Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes • Hacker News Board

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#661

Post by davidw » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 3:43 AM UTC

ameminator wrote: post #603

davidw wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here where I live, the people who show up at hearings to stop homes from being built are all wealthy-ish local people. Not immigrants, not some faceless government, not BlackRock, but our neighbors.

The point is that this is only one part of the problem. "Wealthy-ish local people" protesting a condo development is not enough to explain this absolute explosion in home prices. The government may be faceless, but there are lots of things that could have been done - including more "development-friendly" practices. However, there's always a cost - do you sacrifice environmental protections? Democratic government prin…

In the United States, by and large, zoning regulations are local, so they're set at the city level. Which makes it quite difficult to get rid of bad land use regulations that cause all kinds of problems. At a certain point, in a place like, say, Boulder, Colorado, it turns into a vicious circle: the only people who can afford to live there are wealthy boomer NIMBY types who will vote down anything to help housing affordability. For instance in that city it's illegal for more than 3 unrelated people to live in the same home. Local activists tried to get it overturned via an initiative, and it was voted down.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#662

Post by ashtonkem » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 3:58 AM UTC

throwaway2037 wrote: post #635

bradleyjg wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a lazy slogan that gets us nowhere. I live in NYC and we’ve built three brand new subway stations in the last fifty years. It’s not just a matter of people’s preferences for cars, it’s not possible to build a non car city anymore due to pathologies that have nothing to do with “car culture”. The number one issue is that we’ve allowed too many people and interest groups to effectively bring any major project to a…

You wrote: > That sounds pithy, but it overlooks all the maintenance work done on the system. Have you ever looked at pictures from the NYC subway in the 1970s? It was hell. (You can Google it.) My father lived in NYC in the 1970s and said the subway was like the "Fourth World" (vis-a-via first/second/third world!). Also, how about PATH, Metro North, NJT, LIRR, AirTrain JFK, or AirTrain Newark? These are not the NYC…

Also, you don’t need to add a ton of subway stations when you already have an extensive network. 3 stations in 50 years would be a much worse outcome in say, Cincinnati.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#663

Post by eftychis » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 4:01 AM UTC

ehsankia wrote: post #645

kbenson wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're fighting scarcity. No, they're fighting market inefficiency. A free market requires accurate and timely information to be efficient. This is literally people putting constraints on the market for what they are selling so the information is not available to one side, and the price is inflated. A rational actor should walk away from a system like this, but if that's all that's available around you because of s…

Market inefficiency would add an x% overhead on the price, but it doesn't uncontrollably increase the price. That's scarcity.

I mean scarcity defines value -- the reason gold or platinum are "valuable" is because of scarcity. That is it. Market inefficiency leads to unstable pricing, which for instance would be an "uncontrollably increase [of] the price."

For given supply and demand if market was efficient the price of housing should have been a constant. I am guessing of course here there is an increase in demand also. (Which is what you perhaps you might mean as "scarcity?" Scarcity however has a separate definition.)

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#664

Post by joshlemer » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 4:03 AM UTC

Gigachad wrote: post #575

thrwy_ywrht wrote: post #108

I know HN is not the place for glibness, but literally: just build more homes. Everything else is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Zoning reform is the answer.

Problem is urban sprawl has reached its limit so more homes means more apartments. And millennials accustomed to freestanding houses in suburbs will continue to rent houses and ignore the new apartments while claiming there is still a housing crisis.

I think millennials would happily adjust to condo living if they were affordable and large enough to comfortably live in with room to spare like in a house (1400+ Square feet, 3+ bedrooms)

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#665

Post by bawolff » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 4:06 AM UTC

maxsilver wrote: post #652

CountSessine wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That other problems exist is not a valid reason to prevent fixing something if that fix actually helps in some way That scarcity exists is the whole reason we're focusing on foreign buyers in 2022. And blind-bidding in 2021. And investors in 2019. And money-laundering in 2018. And Chinese money in 2017. All of these things should be addressed, but every one of them has provided political cover for the real reason tha…

> the real reason that housing is so expensive in popular cities, which is scarcity. This isn't really true though. Housing is expensive everywhere, even in unpopular cities, even in cities losing population. (Except for a few specific cities), housing is not scarce, we just pretend it is because we pretend all these fake financial transactions count as valid 'demand'. > we're focusing on foreign buyers in 2022. And…

> This isn't really true though. Housing is expensive everywhere, even in unpopular cities, even in cities losing population.

Calgary? Its a hugely popular city, with a similar growth rate as vancouver and yet housing is much cheaper (relatively speaking)

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#666

Post by bawolff » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 4:08 AM UTC

I'm really doubtful. Foreigners are an easy group to blame, and they don't vote. I think the real problem is a supply crunch being exasperated by domestic speculators looking to invest money and not having a whole lot of good places to put it.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#667

Post by aspenmayer » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 4:10 AM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #606

lotsofpulp wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are public stocks and bonds bought and sold with blind bidding?

In parts yes and in parts no. There’s indeed an order book that’s “public enough”, but not every trading system enters every intent into the public order book. (Even as a retail nobody, I can create contingent orders that only become public orders once the trigger conditions are met.) I also don’t believe that individual bid/asks can be traced to a specific bidder. Further, block trades are negotiated off-order-book…

I'd like to know more about all of this. Do you have any links?

> Even as a retail nobody, I can create contingent orders that only become public orders once the trigger conditions are met.

Do different brokers implement this differently, or is this an a property of the exchanges themselves?

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#668

Post by ericd » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 4:15 AM UTC

iso1210 wrote: post #511

ashtonkem wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Taking the metro many places (for example, from my apartment in an urban "luxury" apartment building to my boat near the waterfront in downtown DC) doubled the time it took to get there. It was actually faster to drive there even during rush hour where you'll sit motionless on the 395 bridge. Depends a lot on where you live and work. My experience was the exact opposite in Chicago. Heck, for some of my jobs I could…

> Depends a lot on where you live and work. My experience was the exact opposite in Chicago. Heck, for some of my jobs I could outrun car commuters on my bike pretty trivially. I got a taxi from Gare du Nord to a hotel on Champs Eleyse this evening -- took about 40 minutes to go 2 miles. That's ridiculous, but it's apparently a thing.

That might be partly because Paris has heavily deprioritized cars, in favor of bikes (which seem to be booming in popularity as a result).

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#669

Post by thehappypm » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 4:23 AM UTC

andrewstuart wrote: post #403

resalisbury wrote: post #396

Housing Policy Nirvana: 1. ban supply (1920s - today) 2. ban demand (today - future) problem fixed! Srsly, why can't we concentrate on policies that unlock supply. nothing else matters.

"Supply is a lie". You know who calls for "more supply"? Real estate developers, speculators and investors. This is how they distract from fixing the real issues in housing prices. Adding more supply won't bring house prices down, it will just give housing stock for investors to buy.

Why do you think this? Is housing immune from Econ 101 supply and demand?

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#670

Post by aspenmayer » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 4:24 AM UTC

lhorie wrote: post #529

citrusybread wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extreme car dependency. Toronto is suffering from the same problem Dubai has. It suddenly became relevant when sovereignists gained power in Quebec and the business class were worried about Montreal being a liability. So they packed up and went down the 401 to Toronto. It has the infrastructure for a much much smaller city, and one in the North American car-driven style (massive highways, occasional regional rail tha…

Personally, I think the problem is more a question of the sort of business development that happens downtown vs the surrounding areas. If you look, for example, at development on highway 7 over the decades, there's definitely densification going on, e.g. this area[0] used to be farmlands back in the day, but now those red lanes are public transit lines and there are condo buildings sprouting up along that corridor. A…

People want to live close to work, because it's hard to multitask while commuting, and if you're paid hourly, it's essentially unpaid work time. Higher paying jobs allow those higher earning workers to bid up prices on the land closest to their high paying workplaces, which tend to be in desirable areas, because those areas have other amenities that the highly paid workers are able to pay to enjoy. It's a ratcheting flywheel that drives up home prices.

The high paying companies benefit from this when the markets are up, as their stock prices appreciate due to being able to compete in the market and remain highly paying companies. And when bubbles burst, their stock prices may go down, but so do their outlying obligations, which are denominated in dollars also. The gains made and invested into the company during the boom years allow strong companies to ride out the lean years better than their weaker competitors, whose workers are then in need of a job at one of the remaining companies unless they become or are already self-employed. This allows the strongest companies to get the benefit of both extremes of market conditions.

All of this causes metro areas, which are full of both established megacorps and VC-infused startups, to become pressure cooker bellwether barometers of property values and rent prices.

There are many ways to solve the problem of unaffordable home prices, and an answer is more supply. Why it isn't chosen more often is primarily a political problem inasmuch as it is a market problem, or land availability problem, or zoning problem.