Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years • Hacker News Board

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#831

Post by ghaff » Tue, Apr 19, 2022, 10:16 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #731

yokoprime wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have never seen that in the US. Any significant remodels are on the order of decades. My house is 200 years old.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#832

Post by Eliezer » Tue, Apr 19, 2022, 10:16 PM UTC

handmodel wrote: post #823

clpm4j wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm actually happy they did it only because it will get people (at least the subset of people who follow casually and do care) to acknowledge that foreign buyers are not the root cause once a couple years pass and the data will be apparent.

That's a very cheerful take about people's ability to update about politics after a law fails to give them a promised result. I wish I lived in the territory corresponding to your map.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#833

Post by chaostheory » Tue, Apr 19, 2022, 10:17 PM UTC

rasz wrote: post #575

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,…

>Foreign investors jump into the housing market because the current system ensures that the supply some do, others just want to safely park capital away from their own government reach (China/Russia/various *stans/corrupted countries).

Mark off China and Russia from the list. With Russia it's obvious, while for China, the CCP has clamped down on capital flight starting two years ago. They keep clamping down harder, which is a big reason they banned crypto

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3158048/c...

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#834

Post by olyjohn » Tue, Apr 19, 2022, 10:18 PM UTC

alfor wrote: post #484

throwaway894345 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's stopping Canada from increasing its housing stock? Surely Canada has plenty of space for its 30M citizens, right? (Yes, I understand that much of the territory is uninhabitable, but even still...).

Regulations... Most land is off limits. Were I live the land is ’protected’ for agricultural use even though it is marginal at best and most farms doesn’t use the land. In my case it killed my agribusiness project because the amount of work, the delays and the risks where too much to bear. We can no longer build what we used to build in the 60’s and 70’s because of the regulations in spite of the technology being muc…

There were also literally half as many people back then.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#835

Post by acchow » Tue, Apr 19, 2022, 10:21 PM UTC

pembrook wrote: post #130

A quick look at the data suggests only about 2% of properties in Toronto and Vancouver are owned by overseas investors. Yes, housing is priced at the margin, but this won't do anything at all to prices over the long term. I'm sure this will be wildly popular politically, because people LOVE the idea that some foreign boogieman is the reason their children can't afford homes anymore. It's much easier to outsource your…

Toronto has a different issue - the purchase price for a home has been rising far faster than rental rates. This is a bubble.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#836

Post by RangerScience » Tue, Apr 19, 2022, 10:29 PM UTC

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.

Hmm. I guess that makes sense if you're looking comparatively within an area. I'm talking about an area as a whole; in particularly, I'm thinking of Venice CA and the DTLA arts district, as two distinct areas.

(AFAIK) Venice is pretty much entirely shit house -> excellent house development, with some multi-unit (townhouses). DTLA is shit building -> modern condos / luxury apts.

AFAIK in both places a secondary effect of all development is that each area becomes more desirable. I guess, sure, if one stopped becoming more desirable the pull from the other would change demand between the two, but, a) they're not, they're both developing, b) (anecdotally) that's a drop in the bucket compared to the overall demand, and c) they have sufficiently different appeals that the demand isn't coming from the same people.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#837

Post by jonny_eh » Tue, Apr 19, 2022, 10:30 PM UTC

hristov wrote: post #657

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,…

When you liberalize zoning you get slum cities. This has already happened many times in latin america, india and africa. It also happened in America when we had liberalized zoning. (See, for example, the history of San Francisco, and New York). I am all for increasing density in places where there is high demand for housing. But a lot of people are living in this libertarian fantasy that all you have to do is liberal…

> See, for example, the history of San Francisco

SF has notoriously strict zoning.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#838

Post by xapata » Tue, Apr 19, 2022, 10:30 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #739

xapata wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I have little sympathy for people that are "forced" to sell their homes for a large capital gain. They can move to where it's cheap and live large. Maybe my perspective as an immigrant is unusual, but I'm a big fan of the freedom to migrate. That includes the freedom to buy housing at market price.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#839

Post by RangerScience » Tue, Apr 19, 2022, 10:33 PM UTC

jjav wrote: post #709

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.

> If developers build more luxury housing, that'll reduce the price of existing housing, such that it becomes affordable. Not really: Say there's one free acre of land in town. You could build one mansion on it, or a highrise with 100 apartments. Building the mansion isn't going to move the needle on any existing housing at all, as it's just one unit.

Are there any places that have these kinds of housing pressure where there are a significant number of free acres of land in town?

(I say this sitting in the middle of the LA metropolis between two almost undeveloped hillsides of ~10 acres each, haha; and a thousand more people in this neighborhood would be significant for us (maybe? dunno the actual pop count) but nothing to LA as a whole, AFAIK)

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#840

Post by nradov » Tue, Apr 19, 2022, 10:34 PM UTC

xapata wrote: post #838

nradov wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have little sympathy for people that are "forced" to sell their homes for a large capital gain. They can move to where it's cheap and live large. Maybe my perspective as an immigrant is unusual, but I'm a big fan of the freedom to migrate. That includes the freedom to buy housing at market price.

Most of the people being forced out are renters.