591–600 of 629 posts
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In nominal dollars . I really doubt that. I just checked a friend's house who has lived in PA since 1952, and they are paying $3200. Anybody can look up what actual property taxes are paid here: https://payments.sccgov.org/propertytax/Secured
According to [1], $10k in 1950 corresponds to about $100k in 2015. So the gain is 23x, which is still insane. [1] http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
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On the other hand, why should your tax bill go up simply because other people are willing to spend increasingly large amounts of money to buy a house like yours? It's not like income tax where your tax bill only goes up when you get more money to pay it with.
One can argue that it should be the opposite of an income tax. If the value of your house goes up because you remodel the kitchen, then it seems fair that you should be able to pocket that value. You did the work, so your taxes should not increase. If the value of your house goes up because the government opens a new light rail station nearby, then you did nothing to earn this, so it seems fair that society should be…
I assert it's a problem with a non-trivial solution.
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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.
From the slide deck: 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 immi…
It's anecdotal, but I know a number of US and Canadian citizens who have non-anglicized Chinese names. I would say most people who immigrate to Canada keep their original name. I also know a number of 1st generation Canadian who have Chinese names, but also English nicknames.
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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 anot…
Those studies are seriously flawed imo as their methodology is to filter on non-anglicized Chinese names and use that as a proxy for foreign money. That would describe a lot of people that aren't recent immigrants, like me. If anything, those studies show that ethinic-Chinese people are more predisposed to buying a house than renting, even when renting is much cheaper.
His data is interesting and adds to the conversation, but is not peer reviewed or an academic study[1].
The studies I refer to above are more rigorous in their approach and thus their results are, imho, more reliable.
http://www.vancourier.com/news/controversial-foreign-ownersh...
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But it's not just cities. Philadelphia and Baltimore and Atlanta are big cities, but they aren't the right cities. It's a small number of them. It's not just urbanism, but also brand.
I think it may just depend on what it is you're trying to accomplish with your career. Take Atlanta since you bring it up. Atlanta already is the number one place to be globally for a career in Information Security which is a significant chunk of the tech community even though it's not nearly as flashy as social-web. Atlanta is also becomming a nexus for email-related startups (it's really not just Mailchimp there ar…
The other funny phenomenon I've noted is people assuming we are in SV and asking whether we are "down in the valley" or "up in the city." I say "we're waaaaaay down in the valley... like eight hours South." I bet companies in Atlanta will give an address in one of Atlanta's burbs and get asked "where's that? is that in the East bay?"
Maybe the whole thing is just real estate fund or bank propaganda.
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I don't see why we have to separate the two. It sounds like Vancouver faces both increasingly high rent and abnormally low salary for tech jobs (although I recognize that we might not expect Silicon Valley level pay).
It's not just Vancouver that's experiencing abnormally low salaries for tech jobs, all of Canada is. The brain drain is slow but inevitable.
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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.
I think that is a more nuanced neighborhood by neighborhood issue. NIMBY is always a thing, and no one wants to live right next to any sort of transit. There are various reasons for this, part of those reasons is that, disproportionately, the poor tend to be relegated to mass transit. Part of that is that transit doesn't make sense if you get on/off work outside of peek hours; most of the Seattle metro system is bias…
I agree with that in most cases, especially in low density wealthy cities, where people would avoid using transit even if it were more convenient, just to avoid the general population.
But in the case of several Bay Area neighborhoods the opposite is true. All else equal, in the urban core people pay a premium to live near a major mass transit station.
I guess you need a critical mass of upper middle class working people, good enough transit, and terrible traffic for this to happen. I certainly never saw transit access marketed as a selling point before moving here from flyover country in the dot-com days.
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As far as I can see this is exactly what is happening. More powerful computers and communications are amplifying the power of individuals, and as a result making relationships even more important. And cities have always been the places of innovation and relationships. Just even more so now.
But it's not just cities. Philadelphia and Baltimore and Atlanta are big cities, but they aren't the right cities. It's a small number of them. It's not just urbanism, but also brand.
Is there any really viable plan to get the foreign owned real estate on to the rental market?
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On the other hand, why should your tax bill go up simply because other people are willing to spend increasingly large amounts of money to buy a house like yours? It's not like income tax where your tax bill only goes up when you get more money to pay it with.
The taxes should indeed go up to optimize land use in general. If you have a house built in 1902 in the middle of a big city, you're paying minimal taxes and find yourself surrounded by high-rises, it's very inefficient land use. Your lot could provide housing for hundreds if not thousands of people if another high-rise was built there. Thus, you should either pay for your privilege (in taxes) or sell the lot (for a…