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
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.
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.
Of course it didn't.
Foreign ownership and immigration were always just distractions.
They sound good, seem to make sense, and the people they are meant to mislead will never look deeper than that.
It took less than 10 minutes on Google to determine that neither of these were significant factors.
Sort of. The thing is - they are factors, just the small low hanging fruit; more specifically it's the easiest to attack from a political stand point: Foreign owners don't vote in Canada.
The reality is - we need to pull out the stops at this point. Go after Foreign ownership, corporate ownership. Go after Vacant properties through taxes, and go after the short term rental market.
Foreign ownership might be say a few percent, short term rentals might be a few percent. But you couple 3-4 small sources and suddenly you are freeing up some 5-10% of housing and putting it back on the long term rental market or they are being sold on the open market... to people who want a home.
Except not really. Freeing up less then 5% and then stopping doesn't actually help anything.
The bunch that hate immigrants are happy, and honestly that seems to be about 30% of the population. And that's enough to elect a government, so that's as far as that will ever go.
It's silly to point to the data on % of buys from foreign buyers because foreign buyers don't buy as foreign buyers, they buy through companies or children that they sent here as a student.
It's a quick hot take that many I know like to spout off without any effort to look into things. They aren't interested in looking any further into it unfortunately. Much like reading in school, they are done with that phase of their lives.
I think if they did, they would realize the major thrust of immigration are students to support universities higher tuitions and a continual new workforce for low wage jobs that others aren't going to work.
There is the added bonus of these people needing rental housing but it's not the main thrust of the issues which are too much for many to bother looking into.
When you have politicians like Squinty McProudBoy (pierre poilievre) who own multiple rental properties and who vote against Canadians at every turn what can you expect?
Lets see...massive inflation, interest rates and a million new canadians.