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Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

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Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Looking at Asia now is like what the west used to be like. There is a huge property bubble in China, so I'm not sure if that is good example for us to follow. Japan is a better model, where a declining population and weariness of a huge real estate bubble that popped in the late 80s has made investing property not very feasible.

I’ve gotten downvoted for mentioning this on HN before but I’ll say it again - all we would need to do to largely stabilize housing prices would be to secure our borders. Our population growth is largely due to immigration, and right now we’re letting in over a million immigrants a year who will statistically have more children than the people that are already here.

That seems unlikely. A difference of a million or so out of 350 million Americans is not going to have much impact on stabilizing housing. Further, poor immigrants are not buying houses. Perhaps we have to look at regulating foreign buyers, you know, folks with money. But blaming immigrants seems misplaced.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 conside…

> San Francisco alone is short about a quarter million homes If they added a quarter million homes, do you think they would still be short another quarter million homes? Not saying densification is bad. But in some cities the density can keep increasing and not have any drop in demand. Apartment prices in dense cities don’t drop?

> If they added a quarter million homes, do you think they would still be short another quarter million homes?

Not in this market, haha. The number was based on the quantity of houses added vs the quantity of jobs added in SF and the surrounding area. (From [1]: "For example, from 2012 to 2016, the San Francisco metropolitan area added 373,000 new jobs, but permitted only 58,000 new housing units") But over time? Maybe.

> Apartment prices in dense cities don’t drop?

There are very few cities where supply of housing is allowed to meet demand for housing - but as I mentioned, Japan is a great example. Japan hasn't seen an increase in the cost of housing since edit: [1995, not 1990 as I mistakenly claimed in GP post]. [2] Compare to the US. [3] What happens is that they stop going up in price.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_housing_shortage

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JPNCPIHOUAINMEI

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIHOSNS

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#553

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.

Density greatly increases land property value. Land with a skyscraper on it is extremely valuable!

Land yes, square foot of housing no. The latter is IMO far more important.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 conside…

> San Francisco alone is short about a quarter million homes If they added a quarter million homes, do you think they would still be short another quarter million homes? Not saying densification is bad. But in some cities the density can keep increasing and not have any drop in demand. Apartment prices in dense cities don’t drop?

Yea, also adding more homes or more units will just increase rents and prices anyway, especially with higher interest rates.

At the end of the day a lot of people have this very wrong idea that living in the best weather and in the epicenter of a global city with top-tier jobs, food, etc. will ever be “affordable”. It simply will not be. Ever.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> San Francisco alone is short about a quarter million homes If they added a quarter million homes, do you think they would still be short another quarter million homes? Not saying densification is bad. But in some cities the density can keep increasing and not have any drop in demand. Apartment prices in dense cities don’t drop?

Yea, also adding more homes or more units will just increase rents and prices anyway, especially with higher interest rates. At the end of the day a lot of people have this very wrong idea that living in the best weather and in the epicenter of a global city with top-tier jobs, food, etc. will ever be “affordable”. It simply will not be. Ever.

Tokyo has all of those things, and yet. Why do you think supply and demand do not exist in the housing market? Why is this the one market on earth where it won't ever work? If you have as many houses as jobs in the nearby area then it will be more affordable. That's just facts.

Further higher interest rates lead to lower house prices, to an extent (but only to the extent supply exceeds demand) because people buy houses based on monthly mortgage affordability.

People have looked into this. Here are the results. [1]

> The resultant high demand for housing, combined with the lack of supply, (caused by severe restrictions on the building of new housing units) caused dramatic increases in rents and extremely high housing prices.

I'm not saying you'll be able to live in SF for the cost of living in a shack in the corn belt, but there's no reason it'll be "unaffordable forever and there's nothing we can do about it" when that historically wasn't the case and there are other global counter-examples. And a ton of research was done on this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_housing_shortage

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Looking at Asia now is like what the west used to be like. There is a huge property bubble in China, so I'm not sure if that is good example for us to follow. Japan is a better model, where a declining population and weariness of a huge real estate bubble that popped in the late 80s has made investing property not very feasible.

I’ve gotten downvoted for mentioning this on HN before but I’ll say it again - all we would need to do to largely stabilize housing prices would be to secure our borders. Our population growth is largely due to immigration, and right now we’re letting in over a million immigrants a year who will statistically have more children than the people that are already here.

I don't think immigration is strictly our problem. Well, it actually might be: it is really hard to find people to build houses right now, and legal immigration of skilled construction workers from Mexico and Central America would really do a lot to solve that problem. But then we might be screwing those countries.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#558

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:…

It's pretty much always the vested interests. Paige Saunders made a decent series on the problem with a Canadian slant (since he lives in Montreal, which is usually in Canada, depending on who you ask and in what language).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OZJClSdZ28&list=PLTNrJFli7o...

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason that the government started moving on foreign investment in BC initially back with the taxes in 2015 was that it was so dominant that it was changing the types of housing that was being built . Companies such as Westbank were making projects like Oakridge, Alberni, Butterfly, Canada House with condo units specifically designed as pied-a-terres, marketed with storefront showrooms in major cities across Asia…

That sounds like you shut down a very profitable export industry. Why not keep building these condos and rake in the money?

Well I think the main reason is that it annoyed the populace that felt they were now having trouble buying a place due to all this foreign competition, and politicians need to serve the populace, not foreign investors.

But the real problem is that building housing is a physical process that takes time and limited manpower. If we're devoting our trades to building empty condos for rich people, then they are not spending their time building housing for regular local workers. That means there is less supply of regular housing, increased scarcity and rising rents and prices. Unhappy local workers.

There's no simple matter of just training more trades because that takes time and effort too, so when you think about all this in an environment of rapidly rising prices where we need a solution NOW not later, it makes a lot of sense to destroy foreign investor demand at a stroke of a pen and effectively force local development companies to focus their product once again on a local buyer.

Re: Canada bans most foreigners from buying homes

#560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, also adding more homes or more units will just increase rents and prices anyway, especially with higher interest rates. At the end of the day a lot of people have this very wrong idea that living in the best weather and in the epicenter of a global city with top-tier jobs, food, etc. will ever be “affordable”. It simply will not be. Ever.

Tokyo has all of those things, and yet. Why do you think supply and demand do not exist in the housing market? Why is this the one market on earth where it won't ever work? If you have as many houses as jobs in the nearby area then it will be more affordable. That's just facts. Further higher interest rates lead to lower house prices, to an extent (but only to the extent supply exceeds demand) because people buy hous…

> Why do you think supply and demand do not exist in the housing market?

Why would you think that I think this? That's really confusing.

I think the issue you have here is that you are thinking in extremely simplistic terms and not really accounting for real supply and demand in this particular market. Instead of looking to Tokyo (which is a generally bad example because Tokyo and Japan are not great generalized models) you should look to New York City to see what will happen if you continue to build housing in the Bay Area. It won't get cheaper, in fact, the more you build the more expensive it'll get for a few of reasons:

  Interest rates
  Housing standards (environment, earthquakes, etc.)
  Developers do not want to build low-margin housing so they'll only build "luxury" housing with cheap, but perceived higher-end finishes so they can charge more rent per sqft
  Lack of available workers
As developers build additional housing they'll only build for higher rental rates, but because there is a near infinite demand for housing in San Francisco and California as a whole, as additional units come onto the market they'll raise the median rent, but it won't make existing housing cheaper, it'll just be the new floor. If you could build a million units or something in a year, you may be able to reduce prices, but construction doesn't work that quickly. Demand far outstrips supply and will continue to do so.

Tokyo is incomparable for a few reasons, but you can start by examining Japanese birth rates, immigration policy, and California's comparable car-only infrastructure.

Historical examples aren't very useful here because historically there were far fewer people, travel from the highly populated east coast to California was long and arduous and the benefits were "unknown", and people had a lot less money and stronger family ties. Trying to do global comparisons is generally suspect as well. But I guess if you want to see what things would look like, New York City, Hong Kong (pre commie China takeover) and the similar extremely high housing costs and density are appropriate versions of the future of the Bay Area real estate market. With that being said, who knows what will happen with remote work and the like, but probably won't have much in the way of price reductions there anyway over the longer term.

If you want less expensive housing you'll have to live somewhere else. That's just how the world works.

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