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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

#731

Post by seanmcdirmid »

yokoprime wrote: post #683
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That sounds tremendously wasteful. All housing will have to be built new now? Well ya. You don't build to have your home last for more than 30-40 years, which can save some materials. We should get better at recycling and renewing building material, maybe the Japanese counteract things that way?

Is this satire, are you really advocating building houses with an expected life-span of 40 years? So if i buy a new house when im 30, i should expect to have to buy new if i live to be more than 70 and I havent moved. If we assume your idea of close to perfectly recyclable houses comes true, i think people would have to really dial down their expectations and standards. No more drywall, particle boards everywhere. Ti…

> Is this satire, are you really advocating building houses with an expected life-span of 40 years?

I'm really not sure. On the one hand, I agree it is wasteful. On the other hand, I personally like living in a new home.

> No more drywall, particle boards everywhere. Tiles.. forget it, kitchen counters made by reclaimed wood etc

The average kitchen where I live is renovated every 10 years, so the drywall, much of the electrical and plumbing, the floor, tile backsplash, etc...is redone. Bathrooms are also on a 10 year schedule. You can let the reno slide, of course, or perhaps you can do a higher quality reno and hope it lasts longer than a decade. (I'm looking at a kitchen reno right now and my house was built in 2016...the builders just made too many mistakes, but $150k to redo the kitchen...ugh)

In Japan, they don't do the reno every 10 years, they just rebuild the house every 30. How is that much different?

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#732

Post by glogla »

homonculus1 wrote: post #673
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tokyo is the farthest possible away you can get from a favela.

>[homogenous Japanese population] is the farthest possible away you can get from [unrestricted immigration from the southern hemisphere]. Why yes, indeed, it is!

Ah, racism. Long time no see.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#733

Post by megablast »

munk-a wrote: post #707
tick_tock_tick wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> build affordable housing Lets build shitty buildings that will last for decades. Affordable housing is and will always be a horrible idea. Build and build until you get a surplus and suddenly tons of housing is affordable.

This may be a healthy long term outcome but a lot of people have a good portion of their value parked in their home - if there is a sudden oversupply how will you cousin the economic and social shock as millions of middle-class folks suddenly lose their wealth while upper class folks mainly invested in the stock market come out the far side with even more wealth? This is not an easy problem - and as soon as you try a…

People dont lose anything until they sell.

Most people aren’t selling. So they haven’t lost.

And how would you limit the effect if housing dropped for the many other reasons prices drop?? You don’t.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#734

Post by s1artibartfast »

brewdad wrote: post #670
s1artibartfast wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, most lenders will do between 36 and 43% of your earnings pre-tax. Assuming you pay another 25 to 30 in taxes, this should be half of your disposable income, leaving 50% or cars food Etc. For a $5,000 mortgage, that's a $5,000 a month buffer

Um. Look at your numbers again. Assuming your 36-43% is correct (I haven't shopped a mortgage in almost 15 years), that puts the combined total at 61-73%. Also, that combined tax rate feels really low for anyone with the income to effectively bid in this current market. Add up SS and Medicare taxes, federal income taxes, state income taxes, and sales taxes and 30% feels like a floor rather than a ceiling.

EXAMPLE: 120k income breakdown (10k/month):

Federal actual rate 16.5% (24% marginal)

CA State actual rate 6.4% (9.3% marginal)

Medicare rate 1.45%

OSDI rate 6.2 %

CA SDI rate 1.0%

Total:31.55% total before tax deductions and tax shelters

If your mortgage is ~40%, you have ~30% left over.

Per month, this is 4,000 for a mortgage, 3,000 taxes, and 3,000 remainder.

A 4,000/month mortgage covers a 800k loan on $1 million dollar home.

You don't get a lot of house in the bay area for 1 million, So if you are single earning this much, you are looking at condos.

If have two similar earners, you just double everything. E.g. 2 million dollar house with $6,000 per month remaining income.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#735

Post by MAGZine »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #633
MAGZine wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what world are "temporary" foreign workers buying homes in Canada? With what salary? Same with Refugees, students. Funny how in the first hundred years in Canada, we didn't have any issue with housing costs, despite accepting vast amounts of refugees. I'm not saying it's not making the problem worse, but to SOLELY pin it on them is IMO willful ignorance. if we banned all immigrants, of any kind, tomorrow, would Ca…

In the real world! There's enough rich people in the world, that some of them send their kids to Canada for school. And some of them buy houses. Why does near every American assume that everyone outside of America is poor.

I'm Canadian, but thanks.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#736

Post by jjav »

weeksie wrote: post #687
johnnyanmac wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"you solve that buy building more homes _where people want to live_. But that's difficult because cities have all these veto points" I'm not going to pretend there isn't some literal gatekeeping going on here that make this more difficult than necessary. But I'm also not exactly surprised that in cities as already densely packed as Los Angeles that there aren't exactly acres or hectacres of land just sitting around t…

1. There's tons of unused vertical space in LA. 2. They make more land all the time. Look at a map of Boston in 1800. In fact, look at an old map of almost any city near a large body of water and compare it to today and you'll find a lot more land being used.

> In fact, look at an old map of almost any city near a large body of water and compare it to today and you'll find a lot more land being used.

At a great environmental cost. Thankfully society is a bit more careful about environment destruction than in the days where all garbage was dumped on the shoreline to create landfill and build on it.

https://estuarypress.com/hrma-photo-post/filling-the-san-fra...

https://priceonomics.com/what-parts-of-san-francisco-are-bui...

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#737

Post by BlargMcLarg »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #711
BlargMcLarg wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(b) is the biggest one. It doesn't make second hand unlivable, it just stops putting a premium on things which clearly aren't premium (unlike say Europe). It also makes it easier to tear things down in case of future needs, whereas Europe tends to "lock" itself in, creating a market which is very inflexible. >(c) Keep in mind 1LDKs (living room, dining room, kitchen) come with everything you'd expect a full apartment…

The USA is about 12% immigrants, Japan is around 2%. I mean, it is definitely no China, but it has the lowest immigration rate of the all the developed countries.

That's not what I was pointing to. Check the visa requirements for various visas for the US, Japan and other developed countries. They follow similar thought patterns: skilled workers with demonstrated experience and/or knowledge, who won't be a burden on the state. The biggest boon being most skilled workers from developed countries already know English at an okay level, and most developed countries accommodate non-native language speakers better than Japan does when it comes to immigration.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#738

Post by worik »

jerf wrote: post #686
xapata wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> incentivizing developers to build affordable housing But that's unnecessary. If developers build more luxury housing, that'll reduce the price of existing housing, such that it becomes affordable.

There's a path dependency problem. In principle, had you just been building housing like that all along, investing in housing is not appealing as you shouldn't see significant gains in general. However, now that it is appealing, the investment itself pushes up demand, which pushes up the appeal of investing because now prices are going up, which pushes up demand, etc. Again, in principle, if you just keep building, t…

Market forces are not magic, nor the only method of economic planning.

When markets work they are very good at finding prices. But when they fail you get this sort of thing.

There needs to be a lot of planned intervention in the housing sector. Entities with a lot of capital need to build the houses that people need to live in where they need to live in them and then let them live in them.

The market will not do that.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#739

Post by nradov »

xapata wrote: post #681
RangerScience wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That (first) either assumes demand remains constant, or requires measuring actual cost vs theoretical cost instead of simply actual; and second, assumes that there aren't complex interdependencies - ie, more luxury housing can make an area more desirable and increase demand more than it increases supply - arguably that's the goal , since otherwise you're literally building places people want to live in less than what…

> more luxury housing can make an area more desirable Depends how big the "area" is that you're thinking about. The effect of increasing housing supply is well-studied. Demand can only grow as fast as the population does. If one area experiences increasing demand, then another area will have decreasing demand, comparatively.

That relationship doesn't hold in ski resort areas. Wealthy people have increasingly bought up vacation homes even as the population remains flat. Those vacation homes are vacant much of the year. There are usually geographic and infrastructure constraints which make it impossible to build significant amounts of new housing within practical commuting distance. So long time local residents are effectively being forced out.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#740

Post by worik »

megablast wrote: post #733
munk-a wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be a healthy long term outcome but a lot of people have a good portion of their value parked in their home - if there is a sudden oversupply how will you cousin the economic and social shock as millions of middle-class folks suddenly lose their wealth while upper class folks mainly invested in the stock market come out the far side with even more wealth? This is not an easy problem - and as soon as you try a…

People dont lose anything until they sell. Most people aren’t selling. So they haven’t lost. And how would you limit the effect if housing dropped for the many other reasons prices drop?? You don’t.

> People dont lose anything until they sell.

Not quite true. It would be truer if they have no debt.

But having a large debt, and negative equity, makes a family very vulnerable economically.

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