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Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

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Re: Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

#321
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That requires the government to acknowledge there is a problem and come up with a clear strategy to solve the problem. The BC Provincial Government is working very hard to ignore it as a problem, where they won't even commission studies to generate data on how bad the problem is (or isn't). The federal government has also signaled their distancing from the Vancouver housing issue. Also, the real problem is foreign ow…

Also, the real problem is foreign ownership. What evidence is there that foreign ownership is a major problem? I've heard plenty of anecdotes, but no actual data. I do know that Vancouver real estate agents are milking the "yellow peril" for all it's worth. "Buy now before China owns all of Vancouver!". Suffice to say, Canadians are doing what American's did in the early 2000's. They are going into a crazy amount of…

There actually is data.

Ian Young, who writes the Hongkouver blog for the South China Morning Post, said this in a recent interview with Vancouver Magazine:

> We’ve got peer-reviewed academic data from David Ley at UBC, who found what he called ‘an unusually decisive link’ between immigration and property prices in Vancouver, and this is going back over 25 years. We had Markus Moos and Andrejs Skaburskis who did another peer-reviewed piece of academic research that found that prices in Vancouver had become decoupled from local incomes by virtue of the fact that the home buying behavior of many recent immigrants was not tied to their local income. That cuts directly to the issue of foreign money.[1]

A quick google for those authors will turn up their studies.

1- http://vanmag.com/city/the-van-mag-qa-ian-young/

Re: Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

#322
post #224
post #82

It seems like many major cities of the world are experiencing this problem, and no city has been able to come up with a good solution. It always leads to displacement and newspaper articles about displacement, but no real solutions. Here are a couple of solutions: 1. Build really tall. Hasn't worked out all that great in Hong Kong, though. 2. Rent control. This is often unfair and inflates price of non-rent controlle…

I have witnessed and seen the day to day effects of a city (albeit, a very small one) that did find a solution to this problem: Aspen, Colorado. It's a tremendous outlier - both in population (8000 full time residents) and in pricing ( even more expensive free market housing than any of the big markets that are typically discussed). The solution was to build city-subsidized "resident housing" that actual residents (a…

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Re: Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

#323
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The taxes are also high https://simpletax.ca/calculator Select BC and enter in the typical income for an experienced developer in Vancouver which is 75k. Your take home salary is $59,000 plus you aren't offered any options usually just straight pay. This doesn't include all the other deductions such as EI and CPP. Now convert CAD to USD and you're a professional experienced developer making $42,000 USD per year, in o…

According to that calculator my taxes would be less in Ontario, Canada than California. In reality they aren't because I do married filing jointly and my wife has no income. But were I a single person it seems that it's not true that the taxes are higher there. In fact I'd be paying $5,000 less in tax in Ontario than in California (assuming wages were the same). I don't know if EI and CPP would add up to $5,000, but…

Don't forget to factor in health care. In BC, standard care that would be the bargain basement cost would likely cost you < $1500 a year. Better care not much more than $2500 tops.

Re: Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

#324

> There are already enough houses and condos in the city with no lights on because no one actually lives in them. To me, there seems to be a pretty obvious public policy response. Institute a very high property tax, which is abated on some kind of curve according to the amount of time the owner or tenants spend living in a property, with no tax being due if the property is legitimately occupied for more than, say, te…

>To me, there seems to be a pretty obvious public policy response. Institute a very high property tax, which is abated on some kind of curve according to the amount of time the owner or tenants spend living in a property, with no tax being due if the property is legitimately occupied for more than, say, ten months. This punishes newcomers and rewards staying in the same property, just like California Prop 13. Have a…

Trouble with a land value tax is that most cities have severe restrictions on redeveloping properties at a higher density, so you have to design all sorts of exceptions or end up with the family living in the poky little flat in a historic building on the edge of the city centre paying more in tax than the property speculators who've bought the penthouse suite in that new multistorey apartment in the exclusive riverfront district.

Re: Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

#325
If apartments are 25% vacant on speculation grounds, that's quite a bubble.

I don't intend to do it, but for curiosity's sake: How does one go short on houses?

"I'll pay you to let me borrow your house and sell it to someone else. Later, I'll get you an equivalent house." Never heard of anyone doing such a thing, but at the right up-front payment, I bet someone would take the deal.

Re: Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

#326
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to that calculator my taxes would be less in Ontario, Canada than California. In reality they aren't because I do married filing jointly and my wife has no income. But were I a single person it seems that it's not true that the taxes are higher there. In fact I'd be paying $5,000 less in tax in Ontario than in California (assuming wages were the same). I don't know if EI and CPP would add up to $5,000, but…

Don't forget to factor in health care. In BC, standard care that would be the bargain basement cost would likely cost you < $1500 a year. Better care not much more than $2500 tops.

I don't really remember paying for health care separately in Ontario (where I'm from originally) anyway... At least there was an option for it but it was more like "In case you become disabled and can't work" or something like that

Re: Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

#327

I live in Vancouver. Well, Burnaby. Like many Vancouverites on HN I am studying for a comp sci degree, and want to work as a developer. I accept that I have to make sacrifices to keep living in Vancouver, such as: -Living in a suburb (like Burnaby) -Getting roommates/a shared room -Living on a bus route instead of being a 5 minute walk from Skytrain With those sacrifices, I can find rents for $750-1000/month. $750 is…

1BR inventory is not really an issue. Most of the new builds consist of small 1BRs so that developers can maximize their $ per square foot. rents on 2 or 3BR places have shot through the roof because there's very little supply being added.

The real problem is that prices have become decoupled from incomes. The median home price is 10x more than the median household income (this includes condos and townhomes).

The only reason for this is outside capital driving up prices.

Re: Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prop 13 has been argued (I'd say convincingly) to reduce liquidity: http://www.nber.org/papers/w11108 (Less churn - opposite of what you hypothesize)

No doubt it reduces liquidity. Probably increases marginal prices as well. But I doubt it makes real estate more valuable in the aggregate except for maybe via second-order effects like policy stability or population composition.

Real estate has value because of the potential flows of rent that can be obtained. Property taxes fall on both land and improvements. While the taxes on improvements are passed on to the tenant, the taxes on land cannot be, as Adam Smith showed. The rent of land, being a case of a locational monopoly, is always as high as it can be.

Thus, taxing land simply reduces the flows of rent that can be kept from controlling a location, and thus reduces the purchase price.

This makes it easier for entrepreneurs to acquire land, since the up front costs are lower.

Re: Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

#329

Come to Montreal! It's great here. No way would I want to pledge the rest of my life to a bank in exchange for the right to exist. Rent controls here. It's odd: it's like the state understands that banks are bastards. Montreal has some issues with organised crime but nothing compared to the organised crime of banking / money laundering through land. I don't have to pay some gangster $1MM for a shack. Leave the boomer…

- It has some ridiculous language issues. We have the OQLF which goes from business to business to fine anyone not adhering to the French language laws. We once got fined for having the accent the wrong way in our signage, and again for having the wrong verb conjugation in our tagline. - Dumbfounding Bureaucratic issues. Once when I went to University, I was able to prove to the Provincial Gov, that I lived in Quebec…

As I said when they rack up $500K corruption I'll have equivalent living costs to Vancouver.

Re: Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

#330
post #279
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's virtually no religion or guns in Seattle. And I'm not sure what race you're talking about, but I can only guess Asian (since Canadian isn't a race!) and even growing up in the 80s half my friends were Asian. We're not talking about Oklahoma here.

There's a bit more religion. I haven't been able to walk through Seattle downtown without some angry person with a sign and a megaphone threatening infidels with hellfire, unless they repent, and accept the Lord as their saviour. Other then that, it's not too bad.

San Francisco's jarring if you're black and not homeless. In Toronto our panhandlers have the decency to be not black.

EDIT> It's demoralizing.

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