[CountSessine]

...but I'm not sure that just building more will do much of anything

<sigh>

As long as we have folks buying with the intention of parking money or using homes as an "investment" you're going to have competition with much deeper pockets

Why do you think foreign investors want to overpay for a Vancouver Special? And what do they do with it once they buy it?

Do they live in it? If so, what you're upset about is population growth. Sounds like scarcity!

Do they rent it out? If so, that's a social good in a city with a 1% rental vacancy rate and sky-high rents are as bad as high housing prices. Sacrificing the rental market to save home-buyers sounds like scarcity!

Do those foreign investors leave the house empty? Who cares if we can just build more? And we know (https://doodles.mountainmath.ca/blog/2022/02/14/unoccupied-c...) that Vancouver doesn't seem to have more empty homes than most cities it's size. But of course we can't "just build more". Scarcity!

The truth is that we've seen developers market condo pre-sales in China playing-up the region's dysfunctions - pointing out our 2% population growth rate and the difficulty in building new housing. Investors come to Vancouver because they know the game is rigged - they know that housing prices are mostly one-sided and hedged by political interference. Canada's real estate is "too-big-to-fail" and is mostly up-side.

Don't talk to me about housing prices unless you deal with scarcity.

[Majromax]

> Do those foreign investors leave the house empty? Who cares if we can just build more?

I'll note here that there is a legitimate complaint to vacant housing. Some expensive city infrastructure like transit is supported by people-density rather than house-density, so a community of empty homes doesn't justify a subway line in the way that a bustling, lived-in community would.

Municipal funding that comes from the provincial level is also supported implicitly by income and sales (value-added) taxes rather than property taxes, so empty homes can easily create an imbalance of cost and revenue. The same also goes for cases of alleged tax evasion, where one globe-trotting patriarch supports their live-in family without declaring and paying Canadian taxes on income as a resident.

[djbebs]

There is no legitimate complaint about empty housing, not just because empty houses pay the same tax as occupied ones, but because empty housing is a myth.

[pedalpete]

Is empty housing a myth? https://openhousing.ca/2020/12/30/vancouver-empty-homes-cros...

I used to live in Yaletown (Vancouver) and the building I lived in was this very tall, maybe 35 story two tower block which only had two elevators. It took me about 6 months to realize that I never saw anybody else in the building. There were only 3 occupied apartments on my floor (I think there were 8 units per floor). I was told the building was designed to be a "piggy bank in the sky" and that low occupancy was in the design.

This is just an anecdote, but I was under the impression low occupancy is an issue in Vancouver so much so that they tried to pass laws regarding empty homes.

[paulmd]

> not just because empty houses pay the same tax as occupied ones

you've literally just responded to a post demonstrating that this is not the case, please don't just do template rants off keywords

[voisin]

Empty housing is a myth? Please explain.