401–410 of 629 posts
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Curious why you are getting down votes... Your post is good. Seems HN group think favours regressive tax?
There is a very enjoyable irony to the notion that you would accuse a community of groupthink for a perceived lack of accepting your opinion as the one true way.
One of the main reasons of the housing crisis in the Bay Area is Prop 13 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197... ) Prop 13 basically keeps the property taxes constant (or 1% increase) as the value of your house increases (doubles or triples). Your tax gets re-calculated only if you sell your house and the new owner starts paying potentially multiples of what the previous owner has been payin…
It's even worse in Australia, which most properties do not have a yearly property tax. So you pay a 'stamp duty' when you purchase the property, based on a % of the sale price. This means you have people living in Sydney with multi-million dollar properties - which are just modest houses in now-desirable suburbs - who haven't paid any property tax since the 60's, and who can't move anywhere because they'd be up for s…
I think that this is the other dimension to the Vancouver housing problem that no one is talking about yet. Vancouver is separated from the rest of the province by the Fraser river to the south-east, and regional development policy for about 30 years has been fashioned to make it difficult for anyone to live south of the Fraser.
If we put more bridges across the Fraser and built more highways, I think most of this problem would go away on its own.
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…
As an established middle-aged software developer with a family living in Burnaby who cannot move now because of custody issues, I'm going to give you the same advice I give to all of the engineering co-ops I work with. You should move out of the Vancouver area as soon as you get your degree. I don't think that you're ever going to have a problem finding 1 bedroom accommodations in Vancouver because that's what develo…
I moved to Vancouver shortly before the .com crash. Worked for a number of companies, primarily doing low-level system programming, climbing from 50K to 120K in 5 or so years and periodically trying to do my own thing. One of the attempts worked, got a good exit, at which point started looking at upgrading from our pretty decent Burnaby condo to a house.
Being a true nouveau riche, we scouted everything, including most expensive areas like UBC, Point Gray and West Vancouver, talked to the agents, looked at the building lots, spoke with architects - the whole shebang. It became absolutely crystal clear that the Vancouver real estate is just one big parking lot for Chinese money. And they don't just park them there, they also bring their gambling habits with them, constantly flipping what they have and perpetually warming up the prices. It is in-your-face obvious once you take a close look at what's going on. You don't even have to prompt agents to relay the stories of how they guide groups of Chinese government suits through dozens of properties, all of which they end up buying above asking. It is absolutely INSANE. As it is ultimately disgusting.
In any case, we looked around once again, said "fuck it" and moved elsewhere. Mountains and good restaurants can't offset the fact that you feel like a lower middle class even when you don't have to work ever again in your life.
It's a nice place when you are young, renting and have no attachments, but I would strongly discourage from trying to settle there on a more permanent basis.
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A Canadian who invests in single-family homes recently told me that the U.S. state of Indiana charges double real-estate taxes if the home is not owner-occupied. As a Californian who owns rental property in Arizona, I am all in favor of this, provided that means my primary residence would be taxed less. Real-estate taxes on your primary residence is the equivalent of paying rent. It has become so high in some states…
Renters pay property taxes, too - indirectly through their landlord.
Georgist taxes have the interesting feature that land rents taxation ( not rack rent, which is what you pay the landlord ) cannot be passed on.
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Also in the Seattle metro area; rent here is just massively out of balance. There is a total lack of regional urban planning and competition in the form of sufficiently available housing to keep prices low. All of that development went to the improperly supported suburban exodus movement of the 80s and 90s.
I hear that even in the more conservative suburbs, support for rail is increasing, just because the traffic in Seattle is so bad. Is this true? I think Washington state's regressive tax pyramid and dependence on plebecites will still stymie progress, though; in Canada, provincial and federal governments have much more centralized power to levy taxes and spend.
Washington state is the worst state for taxes and governance, except when compared to all the other states. It works out well.
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As an established middle-aged software developer with a family living in Burnaby who cannot move now because of custody issues, I'm going to give you the same advice I give to all of the engineering co-ops I work with. You should move out of the Vancouver area as soon as you get your degree. I don't think that you're ever going to have a problem finding 1 bedroom accommodations in Vancouver because that's what develo…
Why does / did the Canadian government let so many Chinese come in and buy property like that?
2. Proxy companies that maintain RE portfolios for overseas clients
3. Complete unwillingness of the government to do anything about this. That's the root of the problem.
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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…
I know of several developers, whose advice and preference is to move out of the city (closer to skiing/biking/etc) and work remotely for a US company.
There is plenty of evidence of the foreign property issue, and the willful ignorance of the government. Besides everything else posted, here's an academic case study:
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/in-a-six-month-peri...
http://www.slideshare.net/ayan604/ownership-patterns-of-sing...
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In the west end, it really is "yellow peril". I am asian myself, but I contribute to the economy as a job provider. Speculators are the reason for the impending ghost town that is Vancouver. http://www.nationalpost.com/m/wp/blog.html?b=news.nationalpo...
That is the worst "research" I think I've ever seen.... Chinese name? Foreigner!!! Despite Vancouver being almost 50% Asian. Canada does not collect data on foreign ownership, and the citizenship of buyers in Yan’s study is not clear. But Yan established that 66 per cent of all buyers had “non-anglicized” Mainland China names.
Our full name analysis methodology follows accepted practices in the fields of epidemiology, demography, and political science. This study wanted to see if any distinct patterns occurring when non-Anglicized Chinese names are isolated from the rest of the data set. It is a primary assumption of this study that a non-Anglicized Chinese names may be an indication that an owner may be an recent immigrant to Canada and that an Anglicized Chinese name is an indication of a long time immigrant or non-immigrant and/or multigenerational Canadian of sole or mixed ethnic Chinese ancestry. As a course of experimentation, there may be names missed for new immigrants who have Anglicized Chinese names and long time immigrants or multi-generational Canadian with non-Anglicized Chinese name to may be in the wrong catagory, but, with external reviews, this risk is minimal.
Within this data set, the name patterns were exceptionally and surprisingly distinct as they lacked ambiguous names like “Scott Low” which could be a Chinese or Scottish name or “John Li” which could be Chinese, Vietnamese, or Korean name. These names did not exist within this data set. Non-Anglicized Chinese names in the study were either in a three or two name sequences that our literature survey suggested were Chinese with no ambiguous names. Without direct measures of immigration or citizenship status and property ownership that are publicly available in Canada, this is an indirect measure of how globalization, non-localized wealth, and immigration, particularly from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan or Chinese global diaspora are entering one portion of the real estate market in Vancouver.
It's not perfect, but it's all we've got.
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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…
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!". It's pretty easy to find them. Google 'Andy Yan'; he's an economist at UBC who did the most recent study. Suffice to say, Canadians are doing what American's di…
Why Chinese buy abroad: to park money outside of China, to participate in real estate markets leased screwed up than their own (say what you want about Vancouver, it isn't anywhere near as bad as Beijing Shanghai Shenzhen), and to have an exit plan when they fall out of favor or things go to hell in China.
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Those companies are very much outliers. Does those 3 all have development operations in Seattle? Your figures don't seem to stack up RE Google: https://www.glassdoor.ca/Salary/Google-Seattle-Salaries-EI_I...
Those GlassDoor salaries are cash. Stock and bonus add another 50-100%. My anecdotal experience with Vancouver is that some employers will throw you 15%, on a good year. Microsoft pays a bit less, but also employs ~30,000 people in the area.