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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

It's hardly clear how this will help much. Vancouver has a population of about 600k people. According to the article, 10k houses are empty. This will, at best, increase the housing supply by 1.6%.

Meanwhile, Vancouver is extremely low density - 13k people/square mile, about 1/3 that of high-rise megacities like...Brooklyn.

Great work guys! Scapegoating a few rich Chinese people with second homes while ignoring the massive self-inflicted harm that locals do.

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For Vancouver, the average is 2.6 people per houshold not 1 as you assume.

This would make 4.3% of the housing unoccupied. 1% would certainly make a difference in housing price... but 4.3%? that's no small effect.

Prices are set on the margin. Knowing that it is "only" 1.6% of the houses (by the way, that's a big number) means nothing without also knowing how many more people are willing to live there by current prices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouverism

Vancouverism-as-high-density only applies to the small downtown area, and tiny slices of land near transit stations. Nearly all the city's area is single-family homes on tenth-acre lots.

Vancouver voters simultaneously want: a) a low-rise, spaced-out city, b) rising property values for people who already own, and c) low home prices for people getting into the market.

If you point out that you can only have two of these three things, you will not have any electoral success there.

If demand is inelastic changing supply by even one percent could make a big difference in prices.

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