Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

691–700 of 817 posts

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#691

Post by refurb »

qball wrote: post #535
chaostheory wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would this change due to climate change? I’ve been looking at the climate trends in major cities and there are some drastic temperature changes in the coming decades.

No, and this ( https://d3d0lqu00lnqvz.cloudfront.net/media/media/9d427dba-c... ) is the reason why. The area in the red is one continuous granite slab called the Canadian Shield. The US has no comparable geography. There's almost zero topsoil, and building any community there involves a lot of very expensive blasting. It's bad land for the opposite reason that the Australian continent is largely uninhabitable: there'…

The capital of Canada (Ottawa) is well within your red zone and I've never heard of any concerns about difficulty building houses.

I think you're just ascribing cause when in fact northern Alberta is just as empty but has no Canadian Shield.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#692

Post by peeters »

boplicity wrote: post #88

> During last year’s election campaign, Trudeau’s party also proposed a ban on “blind bidding” for houses -- the prevailing system by which offers are kept secret when someone is auctioning a home. This is such a huge deal. Anyone who has had to go through the process of buying a home through a bidding war knows how unfair and one-sided this process is. It take a high-pressure emotional situation, and gives all of th…

There are a number of things like this that I don't think will move the needle on housing prices, but because of the massive seller's market we're in, are politically expedient to do now:

- Make home inspections an unwaivable right.

- Eliminate blind bidding

- Fully open MLS data

- Heavily regulate (specifically buyers') real estate agents to eliminate much of the corrupt practices.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#693

Post by refurb »

johndfsgdgdfg wrote: post #161
VincentEvans wrote: post #7

I don’t know the specifics on Canadian real estate market and the specifics of the problems there, but based on my understanding of the problems facing your neighbors to the south - I feel like it’s almost an attempt to appease citizens by blaming the issue on “foreigners” (always a move that is popular with politicians) to redirect attention from the much more likely cause - massive investments made by hedge funds,…

I live in Canada. In Canada foreign investment is a massive problem. This is NOT the only problem. But it is a big part of the problem. And arguably housing crisis in Canada started with foreign investment. Now domestic players and instituitional investors are also involved in housing market. Together there are enough parties involved not to let housing prices go down.

I mean it's a few percent in some cities. Is it a factor? Sure. Is the fact that housing debt is higher than it's ever been for Canadians themselves more important? Yes.

I hear about people pulling out equity in the form of HELOC's to put a downpayment on another home. That's a pretty big chunk of Canadian "investors". And that should scare the shit out of anyone considering that was a major problem in 2008 in the US. People vastly over-leveraging themselves under the assumption that housing only goes up.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#695

Post by stepmr »

This won't do anything. Dr Andy Yan (https://twitter.com/Ayan604) has a pretty interesting take on all of this: "It still leaks. It may make a bit of a difference, but at the same time it doesn’t deal with the issue at hand, which is foreign capital, not foreign people" https://archive.ph/OcSYX

For those interested in how crazy this is in Canada, journalist Sam Cooper (https://twitter.com/scoopercooper) has done some awesome reporting.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#696

Post by aspenmayer »

lhorie wrote: post #677
aspenmayer wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People want to live close to work, because it's hard to multitask while commuting, and if you're paid hourly, it's essentially unpaid work time. Higher paying jobs allow those higher earning workers to bid up prices on the land closest to their high paying workplaces, which tend to be in desirable areas, because those areas have other amenities that the highly paid workers are able to pay to enjoy. It's a ratcheting…

I mean, for a market like the SF Bay Area, sure, the political landscape wrt housing is notoriously difficult to navigate, but at least for Toronto, I never got the impression of housing construction being deterred to as significant of a degree. In fact I'd say condos have been going up all over the place for decades to the extent that people were even voicing concerns over disappearing parking lots as construction c…

> There's no easy way to regulate who gets to buy houses and who doesn't.

I get what you’re saying, but didn’t Canada do just that? That’s not to say that it was easy, but I think it’s a step in the right direction.

Additional/secondary homes, and especially empty homes need to be taxed more to help disincentivize the anticompetitive behavior in the housing market that you mentioned.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#697

Post by throwaway2037 »

aspenmayer wrote: post #672
ashtonkem wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, you don’t need to add a ton of subway stations when you already have an extensive network. 3 stations in 50 years would be a much worse outcome in say, Cincinnati.

That just made me appreciate how much greater value still might be unlocked by simply building as few as 3 stations in metro areas that don't currently have any at all, and then expanding from there. That would be an interesting study if it hasn't been done: what is the MVP of underground subway networks? How many stations do you need for a given area is probably a budgetary concern as much as a passenger capacity co…

"Have any metro areas built entirely new subways where there were none before in recent times?" China is the easiest one to study. The number of kilometers of heavy rail metro lines built since the year 2000 is simply mindboggling. (Specifically, I am not talking about high-speed train lines.) In the same two decade time range, look at Korea, Taiwan, Hongkong, and Singapore. I guess multiple systems have doubled or tripled in size (length or stations). Remember that Korea has two major systems: Seoul and Busan; and Taiwan has Taipei and Kaosiung.

I am not an urban planner but the north-south & east-west initial two-line style seems very popular. In my experience, the trick to quickly increasing ridership on new lines is closely coordinate with private developers. Be transparent about line planning, then team-up with private developers who can build (large) residential or office buildings with subway entrances in their basement. I've never seen a city do it better than Tokyo. My assumption is that the Elizabeth Line in London will spur similarly spectacular levels of redevelopment.

Light rail: Silicon Valley opened their system in Dec 1987.

About "unlocking value": Two massive upgrades come to mind. East Side Access in Manhattan will allow LIRR trains to enter Grand Central Station. The construction photos online are like something from science fiction. And look at last 30 years of Tokyo metro tightly integrating with private suburban rail lines where trains enter same station, but opposite sides of same platform. Everything is timed to the minute, so transfers are seamless.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#698

Post by brankoB »

jl2718 wrote: post #399
joshlemer wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that poorer people or renters generally are subsidizing richer people or homeowners generally. Depending on if your view is that Canadian governments are too big or too small, you'd say that renters are being unfairly overtaxed and should be given a break, or that homeowners are not paying their fair share and should be taxed more.

A lot of home owner occupant tax advantages were specifically introduced to disadvantage landlords. If you get rid of them, it may make the problem worse because there will be no way out of the rental trap. Separately, there are many tax laws that are written specifically to benefit landlords, and these disadvantage renters directly. The whole ‘fair share’ of taxes argument presumes that the aggrieved group would pay…

> The whole ‘fair share’ of taxes argument presumes that the aggrieved group would pay less if others paid more.

I don't think it does presume that. I can want another group to pay their fair share of taxes without necessarily wanting my own taxes lowered.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#699

Post by chii »

imtringued wrote: post #437
orangecat wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Policies that forbid landowners from building housing are central planning and the opposite of capitalism. That aside, this is absolutely correct. It's constantly irritating to hear politicians praise "strong housing markets" when "strong" means "unaffordable if you're not already wealthy".

> Policies that forbid landowners from building housing are central planning and the opposite of capitalism. You mean opposite of a free market. Property rights, aka the exclusion of other people, is actually an inherent part of capitalism. When you think about it, capitalism isn't actually about physical capital. It's actually about having the rights to be allowed to do things and restricting other people's rights w…

> a system that tells you whether you get to work or not. This is completely independent of your ability to work or gain skills.

can you give an example of this? I don't believe the current system prevents anyone from working if they have the skill. The closest policy to what you described is segregation and racism, but i don't think that is what you're referring to.

> A lot of laws that set a minimum living standard

there's no such law. There's minimum wage law, which might cause unintended consequences, if the minimum is inappropriate. But so far, the current minimums don't seem that inappropriate.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#700

Post by eyelidlessness »

CountSessine wrote: post #174
boplicity wrote: post #88

> During last year’s election campaign, Trudeau’s party also proposed a ban on “blind bidding” for houses -- the prevailing system by which offers are kept secret when someone is auctioning a home. This is such a huge deal. Anyone who has had to go through the process of buying a home through a bidding war knows how unfair and one-sided this process is. It take a high-pressure emotional situation, and gives all of th…

You're fighting scarcity. You still won't win the bidding war - it just won't be as one-sided. Stop championing scarcity by blaming scapegoats. Either we limit Canada's crazy-high immigration rate (1% of population every year) or we build more homes which is mostly gated by illiberal zoning laws passed by municipalities. But both of these policies are very popular so you'll be swimming upstream, politically. While yo…

> Either we limit Canada's crazy-high immigration rate (1% of population every year)

You could just stop there, it’s clear where your priorities lie. I’m not Canadian (and don’t worry I’m not emigrating), but I welcome a “crazy high” 1% population immigration rate and I don’t see a conflict with that and reasonable housing policy. Many major cities already see this kind of growth regardless of where people are moving from. We should be able to house and sustain that growth.

Limits on immigration don’t slow the growth, they just satisfy anti immigration attitudes for a while.

Post reply on HN