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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

#641

Post by dr_dshiv »

weeksie wrote: post #588
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There aren't enough homes _where people want to live_ and you solve that buy building more homes _where people want to live_. You mean, if we had the density of Manhattan or Shanghai, our housing would be as cheap as Manhattan or Shanghai? I'm not sure people would like that (given that those places are more expensive in general). The best example in the states is Houston, but it is horrible sprawl (so housing isn'…

Manhattan (where I live) is extremely underbuilt. Lots of people want to live here! But yes, the implication of a housing abundance agenda is that places will change. I think it's generally underrated exactly how much the cities we know today changed during the 20th century as they grew in population. That said, you don't really need a lot of high rises to drastically increase density. Even row houses and low rise ap…

> Even row houses and low rise apartments make a pretty large difference and would be more than enough to meet demand for most cities that are experiencing a crunch

5 stories. Perfect height.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#642

Post by osigurdson »

ckdarby wrote: post #235
osigurdson wrote: post #210

I'm surprised people want to move to Canada at all given our low wages, high tax and terrible weather.

Low levels of corruptions, relatively progressive views, golden passport for travel and generally a good global reputation. > low wages Work remotely for US company or the 1% of Canadian companies that pay competitive to the US market > high tax Social programs. The taxes get curbed through corp taxes if you're in the .1% - 0.01%. Can always earn and then move elsewhere. > Terrible weather True, but can just escape i…

The take away seems to be that if you are already in the 0.1%, Canada is a great place to get a passport so that you can travel to where you really want to be.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#643

Post by zip1234 »

nullc wrote: post #577
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,…

> Until we liberalize zoning, legalize building, and reject the idea that houses have to be appreciating assets, the issue will continue. Even if all those things are done the issue will still continue. There is a limited amount of land at desirable locations with desirable properties. You can increase density-- sure-- but after densifying more than some threshold of land it won't help because the extremely high dens…

Maybe at the extremes there will be an issue, but doing all those things would massively bring down prices.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#644

Post by HeyImAlex »

weeksie wrote: post #558
mpalczewski wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general I agree, that the root cause tends to be a supply constraint. Even if there were a bunch of people buying up houses, at least in theory that should make rents go down. However, in places like Vancouver people are buying up property as a place to park money and they remain unoccupied. Policies like additional taxes on unoccupied or secondary residences. Seem like one good way of adding supply.

The easiest way to solve that is by making housing a less attractive investment, which you can do by building a lot more of it. Otherwise you're stuck crafting clever anti-investment legislation which may or may not work and may or may not create weird distortions due to some unforeseen consequence of how the regulations are worded.

I feel like this works for housing but not really for land? As density increases the cost of housing should go down (more houses), but the cost of land would go up (ability to build more houses on the same plot). I’m imagining the house from Up in the middle of manhattan; you could never build enough housing to make that a bad investment.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#645

Post by jlmorton »

itsoktocry wrote: post #628
twblalock wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because people want to move where jobs are available. There is a decades-long trend of urbanization throughout the world, as economies continue their transitions towards services.

Canada has a deep labor shortage in its urban areas, with plenty of pent-up demand for growth.

It's certainly true that if we must perpetually conserve each and every single family home in an urban area, then we'll remain housing-constrained. If that's what everyone wants to do, that's their right, but it's necessarily going to result in lower income and living standards for the country.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#646

Post by renewiltord »

ejb999 wrote: post #450
rybosworld wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not unreasonable to want to protect your hard-earned money. Inflation forces people to invest in assets. We have reached a point where everything is overpriced (stocks, homes, etc.) and inflation is rampant. So unless you want to have less purchasing power than you did last year, you invest in what you think gives the best return. Placing the burden on the individual to "do the right thing" is scapegoating in th…

But this is the comment I was responding to: " I think it would be fine if my taxes were helping others to start out. " so that poster was saying having his taxes jacked up to help someone out is 'ok with them', and yet he has the power to help others out already - without the law forcing him/her to do it - he obviously thinks he can afford it, and is in favor of it - but he is not going to do it without the law requ…

No, this is a classic group-action pre-commit. "I'd like to play a game of football if we're all up for it, otherwise let's go to the pub"

"Why don't you just go play a game of football yourself, dude?".

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#647

Post by [deleted] »

munificent wrote: post #555
weeksie wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren't enough homes _where people want to live_ and you solve that buy building more homes _where people want to live_. But that's difficult because cities have all these veto points. It takes forever to get new construction going, right? Exactly. That's why we aren't building enough, because in the current regulatory environment we can't. That's what people talk about when they talk about NIMBYism as the cause…

Given that "want to live" is a factor that is fluid and changes more quickly than building homes (which is how we ended up in this situation in the first place), it's probably also good to invest in making existing places that people are currently fleeing more desirable. The jobs left quickly enough that our physical infrastructure couldn't keep up. That implies that jobs are more fluid than building and that therefo…

[deleted]

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#648

Post by quickthrower2 »

gedy wrote: post #562
weeksie wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll be interesting in a couple years when prices are still crazy and someone has to come up with an excuse for why. It's amazing to me how resistant people are to the idea that housing is expensive because there aren't enough homes for people to live in. It's always a search for exotic explanations like foreign buyers and mysterious empty apartments.

It's also amazing to me how resistant people are to the idea that housing is expensive because of near zero interest rates and tons of money being flooded into the economy.

Are people resistant to that? All i see in the mainstream news in Australian (and we know dumbed down it is) is future prediction of house prices based in future prediction of interest rates. They are predicting falls now.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#649

Post by hpkuarg »

lwkl wrote: post #627
hpkuarg wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, that's another whole issue that relates to policy. From what I've gathered, there's an ungodly amount of red tape involved in trying to be an upstart ISP at the residential level. So much so that one of the richest companies on the planet has only made inroads in like ten cities.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#650

Post by tomc1985 »

weeksie wrote: post #511
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,…

It'll be interesting in a couple years when prices are still crazy and someone has to come up with an excuse for why. It's amazing to me how resistant people are to the idea that housing is expensive because there aren't enough homes for people to live in. It's always a search for exotic explanations like foreign buyers and mysterious empty apartments.

> It's amazing to me how resistant people are to the idea that housing is expensive because there aren't enough homes for people to live in. It's always a search for exotic explanations like foreign buyers and mysterious empty apartments.

It shouldn't be. That is describing the demand side of the equation.

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