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by YZF 3502 days ago
The total housing inventory available in all these cities is just not high enough to satisfy the demand of investors. It seems there are certain cities that attract attention while others do not. Seems to be about where the marketing effort is and what the screening criteria is on the buyer side.

This is nothing to do with evil. It's just business/common sense. If I had a lot of money and I was living in China where there's a large risk and I was looking to make a similar investment I'd probably go the same route. A lot of wealth was created in a short time and those wealthy people like any normal person are concerned about preservation of that capital and some sort of safety net.
2 comments
yummyfajitas 3501 days ago
The total housing inventory available in all these cities is just not high enough to satisfy the demand of investors.

But why is the inventory not high enough? Certainly we could easily build more.

Oh yeah, exclusionary zoning in NYC and SF. FAR limits of 1.33 in Mumbai. Mumbai and Delhi have half the density of Brooklyn, Vancouver about a third - there's plenty of room for more inventory. Even in Manhattan we could fit a lot more inventory in.

We don't do this because the middle class don't want it.

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YZF 3501 days ago
It's mostly single family homes that investors are after in Vancouver and that have appreciated the most in value. Vancouver is landlocked between mountains, sea, and river. You can't build many more single family homes in Vancouver. I imagine with most other cities building more would be either more sprawl or more density both of which can create problems.

Canada isn't densely populated so why should the Vancouver people need to squeeze into apartments while houses are sitting empty? So you're right. The middle class doesn't want it.

It's true that not everyone can have the "American Dream" house/garage/car any more but at the same time having a bunch of expensive houses sit empty is worse than them having someone live in them.

I think part of the solution might be building new cities, something that doesn't seem to be happening.

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kspaans 3501 days ago
Yeah, it's like regulatory capture. The owners in the cities want to keep what they have, and vote for it. I'm sure some of it has to to with propping up house prices, but I don't think all of it does either! It's an interesting problem when it comes into conflict with a city's growth.
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twistedpair 3501 days ago
Boston does not have enough affordable housing. There is a ton of building in the city, but most of is it high end housing and very expensive towers/hotels. Good luck finding a freestanding house for under $800K.

When the market prices are high, and land is expensive, and you have the slow zoning/permitting process of Boston, developers are going to only build luxury housing, until the city changes the permitting/zoning process and requires them to build more affordable housing units.

See this detailed article [1]

[1] http://www.bostonmagazine.com/property/article/2016/02/21/bo...

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