Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

voanews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 619 posts

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#501

Post by asdff »

bamboozled wrote: post #134
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.

So I live in a small mountain town where we've seen a massive influx of foreign investors driving up the price of housing because they're coming here and paying off locals to find them houses to buy for a private holiday house. There are middle men who do the finding then flip the property for 500% of what they buy the house off a little old lady for, on selling it to a rich person from overseas, who use the house fo…

How do you know they are foreign? Either way, if you live in say some little ski town, you are going to have people both foreign and domestic who want a ski lodge. That's just the order of things. As long as you throw your hands in the air and say "they are buying up our limited housing stock, lets do anything but make more housing stock" then people will continue to be priced out by those who can afford to compete on the finite amount of housing on offer.

If you keep allowing for building and taxing to pay for infrastructure, however, growth will continue at a more sustainable rate until demand is eventually satiated and builders have less work, and there won't just be infinite demand either. There are limiting factors here too: maybe the ski resort has a finite number of lift tickets being sold per day, or maybe the local airport only sees so many flights per day.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#502

Post by rcarr »

alvah wrote: post #442
rcarr wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, unfortunately, is correct. The birth rate means jack shit. People with the capital to do so will just buy multiple homes. Holiday homes, homes closer to work, rental properties etc. If the crash ever came it would be so bad it would make the Great Depression look like a picnic. This is why governments will go to ludicrous measures such as bailing out the banks during the financial crisis and then pumping the ma…

Ultra-high tax rates during WWII, when governments used tax to raise the money they needed, may have made sense. Ultra-high tax rates in an unbacked fiat currency world are purely an attempt to punish the ultra-rich (which ends up punishing the upper-middle class as the ultra-rich can afford to either package their income or escape to a lower-tax jurisdiction). In an unbacked fiat currency world, income tax rates are…

So what is your suggestion then, to punish the poor some more? Is there not enough homeless on the streets of San Francisco for you? Are the slums of Bombay too small in scope?

As I said in the comment it would be very difficult or perhaps impossible to achieve and the dangers are high (you don’t want a USSR situation happening). You might even need coordinated effort across multiple governments and there is evidence that this is kind of happening with the move towards a global 15% tax rate on corporate business.

At the end of the day, steps need to be taken to tax capital at the same rate or higher than labour. Until that happens inequality will continue to grow. As the scales have been out of balance for so long I don’t think having capital gains and other taxes at parity with or a couple of percentage points above income tax is really going to cut it. A couple of short, sharp years at 90% and all of it invested into major, physical public infrastructure projects to create jobs and filter the money down. Whatever happens, if we continue allowing wealth to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands we are going to end up with a dangerous situation.

And the problem is that it is being framed as “punishment” in the first place rather than as an opportunity to be the actual hero and save your country and fellow citizens from being thrown to the dogs. Once upon a time men used to follow leaders into battle because they had faith in them as leaders. Would we do the same today? Probably not because they’re not acting like leaders, they’re acting like arseholes who would rather get in pissing contests over the length of their super yacht than invest in making their cities and countries a better place.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#503

Post by blitzar »

asdff wrote: post #105
blitzar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seems to lie deep in the lizard brain Wanting an asset you purchased on 10 times leverage, with a 5% interest rate on the debt to decline in value would be total and utter insanity.

I don't think there is much in the literature to suggest that increasing the zoned capacity will lead to significant declines. All I've seen is that such development will instead curtail the significant gains that march past local median wages, which seems like a good thing even if you are a homeowner, unless you identify as a Scrooge McDuck with no empathy for your friends and family or people in your community.

Given that most developers charge a premium over the local market, modest development increases average prices. The bigger problem is it makes existing property look less shinny and new. New buyers are typically richer, or at least more liquid, to be able to afford to pay upfront for the property growth that the existing properties have achieved.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#504

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

rowanG077 wrote: post #475
Terretta wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes exactly. Paris is honestly one of the greatest shitholes in the EU.

> Paris is honestly one of the greatest shitholes in the EU.

Berlin would like to step up as a challenger for that title.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#505

Post by napier »

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:…

Vest interests absolutely one way to put it. Not yet fully vested property wealth dependent influencers at the heart of business, politics and media culture and revolving door regulators makes relatively a simple problem that has been solved innumerable times and contexts in the past seem far more complex and challenging to address than it needs to be. It's difficult to convince someone of something or even create a discourse that entertains something is doable if their livelihood depends on them not believing it is.

Perhaps we need a reshoring powered return to a higher growth productive economic topology in the west rather than the predominantly rent seeking norms, so that boomers, pension funds and REITs have someplace else to shift their capital attention when cashing out their chips.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#506

Post by dismantlethesun »

Terretta wrote: post #438
bboygravity wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Out of curiosity, does San Fran have similar public transportation to Paris?

If it doesn’t it’ll quickly get overwhelmed by people trying to get around in cars.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#507

Post by BurningFrog »

arcticbull wrote: post #163
plantain wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What changed? Governments used to aggressively intervene in the housing market.

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.

Density greatly increases land property value.

Land with a skyscraper on it is extremely valuable!

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#508

Post by KptMarchewa »

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…

>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?

Society should ignore your whining.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#509

Post by rowanG077 »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #504
rowanG077 wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes exactly. Paris is honestly one of the greatest shitholes in the EU.

> Paris is honestly one of the greatest shitholes in the EU. Berlin would like to step up as a challenger for that title.

True Berlin is pretty high up there as well.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#510

Post by philliphaydon »

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.

Can you edit out the nonsense bit from both our comments? I didn’t think there was anything wrong with his comment and think it prompted good conversation.
Post reply on HN