321–330 of 619 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
crazy fact about Vancouver: 85% of residential land is zoned SFH
I think the even crazier fact that explains the housing crisis is that the perception in Vancouver is that the city allows tons of new housing. If you ask residents, they'll tell you all about how much the city has changed. People are naturally conservative with respect to their immediate environment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Looking at Asia now is like what the west used to be like. There is a huge property bubble in China, so I'm not sure if that is good example for us to follow. Japan is a better model, where a declining population and weariness of a huge real estate bubble that popped in the late 80s has made investing property not very feasible.
Property "bubbles" only matter when housing is scarce and therefore treated as an investment. We all understand why the recent run-up in used car prices was bad for most people, even if it meant that the people who owned a car enjoyed a sudden spike in the value of that "asset." We don't want the things we buy to be more expensive. We want them to be less expensive. Falling prices are good .
It never made sense for me to buy property in China (which I was eligible to do after being there for 6 years), since rent prices were so cheap in comparison.
I really don't understand why governments around the globe just throw their hands in the air and pretend housing is an unsolvable problem for which they have no obligation to fix. It wasn't always like this - in 1922 in Australia we realised there was a shortage of 25,000 homes, so they just made it happen [1]. Why are we so impotent today? Do we just not care enough? Are the vested interests too powerful? [1] https:…
Because today houses are not for living in. They are investments. There's multiple issues that need solving now. 1) Being able to purchase a house without ever setting foot in the country. NZ decided to stop foreigners buying houses. There were websites you can go in and people from China would buy houses without ever setting foot in NZ... The buying power of alot of people from China and India is huge. This drives u…
2) I am unclear why one would cap the number of houses or prevent rental. Or how that would solve the problem. Affordablity is only one reason people rent. There are alot of people that do not WANT to own. Hell I am a home owner and have often thought about selling and going back to rental. I might if I ever need to move cities again
3) Price fixing and having government take over the housing market is not a solution to what is largely a government created problem in the first place. Zoning, non-saftey based building standards (i.e min square footage, min lot size, bans on Multifamily, etc) and other government actions are the direct cause of the housing shortage. Change Zoning Laws and allow builders to only have to adhere to actual safety based building standards and housing shortage would be over.
Government putting its hands on the scales of the market for over 50 years is the root cause of the problem, everything from FHA to Fannie/Freddie, to Zoning laws all created this problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because today houses are not for living in. They are investments. There's multiple issues that need solving now. 1) Being able to purchase a house without ever setting foot in the country. NZ decided to stop foreigners buying houses. There were websites you can go in and people from China would buy houses without ever setting foot in NZ... The buying power of alot of people from China and India is huge. This drives u…
The reasons we don’t have enough homes is because governments have made it illegal to build enough new homes to meet demand. You are essentially say that the presence of car collectors leads to car shortages.
> You are essentially say that the presence of car collectors leads to car shortages.
The price of a old car, a new car, a cheap car, and an expensive luxuary car, all vary greatly. Cars are more or less open for purchase by everyone.
Houses a fixed in a location, you cannot pick it up and move it. Let's look at each point.
1) If a house in a street costs $200,000. And you have a ton of money and go online and find the house and for you it doesn't even tickle your bank account. But you want to get some money out of your own country and into another country as a safty net or investment. Or maybe you move to said country and your buying power is much greater than the locals.
"Oh, its ONLY 200k? Heres cash"
The house next door is like "huh, the market value of this street is 170k and he sold his house for 200k? I'm gonna list mine for 220k"
"Oh, it's ONLY 220k? Heres cash"
The house next door is like "huh, the market value of this street is 170k and he sold his house for 220k? I'm gonna list mine for 300k"
"Oh, it's ONLY 300k? Heres cash"
Mean while the locals are like "oh I only needed a 20k deposit, now I need 30, 40... 100... 200k deposit"
Locals are getting priced out of their own country. This happened in NZ and Australia.
2) This I don't know how you can dispute. It's a fact that 100 years ago, houses were an asset, not an investment. Why do people need to own more than 2 houses? There are people who own, 5, 10, 30, and even more. There are businsses setup around buying property to rent it out.
What has happened is people got into the market early, with houses that cost 100k, 200k, maybe even close to 1 million dollars. And each time they buy and remortgage the house to leverage buying another property, to rent it out, use that to pay the mortgage payments, which in alot of cases rent is MORE than the mortgage.
Yet the people PAYING Rent are not in a position to get a loan to buy the same house. You often here "oh just buy a house, because renting you're paying someone elses mortgage". How to you do that when you cannot get a loan to buy the same house? How is it fair?
3) Housing Shortage. 100 years ago, people would buy property, and pay a builder to build a house on it. At some point this more or less got flipped and its builders and property developers who buy property, build a house, then sell it.
You do not need governments to build houses to solve the problem. People are simply priced out of being able to build houses. It's MUCH harder to buy an empty lot, and get a loan from a bank to build a house on that lot now.
Can governments assist with housing shortages, ABSOLUTELY. But you cannot simply blame the government on the housing shortage aspect because they aren't building enough. There are much bigger issues causing the problem.
I don't blame Canada. The country is running out of space really fast and they lack the technology to build more than 1 floor of house. Unlike massive countries like South Korea, they can't fit 50 million people. Can you imagine being forced to live in slum like conditions without a half-acre yard or at least 3 parking spots? We are a developed country, do you expect us to park on the streets like the 3rd world ? If…
> The country is running out of space really fast I get what you're saying, but it's kinda funny since Canada is enormous and most of it is mostly empty.
I don't blame Canada. The country is running out of space really fast and they lack the technology to build more than 1 floor of house. Unlike massive countries like South Korea, they can't fit 50 million people. Can you imagine being forced to live in slum like conditions without a half-acre yard or at least 3 parking spots? We are a developed country, do you expect us to park on the streets like the 3rd world ? If…
Sardine-can conditions become less necessary by the day as more industries move to WFH. Who chooses to live in Manhattan if their job doesn't demand it? Demand for nicer living conditions with lawns, space, garages, and fresh air will rise as the urban exodus continues. The city is obsolete in the era of WFH. Let these unnatural aberrations recede. Humans were meant to live in small tribes and we see how their progra…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reasons we don’t have enough homes is because governments have made it illegal to build enough new homes to meet demand. You are essentially say that the presence of car collectors leads to car shortages.
Those things are not the same though! Cars and Houses do not perform in the same way financially. Houses tend to increase in value, Cars tend to decline in value. There are, of course, outliers in both markets.
this is an observation that may be mostly supported by data right now, but also is not super meaningful.
WHY do houses appreciate? why do cars depreciate?
The answer is supply and demand: supply of housing is far more regulated than supply of cars - height limits and zoning are frequent reasons, but any sort of building approval process with unnecessary hurdles can increase supplier risk and cost. Most of these processes aren't set up with demand in mind. whereas if you are an automaker and want to churn out another 10000 cars, there's no laws stopping you (fuel efficiency / emissions requirements notwithstanding).
The problem with houses is that since a large portion of the population thinks they are investments, anything that would increase supply would devalue their investment, so fixing the regulations around them is a political quagmire.
I suppose cars, as machines, also have increasing maintenance costs over time. the same is true of houses, just over a much longer timescale... if houses depreciated instead of appreciated, we might see more torn down after 30-50 years rather than always repairing everything. Certainly the tradeoffs would start to look different.
I really don't understand why governments around the globe just throw their hands in the air and pretend housing is an unsolvable problem for which they have no obligation to fix. It wasn't always like this - in 1922 in Australia we realised there was a shortage of 25,000 homes, so they just made it happen [1]. Why are we so impotent today? Do we just not care enough? Are the vested interests too powerful? [1] https:…
Because today houses are not for living in. They are investments. There's multiple issues that need solving now. 1) Being able to purchase a house without ever setting foot in the country. NZ decided to stop foreigners buying houses. There were websites you can go in and people from China would buy houses without ever setting foot in NZ... The buying power of alot of people from China and India is huge. This drives u…
Because it seems to me that we can probably find all kinds of ways to reduce a house's market value without reducing its livability. Especially if its owners are on a different continent and not around to stop us. Once they cave and sell at a loss, we've got the local cost of housing going down and whatever the deficit is stays in the local economy.
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.…
"The foreign ban is only for high density areas." Is this correct ? Under these new laws a foreigner can still purchase farm, or ranch land or, for instance, a ski chalet in Golden ? Asking for a friend ...
I've not looked at a map to see how much area that covers, but it sounds like foreign buyers could still purchase rural properties.
https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/en/media-newsroom/notices/2022/e...
I really don't understand why governments around the globe just throw their hands in the air and pretend housing is an unsolvable problem for which they have no obligation to fix. It wasn't always like this - in 1922 in Australia we realised there was a shortage of 25,000 homes, so they just made it happen [1]. Why are we so impotent today? Do we just not care enough? Are the vested interests too powerful? [1] https:…