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Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

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Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#431

Post by ch4s3 »

plantain wrote: post #152
fleddr wrote: post #121

I want to give some push-back regarding the often-heard phrase that governments should stop restricting supply. I'll be using the situation in the Netherlands to explore some complexities. These may not apply everywhere, but it serves to illustrate that the situation is far more complex than "stupid zoning". First, the reason the Netherlands is in a similar situation as Canada (400K home prices, very tight supply) is…

>Builders build homes, not governments. Why? Why did the government just watch this crisis develop? Why not... build some homes?

I can’t speak for other places, but the last time governments in the US tried building a bunch of housing it turned out very poorly. They went all in on Le Corbusier’s “Towers in the Park” nonsense and they ended up as run down ghettoes set far back from the streets by a bunch of dead or overgrown brush. Chicago in particular designed theirs without children or young people in mind and ended up creating incubators for street crime.

I know some places in Northern Europe have managed to build nice and mixed income public housing, but the US failed miserably.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#432

Post by Tiktaalik »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #3

So if you're the stereotypical rich foreigner who wants to invest in real estate here, what's the stop them from incorporating a company locally, and then having that own the house(s)? And that's just one workaround I can think of in the first 30 seconds. As with all well-intentioned simplistic schemes, this will hurt normal folks - immigrants who don't have their paperwork sorted out yet - and do absolutely nothing…

This sort of loophole is closed in BC where they've created a beneficial owner registry. They will still know who owns the numbered company and their nationality.

I believe other provinces are looking into similar things.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#433

Post by eyelidlessness »

plantain wrote: post #140

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:…

The answer is capitalism, plus a bunch of terrible incentives that come from capitalism as a philosophy. We could also solve homelessness and have known we could for less money than we spend avoiding the solution, but government spending money for actual people and their wellbeing isn’t consistent with bootstraps and whatnot. Everyone has to suffer for some homage to personal responsibility that has never existed.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#434

Post by arcticbull »

stoppingin wrote: post #206
arcticbull wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hypothesis has been that renters stopped voting. They tend to be transient, younger, non-voters while landowners tend to be older, rooted and vote fervently. Density hurts landowners by decreasing property values and landowners vote.

> My hypothesis has been that renters stopped voting. Who are these renters who stopped voting? I can only speak for Australia, however the average age of renters has been rising for decades. Most of Gen Y have come to terms with the fact they will likely never own property in a major city. These people keep voting, but their vote isn't accomplishing anything. > Density hurts landowners by decreasing property values…

> How does density actually hurt landowners? If you own a house in a heavily consolidated urban area your property value will hardly have decreased.

Correct because, and I can only speak for America, those big cities stopped building. San Francisco alone is short about a quarter million homes, like 33% of the existing population. There’s a whole Wikipedia article on it. That’s why it’s so unaffordable.

> Also consider that maybe people just don't want to live in a highrise legoland, or think that endless urban consolidation is a good thing for our cities.

This is a pretty funny position to take. Those cities didn’t get to high rises because nobody wanted to live in them. You know those buildings are full … right? If nobody wanted to live there prices would be way lower and they never would have built denser housing.

Tokyo is a great example of a major metro where supply and demand are roughly equal and they haven’t seen houses increase in price since 1990. Their units cost a bit more than cost of construction. This is the power of federalizing zoning rules so city councils can’t get between you and building a house on your property.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#435

Post by Tiktaalik »

garbagecoder wrote: post #12

A better title would be “absentee foreigners.” I think this is part of Airbnb blowback to some extent. Are these people really competing for even middle class housing? Seems weird to me. A few wealthy foreigners pipping millionaire Canadians for penthouses doesn’t really seem like a problem for normies. Am I understanding this wrong? Portugal is also de facto eliminating its “golden visa” which basically lets you be…

I think yes this is the real concern.

There's heaps of people from mainland china coming over here to retire in Vancouver, becoming a permanent resident and so forth. I don't think the government cares about that at all.

The concern is the foreign investors with no interest in moving to Canada (read: foreign capital), people who look at secondary condo ownership in Hong Kong and get sticker shock and decide "oh I'll buy a bunch of condos in Canada instead."

Worse than that are the super rich who were buying condos to leave empty as pied a terres and not even rent them out.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#436

Post by bboygravity »

QIYGT wrote: post #337
Negitivefrags wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And also the city would turn into a horrible place to live with tons of pollution and congestion. Similar to large Asian cities where you can barely breathe, the noise is unbearable and it's a mission to get from one part of the city to another.

Nevermind issues like "can our sewage pipes handle it?".

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#437

Post by BenFranklin100 »

dang wrote: post #416
BenFranklin100 wrote: post #303

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.

Please eliminate swipes and/or name-calling from your HN posts. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . Your comment would be ok without that first bit.

Apologies

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#438

Post by Terretta »

bboygravity wrote: post #436
QIYGT wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And also the city would turn into a horrible place to live with tons of pollution and congestion. Similar to large Asian cities where you can barely breathe, the noise is unbearable and it's a mission to get from one part of the city to another. Nevermind issues like "can our sewage pipes handle it?".

Like the entirely 5 story multi-family residential-over-retail filled Paris, France?

In the US, these manifest as so-called 5-over-1 and it's entirely possible to build the same model of work-life balanced neighborhoods using that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#439

Post by arcticbull »

CPLX wrote: post #249
stoppingin wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does someone oppose population growth? That’s a literal question. What public policy do you endorse that has the ability to significantly reduce the number of people being born? If you don’t have one you’re just opposed to building enough houses for the people we have.

The public policy you want to reduce population growth is simply development. There’s a strong negative correlation between HDI and birth rate. The US, Canada and virtually every other developed nation would lose about 20-40% of its population in a single generation were it not for immigration.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#440

Post by scarface74 »

philliphaydon wrote: post #429
scarface74 wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Do you think everyone in your perfect world would be able to or should buy a home no matter what their circumstances? Including the recently divorced single guy who found odd jobs, the ex convict trying to get his life together, etc?

The guy with the cheapest room was paying less than $4200 a year all utilities included. Did I do him a disservice?

Are you saying that renters shouldn’t exists or do you think no one should be allowed to rent a single family house under no circumstances and you should either rent an apartment or buy a house?

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