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Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

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331–340 of 619 posts

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A full half of the voting base, or more, fervently vote against their own best interest. Seems like it’s happening in Europe and has taken deep roots in places like Brazil, too. People can’t really be surprised that bad things are happening when they explicitly vote for bad things to happen.

I think a lot of it is other people voting against my interests. How many homes in Detroit have democrats demolished in anti-gentrification violence?

What part of demolishing a home is violence? It's property, not a person or a pet. It's important to properly understand and communicate what's going on and what you're upset about. Are you upset about the displacement of the people who lived in the homes, or just about houses being demolished? What was built in their place? If a single-family home was demolished to build multi-family housing, that's a good thing for the housing crisis!

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#332

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 today houses are not for living in. They are investments.

The only reason homes can be considered investments is that governments limit supply so much that prices are forced to increase.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#333

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…

1) I agree here but I have a feeling it would be unpopular policy on the democratic side of the asile if it tried to be done here in the US. 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 bac…

2) I think the vast majority of people want to own their own home, have somewhere to live when they retire, or something they can sell for some money and move to a smaller place.

There will always be a need for rentals. Moving to another city/state/town/country, etc, will require rentals so people can live. What I'm against is people owning MANY homes for the sole purpose of renting them. If you had a balance of people owning 1-3 homes, or people who rent their home out while they live somewhere else maybe for work or they retired. It would be ok.

When I was 20, just before I left NZ, I bumped someone I went to school with who had just bought his 7th house, he had quit his job because the rent income exceeded his day job and he was beginning to look for an 8th house. I'm not considering moving back to NZ as I have a family now, and looking at the prices I'm questioning if I can afford a house at all... Looking at the prices over the last 10 years, houses that wer 190k are now like 1.3 million...

3) Governments just building (or in this case not building) houses isn't the problem. Theres many government level issues to resolve. Absolutely fixing zoning laws, development laws, etc. 3 is a huge topic that could branch out into like 20 different things. I'm simply suggesting in terms of building aspect is taking some ideas from Singapore around the way BTOs are done and restrictions in place to prevent profiteering.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#334

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.

> Houses tend to increase in value

They don't have to. This happens when an area gets popular and zoning regulations don't allow enough new supply to meet the demand.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#335
post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can't tell whether you're being sarcastic. The world you describe sounds disgusting, and NYC is more popular than ever in our new WFH world.

> The world you describe sounds disgusting

Normal countryside villages are disgusting to you?

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) I agree here but I have a feeling it would be unpopular policy on the democratic side of the asile if it tried to be done here in the US. 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 bac…

2) I think the vast majority of people want to own their own home, have somewhere to live when they retire, or something they can sell for some money and move to a smaller place. There will always be a need for rentals. Moving to another city/state/town/country, etc, will require rentals so people can live. What I'm against is people owning MANY homes for the sole purpose of renting them. If you had a balance of peop…

>>taking some ideas from Singapore

Hard pass on that, I want nothing in way of governmental ideas from Singapore. Hard pass on any authoritarianism for me.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#337

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:…

There seems to be a general lack of political will for big projects in the west. Looking at Asia now is like what the west used to be like. I am unsure about the cause but I suspect that a lot of it is that people seem a lot more worried about consultation with locals and such. In the past the government might just decide “we are building a highway here” or “we are building all this infrastructure for houses there” a…

> There seems to be a general lack of political will for big projects in the west.

We don't need big projects. If popular US cities like Seattle and San Francisco simply allowed people to build 5-story apartment buildings in all the space that's currently set aside for single-family detached homes, you'd see people building millions of small projects to easily meet the demand.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#338
post #212

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…

Actually we are running out of space in my Canadian province.

Here in Canada's smallest province I've never seen so many apartment buildings, condos, and homes being built. A field that was empty year ago now has about a dozen apartment buildings, maybe a dozen homes. And that's just one area. The sprawl is taking over farmland.

Meanwhile people have no place to live and anyone who does gets kicked out for a "renoviction". Supposedly repairs and upgrades but often it's just a coat a paoint and rent is doubled. Or it's covered to Air Bnb or other short term rentals STR. I've never seen so many homeless people in my life here.

So many buildings yet nowhere to live.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> renters stopped voting Renters also got co-opted into being NIMBYs out of fear of gentrification.

This idea is pure fantasy. This condition of classifying people as NIMBYs if they disagree with you on this topic is incredibly toxic. There are a plethora of totally valid reasons why people would be opposed to endless urban sprawl, consolidation, and population growth.

> There are a plethora of totally valid reasons why people would be opposed to endless urban sprawl

Density is literally the opposite of sprawl.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s nowhere near 1 million per year. The record from 2021 was 405,000 and the plan for the next 3 years is https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne...

That's 405,000 permanent residents only. Add to that hundreds of thousands international students + hundreds of thousands temporary workers + tens of thousands asylum seekers + etc + etc

Yep, there's a huge amount of international students in Canada and many of them are here for the purpose of eventually getting permanent residency. We are also extremely generous when it comes to granting asylum. My dad actually gamed the asylum process to immigrate to Canada.
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