601–610 of 629 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't most of the land sourth of the Fraser prone to flooding?
no, it's all diked appropriately for the most part. Of course some would like the diking to be improved as there has been some minor flooding every 20 years or so. But that flooding is typically limited to the lowest areas which are almost always agricultural land. It would be a huge stretch to say the area is prone to flooding.
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…
Those house owning elderly you're feeling sorry benefitted from the biggest bull market it history. They may have saw 100x gains on their house while many youth will are spending 30-50% of their income on housing if they're lucky to get a good job. If they do, they can look forward to paying entitlements to these elderly people while they themselves may never see the same turn done to them because the system will be…
why don't the young people left Vancouver create a city of their own?
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So why do speculators choose Vancouver of all places to speculate in?
1. Now-defunct Canadian Immigrant Investor program allowed you to buy permanent resident status in Canada, thus avoiding any potential future tax discrimination against foreigners. Unlike the US Green Card, Canadian PR status is permanent, affords all the privileges of citizenship except voting, and can never be revoked, even if you join a foreign army to fight Canada. A similar incarnation of this program still exis…
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What? That's crap. Why should single home dwellers have to pay more for water and electricity and gas just because their house is bigger? Then you'll have apartment dwellers running the heat with the windows open. Utilities should be paid per-use, just as it is now. People with bigger houses are naturally going to pay more because a bigger house usually needs more power/fuel for HVAC, unless their house is more effic…
> And that leads me to one big problem in the rental market is that landlords never spend a dime on improving or renovating homes for better energy-efficiency, because the tenant has to pay all the utilities. If that were the case they could charge 'fixed utilities' at a reasonable price and then when they upgrade for energy efficiency they reap those gains.
Why not just have some kind of regulation requiring rental dwellings to meet certain energy efficiency standards? And combine this with some programs to help landlords upgrade, perhaps with low-interest loans or something.
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Because the person who has owned the house a long time doesn't have higher income to make up for it, they're likely a retired person on a fixed income. Since you want them to move out so bad, why don't you have the government pay them to move out? I never see these local governments offer to pony up $10k or so for the moving expenses for people priced out of their houses to move out. These people bought a house in a…
I think that's a stretch. Being priced out of a market is not the same thing as genocide. Population transfer is a different thing from gentrification is a different thing from eminent domain is a different thing from genocide.
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It's not about raising more money, it's about fairly apportioning the tax burden. Why should two homeowners with the same value of property pay different amounts of taxes just because one is old and has owned the house a long time?
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 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…
Those house owning elderly you're feeling sorry benefitted from the biggest bull market it history. They may have saw 100x gains on their house while many youth will are spending 30-50% of their income on housing if they're lucky to get a good job. If they do, they can look forward to paying entitlements to these elderly people while they themselves may never see the same turn done to them because the system will be…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those house owning elderly you're feeling sorry benefitted from the biggest bull market it history. They may have saw 100x gains on their house while many youth will are spending 30-50% of their income on housing if they're lucky to get a good job. If they do, they can look forward to paying entitlements to these elderly people while they themselves may never see the same turn done to them because the system will be…
So what you are saying is the person who just spent their entire life, 40+ years helping build the city they live in, should now move away to a small city that no one else wants to move to? And they should do that mainly because other people now want to enjoy the fruits of the elderly labor?
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> 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 so much stamp duty in one hit (easily 50-100k). I don't understand. When you're making millions on the sale of the property, how is 100k in stamp duty a problem? It's on the sa…
It's not a problem, but it's a nice excuse to hold on that sweet investment and let the kids worry about it after you're gone.