Posted May 17, 2024, 6:33 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: Vancouver
Posts: 22,460
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Quote:
Originally Posted by YOWetal
Should we be against exports as they dump money into Canadian real estate ? This kind of logic doesn't make sense. It's the fake student uber workers who are causing a housing shortage. Rich chinese buying West Vancouver housing renovating and paying taxes is almost all positive for our economy.
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Here's a good summary on why it was not a good situation for Vancouver. Assuming the woke cabal doesn't find Mother Jones to be some xenophobic "rage farming" journal. 
It is a long but very well-written and researched article and should be a must-read for everyone interested in urban affairs.
POLITICS
MAY/JUNE 2017 ISSUE
Is Your City Being Sold Off to Global Elites?
Visas for sale, skyrocketing housing prices, miles of condos.
PAUL ROBERTS
“See the little pair of shoes?” Kerry Starchuk brings her minivan to a halt before a sprawling manse with antebellum columns and a cast-iron fence and points to the front door. Sure enough, next to the welcome mat sits a solitary pair of clogs. Realtors do that, Starchuk tells me, “to make it look like someone is living there.” But a quick survey of the property spoils the ruse. The blinds are drawn. The lawn is overgrown and the capacious circular driveway is empty. Still, Starchuk credits the effort. “Some of the houses, you drive by and they haven’t even picked up their mail.”
It’s midmorning on a Saturday in Richmond, a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia, and this is maybe the 20th example we’ve seen of what locals call the “empty-house syndrome“—homes purchased by foreign nationals, many of them wealthy Chinese, and left to sit vacant. Some will eventually have occupants; Vancouver is a top destination for well-heeled emigrants. But often, the new owners treat the houses as little more than vehicles for spiriting capital out of China....
....But for many longtime residents, Vancouver’s evolving role as a giant safety deposit box for China’s elite has been profoundly destabilizing. Thanks in part to foreign capital, home prices here have more than doubled since 2006. In one 12-month period (mid-2015 to mid-2016), the median price for a single-family house jumped nearly 40 percent, to $1.17 million, making Vancouver almost as expensive as San Francisco, but with a job market that is far less varied and robust....
....Vancouver’s wounds may have been self-inflicted. But this won’t be the last urban housing market blown up by the trillions of dollars now pouring out of emerging market economies. Given the attractiveness of urban real estate to foreign investors—and the temptation that outside capital poses for cash-strapped cities—the Vancouver debacle should be a required case study for urban politicians, activists, and citizens everywhere....
....The only problem is that a midsize housing market like Vancouver’s was unprepared for so much new capital. As Chinese money poured in, housing prices quickly outpaced local incomes, which remained among the lowest of any major Canadian metro area. Instead of building a gleaming new economy of technology and entrepreneurship, Vancouver found itself with a financialized economy, whose fastest-growing sectors were real estate, home construction, mortgage lending, and, eventually, speculation—and not just by foreigners. Locals, too, were now investing in the hot housing market.....
....It would be easy for other cities watching Vancouver to misread the crisis as somehow unique and unrepeatable—a perfect storm of exceptional political and historical factors. But if current trends continue, over the next decade the 1 percenters of emerging economies will continue to move trillions of dollars overseas. And while that capital will flow into every conceivable asset—from oil companies to vineyards to art—real estate will be a priority. ....(bold mine)
https://www.motherjones.com/politics...reign-capital/
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