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Comment by VincentEvans | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know the specifics on Canadian real estate market and the specifics of the problems there, but based on my understanding of the problems facing your neighbors to the south - I feel like it’s almost an attempt to appease citizens by blaming the issue on “foreigners” (always a move that is popular with politicians) to redirect attention from the much more likely cause - massive investments made by hedge funds, private capital, REITs which does not appear to be addressed at all?

Thought I do agree that a non-primary-resident investment, whether from citizens, foreigners, or capital should be greatly limited overall and these rules should only loosen to direct investment towards areas that are in dire need of an influx of capital for redevelopment. That is - if it’s not distressed, and it’s not going to be your primary residence - GTFO, you should be last in line to buy.

And I say that as former landlord. I just believe that if I was looking to make some money - I could probably do just fine under these conditions. I don’t see an issue of buying a distressed property needing a rehab, and I think doing so benefits everyone.

I am getting real tired of society getting ever more dystopian just so that someone can make a buck.

https://www.fool.com/investing/stock-market/market-sectors/r...

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> massive investments made by hedge funds, private capital, REITs

I can't recommend this article enough on that subject:

https://www.vox.com/22524829/wall-street-housing-market-blac...

"The role of institutional investors is still being studied, but the popularity of the narrative strikes at something dangerous: People want a convenient boogeyman and when they get it, they often ignore the structural problems that are harder to combat. Housing undersupply is the result of decades of locals opposing new home building. It’s not something that can be blamed on Wall Street greed and the nefarious tinkering of a private equity firm. And that’s a much harder truth to stomach."

I feel like both of these things can be problems.

If you view housing and ownership of your domicile as something that should be accessible to people, then housing necessarily cannot be viewed as an investment vehicle and large corporations, REITs, wallstreet, etc. need to be excluded so that more supply can be available to "correct" buyers.

Limiting these groups does help on the supply-side. While it may not be the root cause, it's far better than showering the demand-side with cash like tax breaks for first-time home buyers.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

I don't think many people are really in favor of big investors getting into housing because no, it sure does not help, but the root cause is "not enough homes", and the solution is "build more homes of all shapes and sizes". That's also the solution to keeping big investors out! Big investors aren't piling into used cars despite the recent scarcity because they know that sooner or later the car companies are going to go back to churning out a bunch of new cars.

You're quite correct that more money chasing after the same limited number of homes is just going to drive up prices.

Yes, but one thing causes the other and it's not in the causal direction people intuitively think. Foreign speculators and investment firms like Blackrock are only entering the SFH market because supply constraints mean ever-higher prices. It's not like nobody thought to buy up houses 40 years ago. You don't have to be a genius to think of it. I can remember being a teenager and thinking, why don't big firms buy up all the housing and rent it back? The answer is that in most markets homes aren't naturally a good investment. It's a capital-intensive business and you end up with a depreciating asset, small margins, and lots of hassle.

But if supply gets constrained enough that prices complete detach from those fundamentals, then, sure, why not jump in? These investors are only in this market in the first place because of supply constraints, so it's not just that low supply is a more important factor than the investors -- the investors wouldn't even exist if not for the low supply!

I'm not contending that supply isn't the real issue, just that there's no way you're going to be able to change the culture around individual home ownership, nimbyism, and zoning laws on any reasonable time-frame. A better current solution that likely has wide-spread support would be to limit the demand rather than throw more money into the demand side.

Limiting large investors does not solve the problem, but it could help alleviate some acute symptoms.

I'm not so sure it's not possible. There are large numbers of people getting priced out, and YIMBY groups are springing up all over. Here in Oregon, we passed HB2001, which re-legalizes up to 4-plexes in our cities. One of the city councilors where I live is a huge YIMBY.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2022/03/31/where-p...

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-yimbys-are-starting-to...

Yeah, you'd never get it done on a local level, but when people are forced to think about the issue holistically -- that is, when they can get outside of their immediate neighborhood and think about the fact that it's illegal to build enough housing on a state or even national level -- it looks like they can actually be swayed. These changes have to be made at the state/province level.

> A better current solution that likely has wide-spread support would be to limit the demand rather than throw more money into the demand side.

black markets spring up to serve demand when there's law and regulation that tries to prohibit such demand. I don't see how making the real estate market this way is gonna get it better.

The only way to make prices drop is to increase supply. trying to tax a fringe group, or to penalize investors etc, is not going to do well at all. And doing so will also dry up investment for growing supply.

> help alleviate some acute symptoms.

A short term symptom abatement, if it even does abate anything, is not going to make any difference tbh. Concentrate on solving the fundamental issue - lack of supply due to various interest groups resisting supply growth.

REITs are not buying million dollar homes in Vancouver to rent out. None of the real estate hotspots where you literally can't buy a home on a normal salary are caused by REITs, because those homes have terrible yields. Most REITs focus on either large, 10+ unit apartment buildings, or on cheaper houses in less appealing locations with good yields.

The real issue is that there is not enough supply in desirable locations.

It's the real estate equivalent of blaming immigrants for stealing jobs.

Not even remotely. Immigrants can buy a home. This is about foreign ownership (not a primary residence).

Foreign ownership is just one problem though, and IMO a smaller one than both cheap debt and lack of supply.

Which is exactly the point of the parent post - blaming joblessness on immigrants stealing jobs is the same as blaming foreign ownership for making property too expensive for the ordinary citizens to buy!

Both are incorrect in the same way, and incite an emotional response of hating some "other" for causing the problem at hand!

Went over my head I guess :)

Ironically, that quoted excerpt inserted its own "convenient boogeyman" of housing undersupply caused by local opposition.

Also, institutional investors do have a reputation for inciting bubbles and that possibility absolutely needs to be carefully scrutinized, particularly for something as essential and socially compounding as housing.

Not everything is just a "convenient boogeyman": some things actually do contribute more to housing costs.

If you drive through any major American (or Canadian) city outside of the core downtown area...it's pretty clear _something_ is preventing large developments. If you drive through the Bay Area, or stand on a 4-storey "high-rise" and look out over miles upon miles of aging bungalows, and consider the value of the land they're sitting on, it's really a bit shocking.

And if you look into adding a suite for rental to your house, it'll be pretty clear what the barrier is to new development. It basically doesn't matter where you are in the country.

Local zoning really does play a huge role in housing cost in North America.

It's not "convenient" though. People desperately want to believe that there is some remote "other" that is causing the problems, not their otherwise kind, friendly neighbors.

And yet, at every hearing I've attended about housing, ever public comment period for a project, it is my "neighbors" opposing the homes. The editorials in the local paper about how re-legalizing fourplexes would lead to (I'm paraphrasing) "those people" living in your neighborhood are not from wall street bankers, they're from people I've met who live here.

If you want to sort out this problem then you will need to address the concerns about "those people".

There are some very real concerns that people have. Violence. Drugs. Noise. School quality. People want a good environment in which to bring up their kids and these are all crucial. Fortunately they could be solved in other ways than expensive housing. Unfortunately people have a very justified fear that they wont be.

Mostly it's not justified, just racism.

'Historically low supply' because it's been bought up as investments?

I can only speak of my local area in North Atlanta suburbs, but it does not seem like builder are building as many single family homes as before. I see complaints on our local social media and I have observed it as well. We bought our house new in 2016. There were many new neighborhoods at the tail end of completion. Every corner had huge signs telling you to stop by. Our house was not designed by us, but by the builder and it was good enough at the time.

We have been eyeing for a new construction neighborhoods in the last many years so we can get something larger and more specific for our needs (multi-generational). All I see are town homes and apartments. For reference, our city population is ~25,000...we have lots of land.

For the record - we don't need new construction and if an existing home fits our needs exactly we'd go for it. But I'm just referencing that no new single family home neighborhoods have popped up as abundantly as before...just townhouses, condos and "Luxury Apartments" with rents more than my monthly mortgage.

Real estate is always a good investment (unfortunately), and capital flight from Asia is not a joke. It's happening in Europe too. Personally, I think governments in well developed countries should do their best to dissuade investment in housing as a financial instrument. Why should I compete with a millionaire, be it local or foreign, for a decent house to live in a city I've lived in for years?

> I feel like it’s almost an attempt to appease citizens by blaming the issue on “foreigners”

There is truth, however. The Wenzhou house wife property speculator trope has some basis in reality, and Chinese markets are already rife with massive speculation that has seeped into foreign markets popular for Chinese emigration (Toronto, Vancouver, and to a much lesser extent NYC and west cost American cities). You don't have to look hard to see the effects in Vancouver, where condo buildings and housing remain empty due to being seen as speculative assets.

American and some western European housing markets (e.g. UK) are a bit unique in that they haven't limited foreigners from buying and speculating on real estate. Whereas in China, many tier 1 and 2 cities have strict residency requirements before you can buy an apartment (but these also apply to Chinese via their hukou residency system).

There is a huge crowd of local Canadian landlords that own or seek to own more than one property. This is the group that benefits from the narrative that Asian foreigners are buying up the local estate.

The really affluent immigrant groups aren't buying multiple properties, they already have a great deal of income, and their properties are well outside most of what HN can afford and do not impact the condo market which is the most competitive, accessible and volatile.

They already taxed and stopped foreign buyers but the home prices in Vancouver keep going up as sales amongst local Canadians make up most of the volume.

Now they announce this virtue signaling to appease the other Canadians who can't afford homes but the problem will not change.

In fact, without outside capital constantly coming in, the Vancouver real estate market is not sustainable. It literally is just another game of musical chairs, it is the news of some Chinese communist elite member buying a mansion in West Vancouver that gets local Canadians eager to own properties.

I'm no stranger to the anti-asian sentiments in Vancouver, just head over to r/vancouver to see people regularly blame Asians for the fact that they can't afford to live there. In fact in the 80s, they blamed Japanese, 90s they blamed Hong Kongers, 2000s they blame Taiwan, Mainlanders.

It's really disgusting to see the blatant racism against one group that is normalized but not for others. It literally is the same attitude that people with anti-semitic views constantly deride Jews of their financial success that largely came out of merit.

> They already taxed and stopped foreign buyers but the home prices in Vancouver keep going up as sales amongst local Canadians make up most of the volume.

These were always easy to work around: how many Chinese students come to Canada to study and just happen to have a few million dollars to spend on a house? The new proposal is also easy to work around, the Canadian government isn't serious about solving the speculation problem.

> In fact, without outside capital constantly coming in, the Vancouver real estate market is not sustainable. It literally is just another game of musical chairs, it is the news of some Chinese communist elite member buying a mansion in West Vancouver that gets local Canadians eager to own properties.

Perhaps. We already went through this in the 80s with the Japanese, and after the Japanese real estate bubble burst, Vancouver real estate was depressed for almost a decade (I remember the signs for condos starting at $100k in 1997! And no one was blaming the Hong Kongese for that at the time). China is just Japan 2.0 in this regard: after the Chinese property bubble bursts, Vancouver real estate will be heavily effected.

> Perhaps. We already went through this in the 80s with the Japanese, and after the Japanese real estate bubble burst, Vancouver real estate was depressed for almost a decade (I remember the signs for condos starting at $100k in 1997! And no one was blaming the Hong Kongese for that at the time). China is just Japan 2.0 in this regard: after the Chinese property bubble bursts, Vancouver real estate will be heavily effected.

Now this is why I love HN, its to see another fisherman!

I remember the 90s were depressing time for Vancouver. The economy was in complete slump and NDP took the fall for that.

Now the Chinese real estate market is incomplete shambles, people are in complete denial about that the Vancouver real estate market lags behind. Already the bubble has started to burst in Montreal, which I remember were the last to join the party!

> Now the Chinese real estate market is incomplete shambles

Chinese real estate prices are still pretty high. The government keeps things from bursting by controlling the real estate agents and their companies (owned mostly by red families, they just taper off on sales volume instead of letting prices fall). We will see how long they can keep juggling that. Which is why rich Chinese like to invest in western property markets in the first place: there is more liquidity in Vancouver and Toronto vs. Shanghai or Beijing.

BTW, I'm not from Vancouver, I just visited a lot in the 90s (when I was going to school in Seattle).

the Chinese communist party elites send money abroad is to put it out of reach. Very tough for the CCP to auction off your property in Canada or United States.

For the Japanese it was cheap debt that exported property inflation which led to an immediate drop in liquidity however currently there is cheap debt locally and its the locals participating in the real estate speculation.

the actual foreign ownership is like less than 5% in Vancouver yet the media and establishment constantly loves to shift attention away from REIT and institutional money, rich Canadians and against scapegoat groups.

unlike the melting pot system you have in America, Canadians fall into ethnic tribalism, safety in similarity. There's an idea that everyone can be Canadian/American but its implicit understanding that it is false. Canadians have this sort of superiority complex and see themselves holier than thou, it is far more broken than America in some ways and just in my personal interactions, Americans by large, were far more "Canadian" than real Canadians.

The country honestly feels very much broken and the more dystopian and divided it becomes, the more it will push people on the fringes away to isolation. Ethnic enclaves aren't by choice, they are a byproduct of an unwelcoming and implicitly hostile incumbent establishment.

> the actual foreign ownership is like less than 5% in Vancouver

It is probably much higher than that, 5% is just what ownership can clearly be traced to a non-resident foreign owner. But you have a lot of property owned by Chinese students. The government is really conservative when they measure these numbers. Heck, I think the empty Seattle townhome next to mine, which I know is owned by an old retired couple in Beijing (the daughter told us as much before she left), is not counted as foreign owned even though it for all practical purposes is (and was bought with money from China...but then again, I bought my townhome largely with money I earned in Beijing as well).

I'm sure plenty of resident Chinese and Indians own property in Vancouver also (since there are so many of them), but I wouldn't count those as foreign owners either. At that point, it is mostly Canadian money chasing after Canadian assets, rather than Chinese or Indian money. Here in Seattle, it is rich techies driving the market, and many of those just happen to be Chinese or Indian (citizens, permanent residents, and H1s). That is a different problem (rich techies like us bidding up the market, not that many techies are Chinese and Indian).

>Now this is why I love HN, its to see another fisherman!

Is "fisherman" supposed to be a Canadian expression?

Lots of bigots have latched onto Vancouver housing issues as a way to further their anti-immigration views. It's gross.

This doesn't mean though that there haven't been real issues with the Vancouver market that involve foreign wealth.

Prior to the foreign buyers tax we were seeing condo developers explicitly opening up sales offices in foreign cities, explicitly marketing their condos as pied-a-terres. I understand why people didn't like that. That sort of thing really doesn't help the local buyer or renter.

I'm happy to see that while Canadian politicians have brought in these rules to deal with some distortions of the real estate market from foreign wealth, we really haven't our politicians embrace the bigoted anti-immigrant rhetoric around this topic of the sort that you occasionally see on twitter and reddit.

"foreigners" make up 50% of Canadas largest cities - where all the money is. The richest of the world can afford to move there but farmboy from Peterborough is SOL if he ever wants to make real money. Im fine with putting your own citizens interests before the rest of the world.

Even if those “citizens” are massively capitalized corps seeking returns on their investments? Who cares if they are domestic or foreign (and if foreign becomes difficult - they’ll just open a subsidiary).

I don’t really know whether you have read the rest of what I wrote or just got triggered by me seemingly defending “foreigners” and hit the Reply button.

I don’t mean to single you out specifically, there other posts that seem oddly similar.

Anyway, I think there’s a big distinction between immigrants (who cease to be immigrants at some point, how many years does it take in your opinion by the way? Who is more worthy of being helped to buy a home - a immigrant who came to the country 30 years ago, or a natural-born 25 year-old citizen?… but I digress.) and investment real estate that requires an intervention.

Let’s say we put a huge tax on all real estate that isn’t a primary residence, I am all for making it super unprofitable to hold so that rents cannot cover the expense - to force all these REITs having to fire-sale their holdings to people who want to live in them.

I refuse to get into an argument that I know will turn out to be emotional so I'm just going to skip to the last point.

>Let’s say we put a huge tax on all real estate that isn’t a primary residence

Because cottages are a traditional part of life here and real estate is one of the only ways to make real money for someone with some capital in the middle class.

I am not sure what you are afraid of since every reply seems to narrow the gap in our differences of opinion.

At what point cottages cease to be “way to make real money with some capital in the middle class” and we firmly enter the territory of “make a buck while fuck everyone else”? One or two is probably the former. 80,000 properties we all probably agree is the latter.

There was a two year moratorium announced today, but there are several exemptions. Permanent residents, refugees, some international students on the path to PR, and people here on work permits are all exempt.

> I feel like it’s almost an attempt to appease citizens by blaming the issue on “foreigners” (always a move that is popular with politicians)

Yeah the Right loves to blame poor foreigners while the Left prefers to blame rich foreigners but at the end of the day they at least agree that it is never the voters themselves who are to blame.

It's low interest rates to blame

Which should’ve helped a whole bunch of hard-working regular people to buy their first-time homes, but that is not what is happening it seems?

> Which should’ve helped a whole bunch of hard-working regular people to buy their first-time homes, but that is not what is happening it seems?

This is false if you think about it.

What drives the price of a house is what people can pay on their monthly payments.

As rates go down prices go up as people can afford to pay more.

Unfortunately for home buyers this means the downpayment goes up. What you end up with is a bunch of first time home buyers who can in theory afford the mortgage payments but can't build up the $200,000 nest egg required as a 20% downpayment on a $1,000,000 home.

When rates go back up home prices will drop and so will the size of the downpayment required, even though the person will pay about the same monthly on their mortgage.

Lower rate help those with existing homes and therefor existing equity more than those without homes.

It would have been true if the supply side of the market was working. Low interest rates have increased demand but the market has not been apply to increase the number of available homes to meet the demand, hence existing properties have increased in price.

Its zoning and nimbyism.

It’s treating basic human needs as financial instruments.

How does your theory explain the difference in housing prices between San Francisco and Lubbock?

The "theory" relates to increase over time for a single location, not differences between 2 locations at a single point in time. But to stick to your example, investors are more likely to flock to a location with greater returns. At the same time, Lubbock hasn't exactly remained stagnant.

https://learn.roofstock.com/blog/lubbock-real-estate-market

Why are you so sure the outsized returns don't have anything to do with zoning?

Plenty of basic human needs are financialized - crops and water and electricity - and they don't have any problems.

Why is financializing land and real estate a cause for the problem?

I argue it's not financializing, but the lack of allowance for production of more, when the price signals a demand for more.

When crop prices are high, farmers grow more, or make use of more land to grow. Ditto with electricity or water. Why isn't more land opened up for development, when price of real estate is high?

Nah, it’s the animal sprits

Interest rates just went over 5% so I guess we'll test this hypothesis soon?

It's a lack of supply caused by costly and overzealous environmental assessments which strangle the process of land development in Canada, particularly Ontario.

If you want a convenient scapegoat, blame the McGuinty government of the early 2000s. When the 2005 Greenbelt Act was passed, developers across the country warned of a housing crisis in the future due to the effect the bill would have on the price and timelines for new construction. 17 years later we'd prefer to blame China or NIMBYs, but the reality is Canadians, and especially Ontarians, did this to themselves when they allowed politicians and environmentalists to ignore the concerns of land developers and engineers.

Weird, I know the left likes to blame the rich, but I’ve never seen specifically rich foreigners.

Also for real how can the voters (ie the average citizen) be the problem? The average citizen has no money and no political or regulatory power. The average citizen just exists in a system they have no control over and responds to incentives. Hoping that en mass people won’t do that is like politely asking a river to move.

This is definitely a thing in Vancouver: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/05/726531803/vancouver-has-been-...

This is refreshing to see a left wing media writing on China. After COVID I pretty much lost trust in left wing media when it comes to China.

Attacking rich foreigners for not paying enough <insert tax or contribution> to their adopted homes is fairly common throughout the world, no? America does make it harder to avoid paying tax with a system that taxes income regardless of which country you earned it in, but most of the rest of the world does not work this way.

To use the UK as an example, attacking rich foreigners for their "non-domiciled" tax status is extremely common. This is where you live in the UK, but for tax purposes hide your wealth in another system with lower tax rates, effectively paying no income taxes at all in the UK. Variations of this concept exist throughout the world in many countries and routinely draw politically ire.

Just this week: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-61017993

Wealth coupled with a collection of passports often creates far more opportunities to avoid tax than being stuck under the rules of one single State, rightly or wrongly.

But at least in the USA, the left treats the rich pretty uniformly (no distinction is made between rich born-here citizen, rich citizen immigrant, or rich foreigner). Many don't even know Elon Musk was born in South Africa, nor do they really care.

Tax evasion is seen as a moral problem no matter how you accomplish (so hiding it with your other citizenship is just as bad as using a shell company).

>Tax evasion is seen as a moral problem no matter how you accomplish (so hiding it with your other citizenship is just as bad as using a shell company).

Tax evasion is a legal term, not a moral one. Tax evasion isn't a problem in USA given that it has the highest compliance rate in the world. Jurisdictional arbitrage is a freedom and should be protected as such.

People were being taxed 90% income tax when this shift happened in the 70s.

it is a good observation, I think you mean most immigrants are not rich. If you didn't mean immigrants, immigrants are not rich until 10+ years later. Definitely don't spend like the rich. But they are willing to commit years to buy into real-estate.

> The foreign-buyer ban won’t apply to students, foreign workers or foreign citizens who are permanent residents of Canada, the person said.

The article says some of those foreigners will be exempt. I will say this, the country needs the immigrants' money (ie spend in that country, on top of taxes paid)

Well for housing in particular, average voters are the ones supporting restrictive zoning and stalling new housing.

While I agree that getting people to change their mind is pretty hopeless, I dislike the framing that they are just "responding to incentives" and therefore not only off the hook for the shitty outcomes of their choices, but also not responsible for the choices themselves.

There are many likely reasons for the explosion in housing prices - but we can't pretend that immigration isn't one of them. A solution will likely need to be multi-factored, but reducing demand by reducing immigration will probably have to be part of that solution. To ignore that is to limit how effective your measures in reducing the cost of housing can be.

Or we could have seen this coming a mile away and built more houses and reduced the idiocy of city zoning.

But yeah it’s the immigrants fault. Lets reduce immigration while we are facing a labor shortage.

Well, it's not the immigrants' fault - it's the government's fault. At the end of the day, this confluence of circumstances is its responsibility. The combination of low interest rates, no expansive public transport projects, no action on money-laundering, hurdles in supply (as you mentioned) - and yes, expansive immigration policies (Canada had the highest population growth in the G7, mostly due to immigration [0]).

The truth is, this problem has been growing for many years and public servants have allowed the issue to grow beyond any control (and actually profiting off it in some cases). Now, the rest of the population will suffer and it's become a hard problem to solve.

Finally, yes we have a labor shortage - but it may actually be a labor correction. Wages have been stagnant for years and inflation is running wild. Wages need to rise to catch up - artificially depressing wages with immigration is a recipe for disaster.

[0] https://www.cicnews.com/2022/02/canada-fastest-growing-count...

Here where I live, the people who show up at hearings to stop homes from being built are all wealthy-ish local people. Not immigrants, not some faceless government, not BlackRock, but our neighbors.

The point is that this is only one part of the problem. "Wealthy-ish local people" protesting a condo development is not enough to explain this absolute explosion in home prices.

The government may be faceless, but there are lots of things that could have been done - including more "development-friendly" practices. However, there's always a cost - do you sacrifice environmental protections? Democratic government principles?

You can't just blame whatever out-group you dislike at the moment. If those neighbors you described vanished as of 5 years ago, the prices of houses would have risen just the same.

The reason that I blame government is because they explicitly had a responsibility to protect society from this. Officials have either neglected or outright contravened this responsibility.

In the United States, by and large, zoning regulations are local, so they're set at the city level. Which makes it quite difficult to get rid of bad land use regulations that cause all kinds of problems. At a certain point, in a place like, say, Boulder, Colorado, it turns into a vicious circle: the only people who can afford to live there are wealthy boomer NIMBY types who will vote down anything to help housing affordability. For instance in that city it's illegal for more than 3 unrelated people to live in the same home. Local activists tried to get it overturned via an initiative, and it was voted down.

The US is a bit of a different animal (although it's comparable to Canada, which is what the original article discusses). To my understanding, there are no equivalent "town halls" that can block development - although it does seem to vary by province and municipality.

Also, immigrants to Canada usually move to one of its three main metro areas - Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, which, coincidentally, have also seen the highest amount of housing increases.

Other places, like Calgary or Winnipeg, have not had housing explode in the same way (although prices have risen in smaller amounts there as well).

Keep in mind, the original article is focusing on Canadian housing, which, while complex, may be even simpler than the American model.

I have a close family member who works in municipal planning, and it's exactly what you describe.

Wealthy-ish, semiretired older local people, or non-locals with vacation property who do everything they can to shut down any kind of housing project. Their methods include suing the town at great expense to the taxpayers and floating their own and sympathetic friends into town council.

It's extremely frustrating when a really well designed development that takes a year and millions to craft can get shut down in a single meeting by a very loud, adamant and group of busybodies.

> Their methods include suing the town at great expense to the taxpayers and floating their own and sympathetic friends into town council.

Those very same people are the taxpayers. They have and should have the right to represent their interests in a court of law. If the town ends up being a victim of it, so be it.

Actually funny you should mention that because one of them actually is not a taxpayer in the municipality that she sued (and lost). So no, they are not all taxpayers, but some are, it is true.

Yes, of course they have this right, I don't dispute that. But when a single case like this eats up literally 10% of a small town's yearly budget, and the same small group of people repeatedly behave in this way, I also have the right to call them assholes.

The level of immigration is over 1%. Pretending people are just blaming foreigners misses the reality.

What do you mean by the level of immigration is over 1%? (Genuine question) and why does that matter?

Adding 500,000 new people a year where the majority settle in one or two cities and not building housing matters. Blaming the lack of housing on foreign buyers is misleading.

>> I feel like it’s almost an attempt to appease citizens by blaming the issue on “foreigners” (always a move that is popular with politicians)

> Yeah the Right loves to blame poor foreigners while the Left prefers to blame rich foreigners but at the end of the day they at least agree that it is never the voters themselves who are to blame.

Generally speaking I think you're mostly correct, but there are exceptions, and nuances.

I am one of the odd outliers who believes that much of the blame lies with voters, but at the same time it is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. It's ~true that voters "should" "vote for better politicians", but consider:

- what if the particular flavour of democracy that we practice does not make this possible?

- what if the public's ability to make optimal decisions is a function of the quality of education they received, which is largely a consequence of government policy (and other things, like culture)?

Take HN for example: observe how many comments there are in this subthread (or the overall thread) asserting that "The problem is X", as if the causality behind the situation is due to a single variable. Might this error be to some degree (perhaps even a large degree) a consequence of causality (philosophy, epistemology, logic, etc) not being first class subjects in school (and culture/society), on par with science, math, and language?

And if one's answer to this question is something along the lines of "Oh, they didn't mean that literally, they were just speaking loosely, or expressing their opinion, etc", then I ask: why is it that we have ~culturally normalized (if not worse) speaking (and I would say: thinking) so inaccurately and imprecisely about so many matters that are extremely important, be it housing prices, immigration, war, politics, you name it? Might it be possible that we (~everyone) are "doing it wrong", at massive scale?

If I was forced to nominate a single variable that lies behind not just this problem, but perhaps ~all problems (mostly excluding natural disasters), it would be the inability of the population of this planet to think and speak/listen/conceptualize/understand at a level that is adequate to rise above the local optima we find ourselves stuck in (note: there's substantial unaddressed complexity here: some things are improving on a relative basis, etc - I am speaking in an absolute sense, which includes that which is beyond our current knowledge, or ability to know).

We can't even get people to consistently pass basic mathematics at a college 101 level, what you're asking is impossible. There is fundamentally a culture of anti-intellectualism in many American subcultures and the left tries to paper over it by shouting about racism and the right straight up supports it.

What of the errors in this comment section? Could the people here do no better? When the topic of discussion is related to computing, rarely do I see this many errors - assuming this observation is correct, is that interesting?

I feel like it’s almost an attempt to appease citizens by blaming the issue on “foreigners” (always a move that is popular with politicians) to redirect attention from the much more likely cause - massive investments made by hedge funds, private capital, REITs which does not appear to be addressed at all?

Sorry friend, but you're wrong. First, the issue of foreign ownership in the real estate market has already been studied. So, they have evidence supporting the moratorium. And second, this budget also announced that they are going to investigate the role of hedge funds, private capital, REITs, etc. Early actions could be announced before the end of the year.

You need to provide evidence for this assertion. I've never seen any kind of analysis of this problem produce a clear signal that supports the idea that foreign ownership is a primary factor.

> I don’t know the specifics on Canadian real estate market and the specifics of the problems there, but based on my understanding of the problems facing your neighbors to the south - I feel like it’s almost an attempt to appease citizens by blaming the issue on “foreigners” (always a move that is popular with politicians) to redirect attention from the much more likely cause - massive investments made by hedge funds, private capital, REITs which does not appear to be addressed at all?

Can you not do this and also seek to identify hedge funds, private capital, REITs, and other entities which may be more difficult to regulate at a later time? Maybe this first piece of legislation is the quick win?

Are you saying that foreigners who do not reside at all in Canada should be able to buy a primary home in Canada? Because that's what this bill is preventing. If you're a "foreigner" it's not relevant so long as you're actually a resident of Canada.

> Can you not do this and also seek to identify hedge funds, private capital, REITs, and other entities which may be more difficult to regulate at a later time? Maybe this first piece of legislation is the quick win?

You can, and I specifically pointed out that I generally agree with what is being proposed, and certainly hope that it isn’t an attempt at diversion by throwing out the usual scapegoat.

Action for home affordability needs to be taken, but I’m always weary of simply blaming foreigners, especially in Vancouver where there was always (since the 1800s) a lot of ethnically Chinese people. Way too many people use “foreigners” as a dog whistle term for “Chinese” and include Chinese Canadian ownership but exclude American foreign ownership (which is quite high if I remember correctly). I recall one controversial article from about 5 years ago that investigated “foreign ownership” by checking records for Chinese-sounding names since at the time citizenship wasn’t publicly available in real estate records. Clearly the wrong way to check, given that there are hundreds of thousands of ethnically Chinese Canadian people in the Vancouver area.

> I feel like it’s almost an attempt to appease citizens by blaming the issue on “foreigners”

As a Canadian, I agree with this.

Part of the problem is that the federal govt doesn't have jurisdiction over the actually issues causing the problem. I _think_ the provinces own it but delegate it to the cities. But for some reason, this isn't an issue in those elections. BC had an election less than a year ago and housing wasn't an issue outside of Reddit. And BC has the second worse housing market in the country (Vancouver).

EDIT: Actually, that BC election was a year and a half ago. I even looked that up before posting and got it wrong. The covid time warp strikes again.

I live in Canada. In Canada foreign investment is a massive problem. This is NOT the only problem. But it is a big part of the problem.

And arguably housing crisis in Canada started with foreign investment. Now domestic players and instituitional investors are also involved in housing market. Together there are enough parties involved not to let housing prices go down.

The problem with “capital” vs “foreign individuals looking to buy a home” in my mind - is that capital will find a way to camouflage as domestic capital if foreign capital is no longer allowed. It will move the money, register a subsidiary etc and buy a billion worth of housing while we are celebrating that a foreign family couldn’t buy a vacation home.

I am sure banning that wealthy family from China will do “something” to help alleviate the crisis, but I think putting restrictions on capital being used to buy up homes that aren’t primary-residence should be a priority and will have much larger effect.

And to be clear - as it stands with the situation in real estate being what it is right now, I am in favor of massive taxes on real estate investments that are to be used to finance affordable housing to be made available exclusively to first-time buyers and primary residents.

Did you know only 3% of Toronto properties are foreign owned. Are you sure it's a real problem or media invented cause?

I mean it's a few percent in some cities. Is it a factor? Sure. Is the fact that housing debt is higher than it's ever been for Canadians themselves more important? Yes.

I hear about people pulling out equity in the form of HELOC's to put a downpayment on another home. That's a pretty big chunk of Canadian "investors". And that should scare the shit out of anyone considering that was a major problem in 2008 in the US. People vastly over-leveraging themselves under the assumption that housing only goes up.

Apparently you don't understand economics. Without the massive investments, housing will be even more expensive.

Others who have replied offered their point of view. Some agreed, some disagreed. You, though, shouldn’t have even bothered. Next time hit that downvote button and move on.

Your this reply is even worse, don’t you see it?

You nailed it. You don't need to be in the Canadian real estate to realize that the most people coming to open houses are in fact local Canadians (also from other provinces) looking to move to the warmest part of the country or add another property or two to their portfolio.

The landlords that run the real estate holdings companies are mostly White. They buy up the properties, apartments, condos when they are cheap with the sole purpose of renting them out. Guess who influences local media and politicians. It's not some rich Chinese communist fu er dai they could care less.

The fact is that Canada isn't the all shining socialist paradise that outsiders make out to be. In fact places like Vancouver almost gets a pass when race issues are mentioned because its automatically chalked up as a "social liberal progressive city" compared to other American cities that often get thrown into the "shithole conservative counties"

In Canada the landlords are of many colours. Many are Jewish.. would you hold that against them because they are white?

Why are you mentioning Jewish community here?

Because if you filter for only colour you miss diversity.

Lots of us are indigenous and Latino but often mistaken for white by people who judge race based on skin color.

I wouldn’t call it a paradise but it’s definitely communist

> massive investments made by hedge funds, private capital, REITs which does not appear to be addressed at all?

If corporations buying houses was actually affecting the purchase market prices, then we'd see an equal effect on rental prices going down. A corporation can't live in a house, so they'd be renting it out. If these evvvill corporations were keeping houses vacant just to screw over regular hard working folks, resulting in no effect on the rental market prices, then we'd see it in the vacancy stats. But that's never actually mentioned by housing conspiracy theorists because the vacancy stats show that the areas with highest prices have extremely low vacancy rates, because demand for housing is so much higher than supply, because not enough housing has been built.

This is a total and complete non sequitur. No reason rental prices would go down. I just looked at materials of one such company touting 50% increases.

In Toronto alone ~40% of new homes being built are being scooped up by investors that obviously have more cash on hand to pay above asking price. With interest rates so low and demand so high, why would they not be driving up the price? It works in their favor.

Given that pretty much everybody in Toronto rents because nobody can afford to buy, it's pretty circular. If they weren't buying to rent them out, then the people who can't afford to buy would have nothing to rent.

How on earth would higher home sale prices by corporations bidding housing up push rent down? It has the exact opposite effect, rents go up if a property costs more..

Seriously? What's the mechanism of this magical connection? Rental prices go up if there is more demand in the rental market.

Landlords don’t buy properties to rent at a loss. Before they buy they make sure they will be able to charge the rent they need to cover costs. Or at least I do.

Exactly. Corporations are buying houses because rents are high. Rents are not high because corporations are buying houses.

Rents are high because there are not enough houses on the rental market, because not enough houses are built.

You talk about supply and demand in your comments, and then somehow the idea that corporations controlling the supply lets them manipulate and ignore demand just goes over your head. Strange.

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