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Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

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Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#621

Post by evilduck »

andrewmutz wrote: post #585
idiotsecant wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what sane universe is not requiring toilets and showers a solution to housing issues? I'm reasonably sure we can meet housing needs and still maintain basic human dignity.

Not all housing need to go to a 4-person family. In my late teens and early 20s I shared a bathroom and a bedroom and never felt my dignity impinged. At that age it was much more important for it to be cheap than for it to be good. It should not be illegal for such housing to exist.

I think you're speaking past each other. The comment mentioned no access to shower facilities at all. Go search Youtube for tiny apartments in Japan or Tokyo and you'll quickly find rooms for rent where bathrooms and personal or communal showers simply don't exist, residents must walk to nearby businesses or public facilities like libraries during business hours just to relieve themselves. This is not a desirable housing situation either.

I think a dormitory or barracks style housing is perfectly acceptable as a solution but putting the burden of supplying bathrooms on private businesses or implicitly requiring people shit in buckets in their one and only room is not.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#622

Post by jjtheblunt »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #557
huevosabio wrote: post #493

These are boogieman policies that have zero influence on the root cause. Foreign investors jump into the housing market because the current system ensures that the supply of housing is limited so it is an attractive way to park your wealth. But that is not the root cause. The root cause is the system that is geared to keep houses always appreciating via supply constraints: aggressive zoning, discretionary permitting,…

We really should follow Japan on this: (a) National zoning (b) A culture that abhors second hand housing (so structures don't appreciate like land does). Housing that depreciates is no longer a sound investment. (c) Liberal definition on minimal standard housing to rent (central heating not required, toilets can be shared, no personal shower or even a shower at all in the building you are renting a room in, small spa…

what does abhors second hand housing imply?

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#623

Post by zip1234 »

mikepurvis wrote: post #594
cosmiccrisp wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The root cause is the system that is geared to keep houses always appreciating via supply constraints: aggressive zoning, discretionary permitting, NIMBYism. I don't agree that this is the root cause. The root cause is the artificial demand on housing created though our mass immigration policy. Canada accepts _at least_ 500,000 people per year through various channels, "temporary" foreign workers, international stud…

I assume the response would be that with policies that allowed for rampant building/sprawl, the market would sort this all out regardless of the population. However, these kinds of price spikes still happen in lots of places that have neither a ton of immigration or constraints on building, so it's not clear to me that either one is really a singular root cause.

A price spike, maybe. A long term unending price increase, no. Would love to see an example of a place that doesn't have such constraints on building that has high prices.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#624

Post by jlmorton »

cosmiccrisp wrote: post #565
huevosabio wrote: post #493

These are boogieman policies that have zero influence on the root cause. Foreign investors jump into the housing market because the current system ensures that the supply of housing is limited so it is an attractive way to park your wealth. But that is not the root cause. The root cause is the system that is geared to keep houses always appreciating via supply constraints: aggressive zoning, discretionary permitting,…

>The root cause is the system that is geared to keep houses always appreciating via supply constraints: aggressive zoning, discretionary permitting, NIMBYism. I don't agree that this is the root cause. The root cause is the artificial demand on housing created though our mass immigration policy. Canada accepts _at least_ 500,000 people per year through various channels, "temporary" foreign workers, international stud…

Demand for housing is not artificial merely because it doesn't come from a citizen.

Separately, Canada's population growth rate is the lowest it's been in over a hundred years, and it isn't close. The lower trend continues for decades and decades. The last time the population growth rate was increasing was in the 1950s. So this is a very strange argument to make.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#626

Post by nullc »

clpm4j wrote: post #582
huevosabio wrote: post #493

These are boogieman policies that have zero influence on the root cause. Foreign investors jump into the housing market because the current system ensures that the supply of housing is limited so it is an attractive way to park your wealth. But that is not the root cause. The root cause is the system that is geared to keep houses always appreciating via supply constraints: aggressive zoning, discretionary permitting,…

Eliminating a subset of buyers, i.e. slightly decreasing demand, is an easy and obvious action to take. Will it have a significant and long lasting effect? Very likely not. But when examining the supply-demand equation, it's painfully obvious to say "foreigners who don't live here should not be allowed to buy residential housing". It's way, way easier than incentivizing developers to build affordable housing and deal…

A key point is that people buying for investment are less sensitive to driving the prices up-- so long as they're sustained. If you have enough wealth that you would be buying multiple properties anyways, buying fewer more expensive places just lowers your transaction costs. As such, they likely have an outsized effect on driving up prices.

I'm dubious that Canada's policy will achieve that, as I understand it they exempt purchases by foreign students which is already a major avenue for foreign investment property purchases. If they limited resident aliens to a single piece of property which they also lived in, that would be something but my understanding is that they don't.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#627

Post by lwkl »

hpkuarg wrote: post #584
idiotsecant wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what sane universe is not requiring toilets and showers a solution to housing issues? I'm reasonably sure we can meet housing needs and still maintain basic human dignity.

For example, it would be nice to be able to build a dormitory- or barracks-style high-density, low-creature comforts housing, where multiple rooms may share a common bathroom and a kitchen, in areas with high homelessness to give those folks a place to call home. This is not currently legal in many jurisdictions due to building code limitations. I might feel that a gigabit fiber connection is necessary to maintain ba…

What is more affordable than Gigabit Fiber? Fiber infrastructure is cheaper to build than copper after all.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#628

Post by itsoktocry »

twblalock wrote: post #599
cosmiccrisp wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The root cause is the system that is geared to keep houses always appreciating via supply constraints: aggressive zoning, discretionary permitting, NIMBYism. I don't agree that this is the root cause. The root cause is the artificial demand on housing created though our mass immigration policy. Canada accepts _at least_ 500,000 people per year through various channels, "temporary" foreign workers, international stud…

When more people show up, you should build more housing. Canada is a big place with a small population relative to its size — you have plenty of space. Your argument might work if Canada was a small island like Singapore, but it is one of the largest countries by land area in the world. What prevents you from just building more housing in all that extra space you have? Zoning laws and nimbyism.

>What prevents you from just building more housing in all that extra space you have?

There is plenty of cheap, available housing in the hinterlands of Canada. And yet, nobody wants to move there. Why do you think that is? Prime locations are scarce no matter how much land mass you have.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#629

Post by car_analogy »

FredPret wrote: post #572
car_analogy wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes yes xenophobia - but is it true ? Did Canada's past immigration policy contribute to current home prices? And more importantly - will the current immigration policy contribute to future high prices? If the goal is affordable housing, why is immigration the one policy that must not be adjusted to meet that goal?

Whether those new Canadians arrived by birth or immigration, they are here now. We should build enough houses for them. If Canada cut it’s immigration targets, it would have to somehow produce a lot more babies to pay for everything. More houses needed either way.

Population cannot grow without limit, no matter what "everything" Canadians have to pay for. Sooner or later, we will have to learn to live with a stable population. Many industrialized countries have already done so - Japan, China, South Korea, eastern Europe.. By any sane environmental standard, there is already too many of us*, so sooner would be better.

*Yes, if we changed our lifestyles to reduce consumption, we could fit more people in - but until we do so, we should stop adding to the population.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#630

Post by zip1234 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #593
3pt14159 wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or we could, you know, intelligently tax property nationally and tie it to a national dividend that directly goes to landed immigrants and citizens in the form of a basic income. It will make sure that the poor and lower middle class don't get hosed and simultaneously make property a less attractive investment for foreigners or would-be mansion builders. I don't want to live in the same place my whole life and I don'…

Property taxes should be doing that already, maybe we just need a national property tax? I'm all for basic income as a form of wealth re-distribution (as long as the money does't come from nowhere and stoke inflation).

Land value tax would prevent people from buying land without a plan to make it useful. IE ending land speculation and encouraging productive uses of land.
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