Comment by trevelyan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trevelyan | Hacker News Reader

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According to new data from Statistics Canada, immigrants own 43 per cent of all residential properties in Toronto and 37 per cent in Vancouver, while making up 46 per cent of Toronto’s population and 41 per cent of Vancouver’s. An additional 4.8 and 3.4 percent of residential properties have foreign owners in Vancouver and Toronto respectively. And these statistics do not seem to include people coming in on student visas.

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/immigrants-canadas-highest...

Even without students the numbers are pretty high comparatively. In contrast, "of all the metropolitan areas in the [United States], Miami had the highest rate of immigrant homeownership (26 percent), as well as the largest percentage of immigrants in its population (41 percent)."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/realestate/immigrants-and...

So it sounds like people that study and work in those cities buy houses and live in them. Wouldn't it be good city planning to permit the construction of enough homes for everyone that studies and works in the area? Housing is only a zero sum game when there's not enough of them.

They might buy them but they don’t necessarily use them. A lot of the housing stock in Vancouver is vacant even if purchased, screwing up the neighborhood economy greatly.

It would indeed be excellent city planning to do what you are suggesting. Other ideas include taxing vacant properties; restricting immigrants to ownership of a single property for N years; taxing immigration more heavily and investing in municipal infrastructure; or following Australia's lead and restricting non-residents to the purchase of newly-built housing.

And it's an great question why so many cities fail to take these steps. My guess is that inertia wins partly because it becomes politically inexpedient to blame immigrants for anything once cities have a certain percent of non-native residents, and partly because rising home prices make older homeowners happy while pushing the marginalized and disaffected younger voters into other ridings.

Unfortunately city planners are appointed by officials who are elected by the CURRENT residents, not the potential future residents.

Preventing adequate construction is in the financial interest of current homeowners -- it inflates their property values due to artificial scarcity.

This won't change as long as city planners answer to those elected by existing residents.

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