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Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

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Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#681

Post by xapata »

RangerScience wrote: post #672
xapata wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> incentivizing developers to build affordable housing But that's unnecessary. If developers build more luxury housing, that'll reduce the price of existing housing, such that it becomes affordable.

That (first) either assumes demand remains constant, or requires measuring actual cost vs theoretical cost instead of simply actual; and second, assumes that there aren't complex interdependencies - ie, more luxury housing can make an area more desirable and increase demand more than it increases supply - arguably that's the goal , since otherwise you're literally building places people want to live in less than what…

> more luxury housing can make an area more desirable

Depends how big the "area" is that you're thinking about. The effect of increasing housing supply is well-studied. Demand can only grow as fast as the population does. If one area experiences increasing demand, then another area will have decreasing demand, comparatively.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#682

Post by rootusrootus »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #638
BlargMcLarg wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you're a recluse you can make it work, but I can understand millenial aged people not jiving with that style Which further creates a spiraling effect where even recluses will feel obligated to move to the city just for anything that you can't / is very difficult to get from a town. Turns out it isn't that fun when the majority of your neighborhood doesn't share your generation or interests. Especially for young p…

I dont get why a recluse would not want to live in a city. It is anonymous (no super friendly neighbours), you get the most food delivery choice and faster internet probably.

Noise, most probably. And perhaps smell. Also, being a recluse does not just mean antisocial or anonymous, for many people it means not being around any people at all.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#683

Post by yokoprime »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #596
admax88qqq wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A culture that abhors second hand housing (so structures don't appreciate like land does). Housing that depreciates is no longer a sound investment That sounds tremendously wasteful. All housing will have to be built new now? > (d) Not very open to immigration at all, have a decreasing population. This is probably the biggest reason housing is depreciating in Japan, especially outside of Tokyo.

> That sounds tremendously wasteful. All housing will have to be built new now? Well ya. You don't build to have your home last for more than 30-40 years, which can save some materials. We should get better at recycling and renewing building material, maybe the Japanese counteract things that way?

Is this satire, are you really advocating building houses with an expected life-span of 40 years? So if i buy a new house when im 30, i should expect to have to buy new if i live to be more than 70 and I havent moved.

If we assume your idea of close to perfectly recyclable houses comes true, i think people would have to really dial down their expectations and standards. No more drywall, particle boards everywhere. Tiles.. forget it, kitchen counters made by reclaimed wood etc

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#684

Post by fennecfoxen »

FredPret wrote: post #665
rockbruno wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can improve the situation, but I'm not sure if it would truly solve it. I believe the proper solution is to simply ban buying non-commercial buildings as an investment. If you're not living on it, you can't own it. I can't see why one would be against this aside from greediness.

Great, so every poor person or student or new worker will have to come up with downpayments and bank loans, or be homeless. Brilliant solution.

I think grandparent is not quite so cruel! If apartment buildings count as "commercial" (which they would in the industry lingo, which differs from the SimCity lingo) then we can just quarantine the undesirables away into a bad part of town using our Zoning laws!

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#685

Post by AYBABTME »

hpkuarg wrote: post #610
AYBABTME wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You portray it as being some capricious choice by entitled brats, but ignore that there's economic and efficiency advantages for society to have more centrally located workforce and services.

As the current supply chain crisis evinces, efficiency shouldn't be the end-all, be-all of policy.

Strange argument to switch to. If your day to day life is better because you live near where you eat and work and obtain healthcare and what not, isn't sort of hard to argue against? Where's the downside to this efficiency? It looks to me like an entirely win-win situation for the individual and society. Sometimes efficiency translates directly into resiliency. In your argument, proximity and density makes urban populations easier and cheaper to deliver to.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#686

Post by jerf »

xapata wrote: post #659
clpm4j wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eliminating a subset of buyers, i.e. slightly decreasing demand, is an easy and obvious action to take. Will it have a significant and long lasting effect? Very likely not. But when examining the supply-demand equation, it's painfully obvious to say "foreigners who don't live here should not be allowed to buy residential housing". It's way, way easier than incentivizing developers to build affordable housing and deal…

> incentivizing developers to build affordable housing But that's unnecessary. If developers build more luxury housing, that'll reduce the price of existing housing, such that it becomes affordable.

There's a path dependency problem. In principle, had you just been building housing like that all along, investing in housing is not appealing as you shouldn't see significant gains in general. However, now that it is appealing, the investment itself pushes up demand, which pushes up the appeal of investing because now prices are going up, which pushes up demand, etc.

Again, in principle, if you just keep building, the market would eventually sort this out. Of course, in the process, you'll overbuild housing proportionally to the investment demand. Once the investment demand leaves, the market will crash, which isn't necessarily a great plan either. And we are talking about a lot of finite resources being misallocated in the meantime, while the market forces figure this out.

If you'd like to resolve this problem faster than the market would naturally sort it out, and harness market forces to do so rather than naively fighting them, it makes sense to cut out the excess, artificial investment demand in the meantime. Sure, it would be better to have not created that problem in the first place, but, here we are.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#687

Post by weeksie »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #583
weeksie wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren't enough homes _where people want to live_ and you solve that buy building more homes _where people want to live_. But that's difficult because cities have all these veto points. It takes forever to get new construction going, right? Exactly. That's why we aren't building enough, because in the current regulatory environment we can't. That's what people talk about when they talk about NIMBYism as the cause…

"you solve that buy building more homes _where people want to live_. But that's difficult because cities have all these veto points" I'm not going to pretend there isn't some literal gatekeeping going on here that make this more difficult than necessary. But I'm also not exactly surprised that in cities as already densely packed as Los Angeles that there aren't exactly acres or hectacres of land just sitting around t…

1. There's tons of unused vertical space in LA.

2. They make more land all the time. Look at a map of Boston in 1800. In fact, look at an old map of almost any city near a large body of water and compare it to today and you'll find a lot more land being used.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#688

Post by bregma »

tenpies wrote: post #219
pards wrote: post #98

I'm a homeowner in Toronto and I don't think this will help. They've eliminated a small number of buyers from the market but have added other incentives like a first home buyers tax credit that will only fuel the fire - Australia tried this with tragic results. >> working with provinces and territories to develop and implement a Home Buyers’ Bill of Rights and bring forward a national plan to end blind bidding. Blind…

> I don't think this will help. You are exactly right, but this is by design. You're talking about the Canadian Federal Liberals. The Prime Minister is a trustafarian who got elected because his father was Prime Minister. Every major minister of their party owns several investment properties. The Minister of Housing and Diversity and Inclusion (what a combo!) owns investment properties. These people have zero interes…

The rate of income property ownership is the same across all federal caucuses (including the NDP). Singling out one party for the transgressions of all parties does not prove any point other than maybe a personal partisan bias.

The fact is the party political system in Canada is heavily biased towards the wealthy. Heck, in Ontario MPPs don't even get a pension so you you have to not only be wealthy to join the game but already self-supporting into retirement to be willing to consider it. You can only rely on politicians carrying through on their virtue signalling to do the right thing for the rest of us, so I'm not willing to criticize any of them for it.

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#689

Post by chucksta »

msie wrote: post #500
chucksta wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So 10 houses a year per person of the %2? That still sounds very plausible for high net worth investors, again especially if the purpose is to move/wash/hide cash, which my understanding is, generally is one of those 3 for overseas investments. If they are washing or hiding, they don't care as much about the profit, so it makes sense they would be buying in larger numbers if they can.

Oh brother.

Thanks to your completely unhelpful comment I realized the error in my logic. Kudos

Re: Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

#690

Post by wnolens »

ejb999 wrote: post #233
RocketOne wrote: post #201

Im one of those 'greedy' old farts who owns more than one home. We have one for ourselves and 5 rentals. Im starting to agree with those who are feeling priced out of the market. What would make me stop buying homes? A graduated tax would. If there were no sales tax on the first two, and then 15% tax on the third, 25% tax on the 4th, and going up by 10% for each subsequent house, it would definitely make me quit buyi…

Quoted post unavailable.

I don't see it as virtue signaling. The opposite almost: doing what you suggest would help one person out (and unfair - how is that person selected?).

As far as helping the bigger problem, it's a drop in the bucket and thus 99% for the feeling of righteousness. Besides, he didn't say his houses were empty or borderline slums. He's using his intelligence, capital, and capacity to take on risk and housing people.

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