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Comment by Tiktaalik | Hacker News Reader

> But Canada closed its federal programme in 2014 (some provincial schemes, such as Quebec’s, continue).

Only mentioned as an aside, but for Vancouverites, this has been very painful.

Uniquely Quebec manages its own immigration (let's not get into it) and they have an investor immigration scheme that essentially sells citizenship for a pittance. Of course since persons have freedom of movement there's nothing stopping persons who buy citizenship in Quebec for moving to Vancouver, which almost all of them do.

Accordingly while British Columbia has enacted various foreign investor taxes to try to limit the distortions from foreign money on the real estate market, there remain significant impacts of foreign wealth in Vancouver and BC.

Sadly federal politicians aren't in much of a rush to annoy the Quebec government by playing hardball on this issue as Canada has an election coming up and Quebec has heaps of seats in play.

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If we only had a technology that could be used to build more housing units on a given plot of land, we could probably build as many housing units as people want to buy. Until such technologies emerge from the land of science fiction, we'll be stuck with shortages, because the problems are really technical, not legal.

https://www.vox.com/a/new-economy-future/urban-sprawl-housin...

Perhaps this sort of sarcastic comment would make sense if we're talking about SF which doesn't build, but we're talking about Vancouver, which actually builds quite a bit of housing, and is currently building multi-unit housing at unprecedented levels not seen in the last 30 years.

The big problem of course that there are real physical limits to the rate of housing development where people have to touch the process eg. inspections, design, labour limits and so 'just add more supply' isn't really a solution when the limited supply you can build are for-sale condos literally being directly marketed overseas and out of the grasp of locals with mere local incomes (Vancouver has pretty much the lowest median income of major Canadian cities).

Do you know anything about supply and demand, or Vancouver, at all? Much of the city is still zoned for single-family only: https://www.thestar.com/vancouver/2019/01/01/2019-could-be-t.... To call this madness is an understatement.

Yeah the remaining single family (actually duplex now) zoning hasn't been a restriction on development. In the last several years the City of Vancouver took significant parcels of that SFH area such as Cambie, Marpole, and Norquay and up zoned it to allow for high rise and mid rise residential.

Like I said, Vancouver isn't SF. Even with areas of the city untouched by redevelopment, there's still thousands upon thousands of units in the pipeline being developed in the areas the city has up zoned over the last 10 years. That's just the CoV proper, never mind the huge amounts of development next door in all the surrounding cities.

On top of this, Metro Vancouver is still a young enough that there's massive areas of untouched brownfield and greenfield that are being redeveloped as well, such as Jericho, NEFC and the Squamish lands around Vanier Park.

Bucky fuller, Dymaxion House, circa 1930:

> The Dymaxion House was developed by inventor and architect Buckminster Fuller to address several perceived shortcomings with existing homebuilding techniques. Fuller designed several versions of the house at different times — all of them factory manufactured kits, assembled on site, intended to be suitable for any site or environment and to use resources efficiently. A key design consideration of the design was ease of shipment and assembly.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house

Nearly a century later... "Prefab housing complex for UC Berkeley students goes up in four days" Aug., 2018 ~ https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/08/02/prefab-housing-compl...

An interesting detail: "Kennedy notes that the cost of trucking to Berkeley from the port of Oakland was more expensive than the cost of shipping from Hong Kong."

Apartment buildings are being slapped together quickly now with cheap materials. Fast isn't good if the result is a house of cards that's ready to fall down at any time.

A three story apartment building in my town burned down because the decorative mulch outside caught fire and spread to the building. Making it worse sprinkler systems are not mandatory in Canada for three story apartment buildings. Luckily all 52 seniors living in the apartment building got out there were no deaths.

The fire chief said the building went up fast because of the materials used in the building.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-fire...

A housing bubble based on domestic demand is dangerous enough, adding in who knows how much foreign demand on top of that, if it was to pop it could be more than doubly impactful.

Before we go on a building spree, I say we should get a decent handle on the total amount of foreign money in play.

You're right, it'd be a real tragedy if they built too many homes and just anyone could afford to live in Vancouver.

In the long run it may be fine. In the short run, crashing housing bubbles can bankrupt families and cause chaos in both financial and job markets.

Technology for "more housing units on a given plot of land" is in widespread use Hongkong, Singapore, Shenzhen, Seoul, and many other parts of Asia. It's even used in parts of the USA like NYC.

My belief has always been foreign capital (speculation) is bad, but immigration is good. So if you want to move here and bring all that foreign capital great! If you want to speculate or park money in Canadian real estate (empty houses and condos) that's really bad for the locals. It never should have been allowed.

Immigration would be great, I agree. One issue though is "astronaut families", where several family members (such as children) move to Canada, but the income-earning parents stay abroad and send money. Then they follow along when they retire.

This can really distort things, because it's a lot of foreign capital coming in without the productive industry and income taxes being present. Then later it becomes a social services burden.

Many of those kids do grow up to become awesome Canadians, so that's good though. But some of them choose to move back abroad after getting their citizenship and education, when it becomes time to work...

The reason why the Feds ended their version of an investor immigration scheme is because a study found that refugees ended up paying more in income taxes than investor immigrants lmao.

So yeah immigrants are great, but it has been abundantly clear that the rich persons buying citizenship are doing so just to have a passport of convenience and buy land as a safe investment and the gains for the rest of Canadian society from that are weak.

Canadian investor immigration scheme required purchasing government bonds and holding them, but only for certain amount of time. After that time they could sell bonds and get their money back.

It was more of visa-for-a-loan program than anything else. Complete bullshit.

>a study found that refugees ended up paying more in income taxes than investor immigrants

Citation?

I mean, presumably there's a citable study out there somewhere.

That immigrants in general pay in more taxes sounds plausible. That refugees are a greater net positive (taxes in minus benefits out) than investors, who are basically all wealthy enough to use minimal government services, seems like a stretch.

There's a bunch of articles if you google the right words, but basically in 2014 Jason Kenny cancelled the program because a Canadian government data showed that millionaires weren't really hanging around and contributing.

> According to CIC, investor immigrants reported average earnings of about $18,000 in their first year and just $28,000 after 15 years. After three years, only 47 per cent of such immigrants reported any income. The Canadian average is 67 per cent.

> Meanwhile, refugees (those who come to Canada under hardship) reported first-year average incomes of $20,000 and after 15 years those incomes rose to $30,000. Two-thirds of refugees reported income by their fifth year, on par with Canada’s average.

> After five years, only 39 per cent reported income, suggesting investor immigrants may leave the country (or declare non-residency) after the citizenship process is complete.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/refugees-reporting-high...

Sounds like a good reason to soak all the rich, not just the foreign rich.

Foreign capital, when it is invested in productive enterprise is good. It reduces the cost of borrowing money, which stimulates your economy, promotes value creation, etc. Assuming you believe that this sort of economic activity is a net good, that is. (And I think that even a dyed-in-the-wool socialist will agree, under the right tax system.)

Foreign capital, when invested into a limited, rationed, speculative resource, that is also required for life - like say, housing, is a ----ing nightmare.

The problem is not foreign capital but that someone thought that limiting housing construction would be a good idea

Vancouver, SF, Seattle are all going through unprecedented construction booms. There are more active cranes in Seattle at the moment then there are anywhere in North America.

This has not stopped housing costs from going through-the-roof. People are buying houses to speculate, new residents (foreign rich, or migrating techies) are buying houses with staggering amounts of money - amounts that existing residents could never hope to save up.

Except everything I can find says that Seattle real estate prices are in fact falling.

[0] https://komonews.com/news/local/home-prices-dropping-in-the-...

[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-ar...

[2] https://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Seattle-Washington/

...only at the high end. There is still a rapid shrinkage of space for ordinary folk...

Why do you build houses and not apartment building like we do in Europe?

that's really bad for the locals

Exporting housing services is a great business and a tremendous opportunity that is too rarely framed as such. https://slate.com/business/2013/05/exporting-housing-service...

They don't pay income tax. In a country with free medicare and cheap post-secondary education, and many other low income benefits this is a massive problem.

"nine of 10 recent Chinese immigrants arrive in Metro Vancouver with enough money to immediately buy homes. But only half hold down jobs during their first five years in Canada, while four of 10 report they’re surviving on low incomes."

https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-how...

Ritzy Richmond neighbourhood where many are ‘poor’

http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Part+Ritzy+Richmond+nei...

> But only half hold down jobs during their first five years

I wonder how long it will be before the government decides to change their data format so immigrant employment numbers can no longer be associated with country of origin, under the guise of "privacy" or something like that.

9/10 is taken out of context. It sounds like 9/10 of all Chinese immigrants but that’s clearly not true. Many reading it will be outraged and not investigate further. Mission accomplished for the opinion piece.

You are publishing opinion pieces from Douglas Todd, who is a syndicated conservative author who doesn’t like immigration. I wouldn’t take his articles at face value.

I think this is confusion of two pretty distinct things, I'm fine with affluence being a metric in the immigration process (especially if, as with Canada, the government directly profits from the temporary use of that money) - the issue in Vancouver more lies in the usage of vacant properties to park money from overseas, since cities suffer from having artificially lowered vacancies it is pretty proper that a vacancy tax is leveraged on these properties to recoup the lost value - the issue here is mostly that the prior Premier worked to block such a tax repeatedly, we now have the tax in place though it's implementation is still having some growing pains.

Thus we're getting some utility out of recouping lost value from the tax, but the disincentive the tax would have represented has come in too late to avoid the huge property value spike, ideally we'll see those inflated values decrease somewhat as real estate as a savings account becomes less attractive and starts depreciating the parked value quicker.

There is also the issue that it's hard to audit residency currently.

> Uniquely Quebec manages its own immigration

That Quebec is the only province that avails itself of the opportunity to attract immigrants to itself rather than relying on the federal government is to its credit. If the Anglophone provinces don’t feel like exercising the powers they and Quebec share that’s their problem, not Quebec’s.

If Quebec were only using their policy to attract immigrants to Quebec, I don't think any other provinces would have an issue with it.

> Uniquely Quebec manages its own immigration (let's not get into it) and they have an investor immigration scheme that essentially sells citizenship for a pittance. Of course since persons have freedom of movement there's nothing stopping persons who buy citizenship in Quebec for moving to Vancouver, which almost all of them do.

Most every province seems to have some sort of provincial nominee program in place for granting permanent residence. They're just not usually designed for investors.

Example of Ontario: https://www.ontario.ca/page/ontario-immigrant-nominee-progra...

> Most every province seems to have some sort of provincial nominee program in place for granting permanent residence. They're just not usually designed for investors.

I went through the program (I'm a PR now).

It takes many years, and then many years again to get citizenship. You have to work, etc. It's not even close to the same as the old "investor" program which was literally buy citizenship if you are rich.

> Uniquely Quebec manages its own immigration (let's not get into it) and they have an investor immigration scheme that essentially sells citizenship for a pittance

Their website say 1.2M$ ? That’s a pittance ?

In other words, If you buy one house you can have citizenship.

In QC that’d be 4 houses.

Actually QC did implement changes:

- limited country representation to a X% only

- added a law that enforces that immigrants are intending to reside in QC and even now must learn French

- investment amount was raised

I got pitched at silicon milkabout in the UK about moving to Quebec as a developer.

You have to invest $1.2 million and have a net worth of at least $2 million, right? I wouldn't call that a pittance.

Buying real estate counts as "investment" and with the Quebec program, there is zero risk because that 1.2 million is fully guaranteed.

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