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Comment by msie | Hacker News Reader

No, there is definitely a racist element here. Just read the comments on a lot of the local articles or letters published in papers. Lots of racism. People are too eager to point their fingers at asian foreigners but the situation is more complicated than that. The majority of real estate is not owned by foreigners. It’s not like Canadians have decided not to buy real estate, they are still fully involved in this market.

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Please, have you ever been to Vancouver or Seattle? Anyone who has ever been to any of these cities would never hold those opinions. Huge vacant houses with no one living in them, an entire sub section of the real estate industry that speaks mandarin but won't bother talking to any of the locals, schools that cater entirely to wealthy Chinese. The speculation tax is going to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, precisely because of mass foreign home ownership.

You'd have to be living under a rock to miss the signs of the times. Willfully ignorant, perhaps.

I have lived in Vancouver most of my life and did live in Seattle for three years. I watch and read a lot of the local news. What you are describing sounds like a 30000 ft view of Vancouver as portrayed by many news articles.

Newspaper articles and people that live in the immediate neighborhoods report the same thing - entire neighborhoods empty with the yards growing weeds. Condo towers with dark windows all night every night, year round.

"entire neighborhoods empty with the yards growing weeds."

Maybe they can actually get some cash by growing weed there, now that it's legal and all. ;)

Where in Vancouver? My wife's parents live in Richmond and three houses in their block are vacant most of the year. I have a relative that lives near Oak and King Ed. and it's similar there too.

Marginal demand matters greatly in real estate pricing. Reducing all analysis to "spot the racist" is a fun game to play to score points with your buddies, but not so useful for solving problems in the real world.

> Lots of racism.

What definition are you using for the word "racism"?

> The majority of real estate is not owned by foreigners.

There have been no published statistics on the amount of foreign owned real estate. Feel free to post evidence otherwise, and I will respond by pointing out it is not statistics on foreign ownership (or, you could just read the report yourself and discover the same thing).

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