Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by louison11 524 days ago
Money invested from abroad is money coming inside the economy - whether the person lives there or not. That money goes to the seller, who'll then get taxed on it, spend it somewhere else... Or that money could be used, as I said, to build new buildings and rehabilitate old ones, thus creating jobs in the process. If the system was well set up for it, foreigners investing in a country is usually a good thing. The US is super foreign-investment friendly for example, doesn't hurt them.

Besides, if foreigners are investing solely to speculate - if they did fix the supply constraints, the opportunity for speculation would greatly decrease. It's only an attractive investment because the supply is so finite.

2 comments

Alternatively, I got my current house because of KYC laws.

The house bidding was originally won by someone abroad. They overbid the house by a lot. However, because of the KYC laws, that person needed to proof their income is legitimate, which they couldn’t. Therefore, we got the house.

Building new houses costs 10 years in my country. So building new houses is not fast enough to create new affordable houses.

Worked great for Vancouver /s
To be fair, you're referring to one of the largest and fastest-growing economies in Canada [1]. (It also has a massive affordability crisis despite a ban on non-student foreigners buying expensive real estate.)

[1] https://www.katrinaandtheteam.com/blog/vancouver-bc-economy/

Half the people in Vancouver are thinking about leaving and 25% want to leave within the next 5 years. People are leaving in droves largely because of costs. That seems to make the parents point - that the ecnomic benefits from immigration accrue to the few and the wealthy while making life harder for average people

https://vancouversun.com/news/survey-finds-half-of-metro-van...

I can sympathize with it because I live in Toronto and am also thinking about leaving. Do I hate immigrants, no there aren't actually that many immigrants in the city core where I live. But certaintly there is an affordability crsis that has gripped the city and the country and wages seemed to be supressed and there seems to be less job opportunities (likely due to all that extra labour coming in)

Vancouver's population has been steadily increasing. Maybe it's catering to different people than before, but it's not fewer.