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Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

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Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#461

Post by Fatnino »

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?".

Just like new york

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#462

Post by asdff »

fatbird wrote: post #193
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…

its zoning that explains everything about today's home prices Not really. Vancouver, one of the worst places in Canada for foreign investment driving up prices, has been adding new high density housing as fast as it can for 20 years now. One of the primary constraints is the construction trade that can't keep up with demand.

Not enough of Vancouver is zoned for middle density housing. If you opened up the zoning for Vancouver, you'd see the construction trade in Vancouver expand and more middle density constructed throughout the city, instead of limited patches of high density that can only be constructed by a limited set of developers able to get financing for such a huge project.

Here is the zoning map of Vancouver, 80% of it is zoned for low density development and this is the root of the problem: https://i.redd.it/xy30s6tayvo91.png

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#463

Post by josho »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #314
josho wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t necessarily see a problem with point 2. Renting a house often creates supply. The owner will create a basement suite or a nanny suite over the garage. If housing shortage was solved then that also kills the profit motive of renting out all but the most ideal houses for renting. The root cause in Canada is the neoliberal policy that started in the 90s that ended government building low income housing. They lef…

>They left the free market to do its thing. And this is the end result of decades of free enterprise. We’ve built lots of housing for upper middle class because that’s profitable for builders and largely left the poor/young to be screwed. Is that true? I'd imagine building a big block of, say, 100 units to be far more capital efficient than building a few freestanding homes, if zoning laws allowed it.

Oh 100 units are still built. But they are sold as condos targeting upper middle class as those are more profitable for builders to sell. And these are not affordable for many.

We need policy that requires mixed units. Some for the affluent, some for service workers, etc.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#464

Post by ravendug »

breitling wrote: post #113
ravendug wrote: post #24

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

Those are mostly temporary by definition so I don’t see that as a source of the longer term shortages at the macro level unless it is shown that the size of the student and temporary worker pool is growing significantly every year? Sure, many of those eventually go onto permanent residency but that’s still included in the 400k annual figure is it not?

The number of asylum claimants is overstated in my opinion. Even if 100% are granted, which is unlikely, it is a very small number in terms of population growth.

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#465

Post by medvezhenok »

scarface74 wrote: post #451
philliphaydon wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Providing a service doesn’t change that you’re contributing to a problem. You really sound like you don’t want people to own homes. You would rather houses be expensive so you can provide a service to more than to a few or to people who don’t want to own a home etc.

I sold my investment properties over a decade ago. But you didn’t answer the questions. Should everyone who wants to live in a house be forced to buy no matter what stage of life they are in? What shouid the people do who can’t afford to buy?

I don't think everyone should be forced to buy - I think that the tax code should be changed in order to not favor buying so heavily over renting.

A few ideas to start

1) Get rid of the mortgage interest deduction

2) Tax imputed rent same way that rent payments are taxed (so you would have to pay tax on the money you would have paid to rent from yourself)

3) Get rid of capital gains exemption ($250K per person, 500K for married couples)

or the more extreme version

Land Value Tax.

In Switzerland, 58% of the population are renters. Notably, the tax advantages of owning above are missing in Switzerland, making renting a more attractive proposition. That's what should be fixed. Don't push everyone to buy a home, but don't keep shoveling money in regressive transfers to those who do.

(I didn't even mention prop 13 in California here which locks in your property tax - that is a complete abomination and should never have been passed. It's a regressive giveaway to homeowners)

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#466

Post by ravendug »

pkaye wrote: post #143
breitling wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Based on a Google search, Canada builds 200k homes, condos and other dwellings in a year. Looks like the pace needs to be doubled.

I’m not disagreeing that a lot more should be done on the supply side but the suggestion of it needing to double comes across as the additional demand equaling 1 home per immigrant which is simply not the case. I would like to see the hard numbers but I would expect a significant proportion to be 2+ families.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#467

Post by reducesuffering »

stoppingin wrote: post #311
xvilka wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just do it like any big Asian city: 1) build high-rises 2) build more metro lines Look at Tokio or Shanghai, as an example.

Why do so many people here take for granted that living in Asian-style megacities is inevitable, or even remotely desirable? I really don't want to live in such a place.

You don't have to. All it takes is a few that will soak up the population that want affordable housing. 99% of the rest of the land will be left for you to live in as you see fit. Just don't expect your housing to be an investment or subsidies for your extra cost of infrastructure and energy.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#468

Post by vehementi »

ShaunK wrote: post #171
beyond_based wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will be easy to side-step as it has been done all along now. Linking a random redditors interpretation is absolutely meaningless.

Can you elaborate on some of the points the random redditor made that you think aren't valid?

They're mostly arguing that it's dangerous to buy because transactions could be rolled back... but nobody in the chain has interest in doing that

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#469

Post by rich_sasha »

dionidium wrote: post #284
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. The spectacular thing about the housing crisis is that you don't even need any big government projects. It just needs to be legal for private actors to build housing. On most plots of land today it is not legal to build anything but a single-family home, so cities are no longer able to naturally densify over time (just like every singl…

My impression from the UK, which seems to have a similar housing shortage and restrictive zoning laws, is that there is another piece to this jigsaw, namely infrastructure.

There are a fair few housing developments in the UK which provide the quantity and density needed, but eg don't have sufficient roads to support the increased traffic, causing gridlocks. Similar story for schools or shops.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#470

Post by stoppingin »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #445
stoppingin wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is prudent pipeline management... Doesn't this contradict your central thesis? If the supply of housing doesn't exceed the demand, the price isn't going to drop. How can urban consolidation actually benefit the renter class if property developers are able to artificially increase the value by restricting supply until mechanisms like immigration cause demand to catch up?

> Doesn't this contradict your central thesis? No. In development-constrained world, particularly one with long approval timelines, you need to make money on margin. In a less-constrained world, you can bring to force economies of scale and make money in volume. The thesis is: if you have an anti-development environment, developers will maximise margins. This isn’t a conspiracy and it isn’t artificially increasing va…

This sounds intuitively correct with regards to the economics of property development. I'm not a property developer though. I'm not really that concerned about their profits. I'm a young person renting an apartment in a city that is rapidly becoming unaffordable for the average Australian. The point of my post above was: If property developers are legally able to artificially constrain supply to maximise their profits, then how does all this YIMBYism actually benefit me? The main argument I hear for urban consolidation is that increasing supply lowers the cost. If this doesn't actually happen, then what's in it for us again?
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