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hello_popppeton Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

The people writing the laws are all about the scarcity, and they aren’t on HN and you can’t take any shots at them or tell them to f*ck off. They’ve gotten this far by diligently min maxing and if you think they are going to have a change of heart, you’re way off base.

hello_popppeton Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

That’s not going to happen. We have had this discussion on HN for a decade now. People are misled by “it’s simple, solve for X.”

hello_popppeton Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

We all know that on an intuitive level, housing can never be affordable again in the West. At least in the areas that are currently out of reach for most people. The outlands, maybe, remain inhabitable but far removed from major cities. There’s no policy out there that will, by the time you wake up tomorrow, bridge the twenty-fold gap between what majority of people in the country make and what an apartment (never mind a house) costs.

This isn’t a matter of supply and demand, of investors taking 80% of all new houses, of foreigners laundering money, or of NIMBYs. These are all red herrings. These are all secondary effects of a bigger problem. These are all ways to ignore the real problem.

No amount of policy will slash house prices in Toronto by half, and no policy will double your income to match the increasing prices.

I suggest you stop looking for policies, because by the time any of them take effect and reverb through society, long enough time would have passed that you’d spend your whole life renting and paying off someone else’s mortgage anyway.

Now ask yourself if that’s the future you want, and act accordingly.

hello_popppeton Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

I posted this earlier - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30945227. And no, it’s not supposed to be a tongue in cheek.

First of all, this “ban” is for 2 years. Secondly, majority of the homes bought, as in the stark-fucking-majority, are by investment firms. This ban doesn’t apply to them.

This is just another reshuffling of money that’s going to be pocketed by the government cronies. What are they going to spend $10B on? They aren’t the ones building houses and residencies, that’s for sure.

Other commenters in here are spot on. First they tried to swindle us by saying oh no no it’s not the foreigners, you’re just being racist and xenophobic. Now fucking what.