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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

#911

Post by bombcar »

ghaff wrote: post #831
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Median duration of home ownership is 13 years - only need them to do one remodel and we basically hit the proposed numbers.

Being in a 200 year old house already puts you WAY into the far outliers - the median US house is 37 years old.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#912

Post by janmo »

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 of high real estate prices are low interest rates. There is always a correlation between those two.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#913

Post by gwright »

heavyset_go wrote: post #818
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 are housing insecure people who need housing now and not some nebulous time in the future when the market could, theoretically, correct itself. Markets are notorious for remaining irrational in the face of obvious market forces that should, theoretically, influence them. While we wait for housing to trickle down, people will go without homes, possibly for decades. It's a classic market failure, and doubling dow…

> It's a classic market failure

If you mean classic "free" market failure, then I would disagree. The housing market is replete with constraints that are imposed by government. I think it is more accurate to say that it is a classic regulatory failure (at least in some jurisdictions).

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#914

Post by bombcar »

troupe wrote: post #908
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A $250/month room with a shared toilet is better than living in a tent somewhere. Also, the need for showers can be mitigated with public bath houses, we used to have more of those...again...it makes lower end housing more viable, but most people will probably want their own toilet and shower and will pay for it. > I'm reasonably sure we can meet housing needs and still maintain basic human dignity. The proof of your…

> A $250/month room with a shared toilet is better than living in a tent somewhere. For the person living in it, yes. For other people living in the area, bringing in a large number of people who are just one step above living in a tent, may have impacts on the neighborhood that they don't want. Much of the resistance to building more housing is this at various different levels.

NIMBY just is “keep out the poors” for the most part.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#915

Post by sangnoir »

vkou wrote: post #652
oneoff786 wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it? Or would it simply push home ownership further out of reach and favor landlords with capital?

To rephrase my point: What do you think would happen to the price of the average home if we printed, and handed out, each man, woman, child, and dog in Canada a million dollars? My guess is that it would increase by ~2.6 million. But it would certainly level the playing field between the average person and 'the landlord with capital'. So if we are so concerned about keeping the average Joe up with that landlord, why…

On the flip side, what do you think would happen to home ownership if the mortgage terms were set to be 1 year max? That ought to really lower the home prices, right?

My guess is most homes on the market would be bought by private equity firms and retirement funds. There are a lot of confounding factors; just changing mortgage terms is not sufficient.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#916

Post by 8bitsrule »

Good idea. It'd be great to see this in the US, along with very limited speculative (no intent to dwell-in) purchasing of second homes until the market for first-time home-owners (and the demand) shrinks dramatically.

The use of homes as gambling chips ("investments") has to be stopped. The economic and social costs are egregious, inhuman, self-destructive.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#917

Post by bombcar »

nullc wrote: post #603
hibikir wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that most YIMBYs are arguing the opposite: That if I buy a piece of land, and I want to build a duplex in it, all the way to the property line, I should be able to do it. As it is, zoning and the approval processes make all kinds of viable projects impossible to do, by the property owners. If I wanted to turn my single family house into a duplex, or just tear it down and build bigger, to far closer to the pro…

> So how is asking to be allowed to redevelop your own lot being against private property ownership? To answer that: consider, would me being allowed to build a joint pig farm and jet engine testing facility 10 feet from your bedroom window be compatible with your property rights? Externalities exist. Changes in the usage-- which includes density-- of the surrounding property can have a real effect on the existing re…

There’s a far cry between “no unlicensed pig farms” and “each house must be an entire freeway’s width from the next one”, especially as one is a different type of use instead of just a more dense one.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#918

Post by bombcar »

volkl48 wrote: post #552
dimitrios1 wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, is that economic research based on thought experiments or reality? I'd love to read it. Let's go back to my example. You build denser housing on top of or next to the condos I mentioned, what happens? The workers move in closer to the city center. The price is low for a short period of time, until more people migrate. Just like when the highway opens up a new lane. The traffic is better for a short period, unt…

Tokyo has managed to keep housing prices pretty affordable (and while Japan's population may be shrinking, Tokyo's has continued to grow). Unsurprisingly, they build a LOT of housing and removed most legal/regulatory obstacles to building it a few decades ago. They issue more permits for new housing units in a year than the entire state of California does, even though California has more than double the population. (…

> As of April 1, 2020, there were approximately 115.8 thousand square kilometers of high-class asphalt roads in Tokyo metropolis, Japan, which was the dominant type of pavement.

Tokyo metro area is 14,034 km2.

Meanwhile LA is 14% parking lots or so I’ve heard.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#919

Post by liketochill »

rory wrote: post #758
car_analogy wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Overseas investors may own only 2%, but Canada has 23% foreign-bor…

I don't know a ton about Canadian immigration, but while raw net immigration volume is likely important in pricing a relatively inelastic good like housing, I think the details of who the immigrants are is too often overlooked in this kind of conversation. In the US our largest immigrant group (Mexicans), and more recently Guatemalans and Salvadorans, are disproportionately the ones building new houses. Without them…

I can tell you that people with heritage of India do the majority of the drywall work in Vancouver

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#920

Post by Trias11 »

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,…

Right.

Communist until you get rich

Feminist until you get married

Atheist until the plane starts falling

Critisizing NIMBYism until you own the house.

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