Quote:
Originally Posted by ssiguy
Places like Vancouver have {and continue to} build housing at record levels that far exceeds their population demands and yet prices are ridiculous. You can built endlessly to increase supply but it down't do any good if those units are too expensive for the average earner and are bought up en masse by investors, money launderes, and passport buyers.
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I completely disagree. People don't buy homes and leave them empty, Vancouver has its own empty home tax data showing this happens less than 3% of the time.
So if someone buys a home and lives in it, we reduce demand by 1. Developers generally build what the city tells them to and to cater to who buys it. If people are buying then the price set is affordable.
There is no data supporting that money launderers or foreigners are a significant portion of sales over the past few years.
If we build 10,000 condos at $1,000,000 and they all sell, then this solves 10,000 demand and gets 10,000 people into condos. This helps reduce the demand and as those people move into 10,000 condos they usually free up lower tiers of housing for those poorer than them.
You cannot blame investors, money launderers, passport buyers, etc. for a simple problem where supply does not meet demand. In addition, its not like something significant has changed from 1990, we had foreign buyers, investors, money launderers, passport buyers, etc back then too. What we must ask is what changed from 2015-2018 to cause our housing to skyrocket? I'd say 3 things: low interest rates, a great economy, and our supply of homes ran out and thus we could not meet demand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...alth_per_adult
Canada is 8th in the world for median wealth and 9th for mean wealth per adult. For median wealth the only nation with a bigger population above us is France. We're pretty damn wealthy and should stop thinking that foreigners have more money than us. In Canada the median wealth per adult is $140,000 CAD and in Metro Vancouver its $1,780,000. That means the average household in Metro Vancouver has almost 10x more wealth than the average Canadian household. And btw only 25% of Vancouver is Chinese so there's definitely a lot of wealthy white trust fund families. So no duh there is more competition over real estate than other Canadian cities.
https://www.macleans.ca/economy/mone...munities-2019/
It never made sense to blame foreigners or Chinese as Richmond has a lot cheaper real estate than Vancouver despite having double the amount of Chinese proportionally.