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Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

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Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#421

Post by hcurtiss »

cycomanic wrote: post #402
QIYGT wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If it is just a matter of supply and demand, how come that increase in house prices have outpaced population growth by huge margins in many places? I mean look at places like, e.g. Germany which has a pretty stable population (it would be contracting if it wasn't for immigration), but house prices increased significantly over the last 10 years, pretty much throughout most of the country.

Inflation-driven real asset appreciation.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#422

Post by Tiktaalik »

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.

There's not really that much habitable land in Canada that's not already being used imo.

BC for example is pretty much all mountain and has dammed and flooded many of its habitable river valleys.

In the Prairies the land is already valuably used to export food across the world.

In other parts of Canada it's muskeg and inhospitably cold.

The other thing that everyone always forgets about is that all this "free" land out there is not at all free for the taking: it is under land claims by First Nations. These longstanding unresolved issues will need to be resolved before people can start cutting down forests somewhere and laying out a new main street.

There's plenty of room for more Canadians in the parts of Canada that are already developed, but not a terribly compelling reason for expansion beyond that.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#423

Post by lazide »

cycomanic wrote: post #402
QIYGT wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If it is just a matter of supply and demand, how come that increase in house prices have outpaced population growth by huge margins in many places? I mean look at places like, e.g. Germany which has a pretty stable population (it would be contracting if it wasn't for immigration), but house prices increased significantly over the last 10 years, pretty much throughout most of the country.

Because the fed (and most other countries) have been printing money like no tomorrow for over a decade now.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#424

Post by Tiktaalik »

kelnos wrote: post #259

Will this actually do anything, though? The Vancouver and Toronto metro areas implemented foreign investor taxes on home purchases a bunch of years ago. I believe the data shows that the taxes did dramatically reduce foreign real estate investment, but it wasn't clear that it did much to make home prices more affordable for citizens. Granted, it's possible that foreign investment would have made the situation worse.…

The taxes in BC certainly caused prices to stall out but then there was a once a century pandemic, the Bank of Canada dropped interest rates to about zero, and real estate once again took off like a rocket.

Who knows how the market would have gone had that not happened.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#425

Post by jimmywetnips »

QIYGT wrote: post #326
jimmaswell wrote: post #280

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.

Bruh

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#426

Post by [deleted] »

JacobThreeThree wrote: post #58
tomohawk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. This is only attracting foreign interest due to th artificially constrained supply. If they were serious about the issue, they would increase supply.

Imagine if the government of Canada used just 1% of the 89% of crown land it owns out of all the land in Canada to give to people for housing.

[deleted]

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#427

Post by BenFranklin100 »

mads_ravn wrote: post #401
BenFranklin100 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your’e confused about this specific conversation and the US housing market in general. I read your post several times, and can’t make heads or tails of what you’re trying to say. Sorry. I will make one point: in the US, it’s never been the government’s job to build homes. That’s always been left primarily to the private sector. Right now however, governments won’t allow the private sector to build enough homes. They’…

> I will make one point: in the US, it’s never been the government’s job to build homes. That might be technically correct on the build part, but the US government used to subsidize home ownership through loans as described in [1], e.g. > GI Bill benefits that guarantied home loans helped many Americans buy houses and move into the suburbs. [1] https://www.exploros.com/summary/The-Growth-of-Suburbia

I think you are more right than you realize. The US Federal government still to this day subsidizes and promotes home ownership. The mortgage tax deduction, the Home Sales Tax exclusion, and even the fixed rate 30 year mortgage itself - without which most of us could never buy a home in the first place - subsidizes home ownership.

But the actual building of homes is left to the private sector, which is frequently banned from building new homes by local governments.

It’s a strange situation: the Feds promote home ownership, while local governments make home ownership difficult by limiting the number of homes that can be built. It’s little wonder the housing market is so dysfunctional.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#428

Post by dionidium »

stoppingin wrote: post #405
dionidium wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are a plethora of totally valid reasons why people would be opposed to endless urban sprawl, consolidation, and population growth. There really aren't, though, in the sense that the costs (both societal and individual) drastically outweigh the benefits. Of course prohibitions on new construction are narrowly beneficial to specific individuals. Who wants some guys starting up new construction at 7AM next door?…

Everything in your post is just your own personal opinion. > The problem is that these individual preferences come with enormous costs, both economic and with respect to individual freedom... What if I don't agree with increasing the population? If I don't want to increase the number of people in the city I'm living in, then why on earth would I want urban consolidation? Does anyone actually enjoy living in a tiny ap…

> Does anyone actually enjoy living in a tiny apartment, as opposed to being able to afford a house with a yard?

In order to answer this question for yourself you need to first accept an iron law of economics: because decisions are not made in a vacuum, there is no such thing as an abstract preference, only constraints and tradeoffs.

My preference is that I have a 10,000 square foot single-family home located on an otherwise empty block of land just south of Central Park. That way I get everything great about single-family living and access to the economic and cultural superpower that is Manhattan.

But, and I mean this technically and in the kindest way possible: literally who gives a shit?

Everything in life is tradeoffs. The NIMBY position is that tradeoffs can be wished away by legislation. But they cannot. It only deranges the situation.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#429

Post by philliphaydon »

scarface74 wrote: post #417
philliphaydon wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You kinda prove my point, you rent out a room, you can afford a high mortgage repayment and combined income from your rentals covers mortgage payments. Preventing anyone from ever owning a home. Mortgage payments should be less than rental payments. Also not EVERYONE will be able to afford homes. But when the middle class are priced out of owning a home, as is the issue, thats a problem. Edit: you also seem to ignore…

So, I prevented someone from owning a home that could only barely afford $80-$135/week with all utilities included? Isn’t that the ultimate “let them eat cake”? The alternative would be for the eight people to be homeless? Are all of the people buying property and focusing on student housing also keeping people from buying houses? Were the college students with no income who were only going to be in town for four yea…

Do you think if income grew at the same pace as house prices, those paying $80-135/week would be able to afford a house and mortgage on a smaller home?

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#430

Post by tjpnz »

tux2bsd wrote: post #132
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. The current trend is that people from nations that were colonisers are the cause of, and are responsible for, the woes of descendants of colonised peoples. It's good to see that you can see through the bullshit too. There are only select groups that can invest in property, they must reach the baseline investment…

>Offshore control of property can easily be weaponised, where it's not about investment but instead about legal denial of property to the locals.

>NZ suffers from some of this.

Given all of the geopolitical problems China's creating now that was absolutely the right call. Of course the country's still massively exposed with more than 30% of the economy built on trade with China. We've effectively handed an authoritarian regime a button which when pushed will trigger the outright destruction of our economy, and there aren't any politicians in parliament with the intelligence or foresight to see why that's a problem.

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