Quote:
Originally Posted by Changing City
I'm not sure that (as seems to be the case so often these days) references to "the Nazi propaganda machine which blamed the Jews for the bad economy" has very much, if anything, to do with the soon to be decided civic election. In fact municipal governments can't do much about prices of housing - even the foreign buyers tax was provincial legislation.
If you are going to post charts, at least post up to date charts. The tax was introduced in July 2016. While foreign buyers are only one factor affecting the price of residential property in Greater Vancouver, with mortgage rates and stress testing of mortgages playing, I would argue, a greater role, you can't argue with the fact that prices rose consistently until July 2016, and they've plateaued from there until they started to fall consistently over the past 4 months.
[source; CTV News]
As another news piece noted "A chart produced by BMO chief economist Douglas Porter in January 2017, showed that Greater Vancouver home prices were yanked down compared to other cities across Canada following the introduction of the tax.
At that time, Vancouver was the only region with a foreign buyers’ tax. The measure didn’t apply in Victoria, and a tax hadn’t yet been introduced in Toronto.
Prices just kept climbing in those cities." [source: Global TV] |
Got off topic a bit, was mostly getting pissed at people blaming things that aren’t based on facts. You make some good points. I wouldn’t say the tax was a bad idea just that 15-20% is the same as banning foreign investment so it’s so crazy that people still want to ban it instead of the huge tax? Saying foreign investors when any foreigner who buys a house and pays that tax is definitely not looking for an investment. I would have said a 5% tax was already high and reasonable as it allows foreign investment but also allows us to raise taxes to help locals. But yeah too late now.
Anyway my point was, we’ve done everything to kill home prices yet we haven’t achieved much success . Housing isn’t any more affordable but we’ve lowered wages, hurt our economy, and hurt growth of housing supply. By more affordable I mean housing is not down the 40%+ it would need to be for most of the people that complain about it to actually buy it with the new mortgage rules. So the only difference I see here is we shot ourselves in the foot for a minimal difference.
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