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Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

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Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#101

Post by Supermancho »

BurningFrog wrote: post #75

One good rule of thumb is that whenever people are blaming foreigners for their problems, they're wrong. Investment in housing and price increases are related. But it's the price increases that cause the investments, not the other way around.

> One good rule of thumb is that whenever people are blaming foreigners for their problems, they're wrong.

I don't think history reflects this view. You might remember something like the Revolutionary War, et al. One country often targets and exploits other groups of people. In modern terms, "foreigners" is a practical way to describe the exclusion of a specific nation's members and it's allies. In the USA/China sometimes there's policy that's populist misinformation. In retrospect (decades later) the sentiment is seen as reasonable.

Let's take for granted that you meant "in housing markets". In Canada and the Seattle^ area, luxury homes and goods were commonly considered to be dominated by wealthy Chinese "investors". I dont remember the exact Chinese tax law change enacted by Xi (which effectively taxed foreign holdings), but it caused a mass exodus of Chinese investment and crashed the luxury good market for the Bellevue area over a handful of months. I had left the area by then, so I didn't track it too closely. Seattle is back as a top destination for Chinese millionaires...but I don't know much about that either.

^ https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/business/in-suburban-seat...

^ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-be...

p.s. I do think there's some strange belief that people making broad claims are stupid or less connected and informed than in the past. Almost anyone can talk to brokers and realtors and get this information, as opposed to random internet assumption of inaccuracy.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#102

Post by BurningFrog »

elcomet wrote: post #97
BurningFrog wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value of housing comes from how much you can charge people who want to live in them. That number doesn't change because foreigners can't buy.

What do you mean? Foreigners can't buy therefore it will decrease the number of people trying to buy there

But it won't decrease the number of people competing to live in the units, which is what determines the value of the housing units.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#103

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

7e wrote: post #93
asdff wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its really not a step in the right direction. Imo its even a bit into the wrong direction because they are opting to sidestep the vastly easier step that would actually solve this problem for good: updating the zoning to keep up with job growth. Blaming foreign investors for today's home prices is like blaming the boogyman, because its zoning that explains everything about today's home prices and its the zoning creat…

Update zoning? Humans are breeding creatures. Like all animals, they will reproduce to fill their available habitat and back pressure is needed to keep the population from strangling this planet.

My understanding is that it's been proven over and over, the world over, the way to slow population growth is to educate, especially women, and provide easy access to family planning / birth control.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#104

Post by libria »

dylan604 wrote: post #36
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #22

Of all the things that a person can own, land seems the least justified to me. There is a finite amount of it, you did not create it, you cannot destroy it, and essentially all ownership derives from conquest, in recent or ancient history.

>you cannot destroy it, is this really true? you can definitely do things to it that would make it uninhabitable, no longer "fertile", or any other terms that essentially come to the same conclusion of the land being essentially destroyed. at least as far as the context of desirability to be owned

> > you cannot destroy it,

> is this really true?

Practically speaking, yes. The value of a parcel is largely from its location/proximity to metro areas. I've never heard of someone destroying residential property directly through chemicals or radioactivity, though value can be greatly diminished by local antagonistic developments or rezoning it unfavorably.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#105

Post by asdff »

blitzar wrote: post #9
jleyank wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I didn’t follow the news closely, this seems to have come from the Vancouver and Toronto real estate markets. City level laws might have been tried but they lack teeth. This issue is also leading towards a vacancy survey and tax for vacant houses to provide material to escalate (I feel) if necessary. And worldwide, people might want cheaper housing but they din’t want their own house value to decline. The forme…

> seems to lie deep in the lizard brain Wanting an asset you purchased on 10 times leverage, with a 5% interest rate on the debt to decline in value would be total and utter insanity.

I don't think there is much in the literature to suggest that increasing the zoned capacity will lead to significant declines. All I've seen is that such development will instead curtail the significant gains that march past local median wages, which seems like a good thing even if you are a homeowner, unless you identify as a Scrooge McDuck with no empathy for your friends and family or people in your community.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#106

Post by makebabies »

verdenti wrote: post #25
Jemm wrote: post #23

Canada is also bringing in one million immigrants a year to feed the exploitative low paying job market and to try to stave off recession. These immigrants tend to gravitate in either Toronto or Vancouver. Meanwhile corporate and rich investors are snapping up any property they can get their hands one. In Ontario the Premiere is reclassifying conservation land owner by his buddies to allow them to build developments.…

As a Canadian, Canada needs way more people for how much habitable land we have.

Need and "can accommodate" are two different things.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#107

Post by elwebmaster »

throwayyy479087 wrote: post #33
kennend3 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of being critical of the decisions of others, what do you suggest? Arm chair critics are a dime a dozen, what are your ideas on how to address the housing problems?

Zone every inch of currently settled land to allow 6 story mixed use buildings, by right. Don’t require anything to build besides engineering and safety checks - no chance for NIMBY input. Do this federally.

Up the stories to 85 and then we are talking.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#109

Post by hippich »

smnrchrds wrote: post #51
ls15 wrote: post #2

This seems like a good idea and it carves out exceptions for foreigners who are residents. I presume this puts pressure on other countries to do the same, since investors are looking for other opportunities.

It is important to note that according to Canadian law, permanent residents (equivalent to green card holders in the US) are not considered foreign nationals. They enjoy roughly the same rights and privileges as Canadian citizens, with very limited exceptions such as voting, running for office, serving as a jury, and some high-level government positions. > Foreign national: A person who is not a Canadian citizen or a…

I think you can say the same about green card holders in the USA. Or there is some specifics that specifics between treatment of permanent residents in USA vs Canada?

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#110

Post by crazygringo »

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #22

Of all the things that a person can own, land seems the least justified to me. There is a finite amount of it, you did not create it, you cannot destroy it, and essentially all ownership derives from conquest, in recent or ancient history.

Well, you absolutely need a system to organize who can invest building on land and can reap the benefits. It can't just be a free-for-all with anybody allowed to build anywhere there's space, even if it's currently somebody's backyard.

So once you agree that permission to build needs to be organized, you need to figure out how to allocate that permission, which in situations of scarcity is going to be to the highest bidder.

But people aren't going to invest in building structures that will last for decades unless they know they'll continue to hold permission to occupy those structures for decades.

So either you hand out things like 100-year leases or you hand out ownership outright. In the end, most of the world has settled on ownership because 100-year leases tend to cause massive headaches once you hit the 100-year mark, for a whole host of reasons.

So land ownership is just what works from a practical perspective.

(That being said, I am personally intrigued by a system where the government would lease all land yearly according to market rates, but where higher rates for longer [e.g. 15- or 30-year] terms could be locked in with private banks, much like fixed rate mortgages. The classic problem, of course, is how a government is going to reliably determine "market rates" for land that changes hands only very infrequently. Property taxes already attempt that, but they also often result in value that are obviously not "market". It's much the same problem with assessing non-liquid wealth for wealth taxes.)

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