[misher]

Originally Posted by whatnext

From today's Globe & Mail: former Rize Alliance employee and Oxford Graduate student's study shows Foreign Buyers Tax has helped affordbaility:

Oxford academic’s research suggests Vancouver’s foreign-buyers tax has been a boon to affordability

..he 28-year-old property developer says the city was being hollowed out, largely owing to foreign investment. So in the spring of 2015, he moved to London for a job with the region’s transit system and began his graduate thesis at the University of Oxford on Vancouver’s foreign-buyers tax to determine the impact it had on improving affordability. According to his research findings, the tax that was introduced in August, 2016, resulted in an immediate improvement in housing affordability in Metro Vancouver. He says he thinks he is the first academic to use empirical evidence to prove the tax achieved better affordability for local income earners, albeit only temporarily. And as someone who’d like to return to Vancouver one day, he’s arguing for policy makers to do more to deter foreign investment...

...Mr. Wilson says we are seeing long-term effects of the tax, but he says the tax itself is too low, even at 20 per cent, to have enough of an impact.

“The tax did have a significant impact, but it was short-lived and temporary, meaning the rate of taxation may not be high enough to dissuade foreign investment on a long-term basis to a sufficient degree.

...Using hedonic regression analysis, Mr. Wilson says he was able to measure the direct impact of the tax on housing affordability. He didn’t use the standard affordability ratio of median income versus median home price, but instead considered how well a median household could service a typical mortgage payment while maintaining a basic standard of living. He found that the ability for the median income household to cover the cost of a mortgage had been reduced by nearly 50 per cent between 2012 and 2016. When the foreign-buyers tax was introduced for Metro Vancouver in August, 2016, this trend reversed and affordability improved by 38 per cent. However, the impact was short-lived, and after six months, affordability once again began to worsen.Mr. Wilson says this proved that demand-side measures must be paired with supply-side measures if the crisis is to be fully addressed.

“This suggests that significantly higher taxation rates, or more likely, outright restrictions on foreign ownership, must be applied to deal effectively with the influence of foreign capital in Vancouver’s housing market,”...

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-est...gests-vancouvers-foreign-buyers-tax-has/

If foreign purchases were still above 5% not under 1% as they've all gone to Montreal I'd agree. The less than 1% who are desperate enough to pay that 20% tax are not a problem. If anything we should be giving them medals as thanks for donating to our province.