Comment by adamt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adamt | Hacker News Reader

There is a similar story appearing in UK in places like London and in my home town of Cambridge. This isn't yet not he same scale, but it is affecting the property market.

In Cambridge 1 in 20 new-build properties is purchased by non-resident Chinese buyers, which has been one of the contributing factors that has seen prices rise by 50% since 2010 [1] and are 47% above 2007 pre-GFC peak [2]. Note - unlike Vancouver that has a a big (30%) local Chinese population, only about 1.4% of the Cambridge population is Chinese or of Chinese ethnic origin [3]

To some extent this is just about free markets and a movement of capital. But it is starting to price out many local people out of the property market that does have a social impact.

There are other factors at play including a booming tech & biotech sectors, restrictive planning, stock-piling of building plots etc, but the foreign buyers issue is a major contributor.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/22/china-cambridg...

[2] http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/mortgageshome/article-328...

[3] Guardian data - available in a Google doc https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yc8W1SiCbWd9V4I9KmTl...

In Cambridge, it's sadly a pretty artificial bubble. With all land there is in the surroundings, it looks like an artificial limit in the demand.

That's prime agricultural land, though. And Cambridge is really not suited transportwise to becoming a big city.

> That's prime agricultural land

Let's grow some cabbage on the most expensive land on the planet?

Because forget money - it's cabbage that counts.

> And Cambridge is really not suited transportwise to becoming a big city.

We have this recurring thing that people only want to move to a very very small subset of cities. There are multiple solutions to be proposed, but just turning blind on this doesn't sound feasible.

Yeah, urban planning should be rethought here.

It doesn't make sense that a small town is so congested. Public transportation needs a serious upgrade.

It's a shame a fantastic place to do science and business is getting a bit held back by congestion and expensive real estate.

It's hardly the most expensive land on the planet, it isn't even all that near to London let alone somewhere like Manhattan or Hong Kong.

Food security is not something that should be entirely handwaved away, although I agree that plenty of places manage to live entirely on imports.

I agree with the idea of not limiting ourselves to a few cities: that's why it makes little sense to try to turn Cambridge into a London suburb. It's a market town of historic buildings that was spared bombing. The tech industry growth there is great but somewhat accidental. I doubt you've been there, but there's very little that can be done about the traffic problems without demolishing a college. The building of a new railway station north of the river should help greatly though.

I'd suggest trying to build up tech industry in one of the 'post-industrial' cities instead. Maybe we could buy up the £1 houses in Stoke-on-Trent and market those to China at huge markups instead.

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