Why Canada's ban on foreign buyers hasn't made homes more affordable
Why Canada's ban on foreign buyers hasn't made homes more affordable
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The reason why is because foreign home ownership has never been the core of the issue. This law was a distraction from the reality that Canadians are plenty willing, and more likely, to be the one exploiting you.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/46-28-0001/2023001/article/00001-eng.htm
In Nova Scotia, more than 1 in 20 houses is used as an investment by a person living outside the province or the country
[...]
In-province investors owned, as investment properties, between 8.7% of the houses in New Brunswick and 12.4% in Nova Scotia, and, as such, they owned more houses used as an investment than all the other types of investors combined.
As always, the core of the issue is that home ownership is treated as a commodity. Sort of a fundamental reality of putting a thing into a competitive market is that you're going to have winners and losers. And losers in the housing market leads to, you know, homelessness among many other social ills.
I tried to point this out on Reddit and Lemmy so many times and usually got downvoted. People want to believe there's some nefarious boogeyman buying up houses and keeping them vacant, but the reality is that virtually all homes in Canada have occupants. We just don't have nearly enough housing for the population.
Edit: it's still happening. In the other thread on this board about this article, people are saying "it's not the foreign buyers we should tax, it's the corporate buyers". People will do all sorts of mental gymnastics to avoid considering the possibility that we need to densify our housing.
We need to change the ways we build our cities. The suburban experiment has failed and we need to address that. Commiting nearly every scrap of residential zoning for exclusively single family homes has had massive impacts on the urban fabric of our cities, the scarcity of housing, and the dependance on cars.
We don't need to eliminate all single family homes, but we do need to make it possible to build multi-residences and mixed use areas. We also need to address how we tax residential properties because as it stands, single family zoning is often subsidized by the denser areas of the city.
but the reality is that virtually all homes in Canada have occupants.
Vancouver and Toronto are currently sitting about 7% and 7.4% homes that are empty or not for usual residents. That's a fucking massive number, imo.
Okay and you could have 50% more homes available if 20% of the SFH in a city was converted into apartments. 7% is nothing if we actually would densify what we build rather than just sprawling suburbs.
Sure, but let's not pretend it's not an issue.
"empty or not for usual residents." is a useless metric. Student houses are considered "empty" if the the students have a family home to return to and haven't updated their mailing address.
Wrong. It states directly in the article that students and foreign workers are not included in that metric.
The usual residence of students is that of their parents, if they return to live with their parents during the year even if they live elsewhere while attending school or working at a summer job.
From Stats Canada.
Students are usual residents of Canada, they're not usual residents of the place they stay in while studying in school.
Students and workers from other countries with study and work permits are considered usual residents, according to StatsCan.
Directly quoted from the source I posted.
That's why I clarified how you misinterpreted that sentence, and gave you a source from Stats Canada. I also worked the last census in KW, where there's a large student population, so it was drilled into our heads students only count if they live in that house year round (and preferable changed the address on their ID).
Residential property shouldn't be an investment, but we can make great strides if we ban corporate and foreign ownership (NO exceptions this time)
It's the kind of thing that might occur if people don't have pensions and need to secure some sort of income that would sustain them when they retire. 🫠 Perhaps in addition to tackling the lack of density, number of non-market units, etc. we should also look at the industry pushing people to create their own pensions.