971–980 of 1001 posts
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People forget that houses depreciate. It's the land that appreciates.
This isn’t true in all markets. Higher labor costs (for instance, caused by higher rents…) makes it more expensive to construct new homes. That makes any existing homes more valuable, potentially even accounting for depreciation
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…
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We’re not anywhere close to this in any of the high cost markets. But once we do get to that point another thing will happen: the lower demand for high end housing (there’s only so many vacation homes and short term rentals you can sell) will make it economical to build new mid-range housing
> there’s only so many vacation homes and short term rentals you can sell) There are many markets the the number you can sell far exceeds the available land to build. I fail to see how lower demand for high end housing makes it more economical to build mid-range housing? The price for that housing will be lower and land to buiody it on will be taken up by lower density high end housing. High end housing construction…
Developers today build low density single family homes often due to zoning. If the law says you can build 3000 sqft on a given lot, the most profitable thing to build is probably single family. But if they were allowed 30,000 sqft or 300,000 sqft then you’re almost surely going to get multi family instead. At that point high end and mid range condos will likely both be profitable, but developer returns would be better for the former (if they can find buyers). So as high end buyers become more scarce, more developers will transition to mid range
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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…
I was defending a "planned intervention".
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It should be fast to build houses. My family acquired land, designs, permits, and moved in to a place in rural TN in about 9 months. It's taken me 2 years to get a site development permit (permission to ask for a building permit) to modify a roofline so that it sheds water in CA.
Building houses in rural areas is fast and cheap because there's nothing already there and screwing up is unlikely to affect anyone else since no one is nearby. Increasing density in places that are already built up is much harder. You have to remove the people and things that are already there. If you do something wrong, there are many people in the area who can be negatively affected. Building permitting regulation…
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Because as I alluded to, that person would fall behind in terms of purchasing power. Allowing your money to erode away is not going to affect the greater good. The incentives (taxes) need to be changed. Suggesting a change that you think is positive but not acting on it in the meantime is not virtue signaling.
>>Suggesting a change that you think is positive but not acting on it in the meantime is not virtue signaling. Actually, it is the very definition of virtue signaling.
Virtue signaling requires that you say these things only for attention or praise. Your definition is equating a suggestion of change with virtue signaling.
Having an opinion != virtue signaling.
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I was referring to North America (had a typo in there, should have said “at a France pace”, ie france is building these and NA is not), I get the sense your comment here is in reference to France?
Ah sorry, I misunderstood you and was talking about France indeed.
Merci pour partager votre perspective!
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This isn't true at all. If any foreign buying stat looked single digit it was only because the metric was so broad so as to include areas where there was zero foreign buying interest. The week the BC Liberals brought in the foreign buyer tax they had data in hand that showed foreign buying in Richmond and Burnaby was (going from memory here) between 15-20% of sales that period. Worth noting that at the time those are…
They never started collecting actual citizenship/residency data on house sales until a year or two ago. I remember one analysis out of UBC that assume foreign owner if they has a "foreign sounding name". From what I've seen, some neighborhoods are high, but it's at the margin. Canadians snorfing up massive amounts of debt in order to acquire more property is a bigger driver.
I see the "{place} should be affordable for anyone who wants to live in {place}" folks are out again. I'm pretty sure that there are at least 100k, if not 10M, people who'd like to live in Yosemite Valley. Should they be accommodated? Okay, that's transforming "pastoral" to "urban" and they don't mean that. I'm pretty sure that there are 10M more people who'd like to live in London (current metro population 14M, Lond…
> Why are the current residents obligated to accept that change? They're not. They just need to admit they want to turn their city into a giant gated community and have-nots be dammed. Then we can have an open and earnest dialogue about it. Of course, the greatest irony is that many of these cities are heavily progressive so they won't acknowledge the hypocrisy. Instead they'll hide behind environmental regulations o…
Why do they "need" to do anything?
> they won't acknowledge the hypocrisy
While I'm perfectly happy to criticize "progressive communities", there's nothing hypocritical about not wanting to live in a London with 25M people.
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> Foreign investors simply don't belong in that space at all. How much is this a problem? Further, this does not (IIRC) apply to folks to have permanent residence status or folks here on things like student visas. So how many never-set-foot-in-Canada people are buying properties?
I would not try to immigrate into a country in which I don't have a place to live, so this essentially is an anti-immigration, "Canada for the Canadians, Foreigners out" policy in my book.
Plenty of Canadian-born people rent.