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gota

What happened to the punitive taxes for unnocupied homes I read about a couple of years ago?

If I recall it was a "tax" 1% of the property value every month after the first 12 of vacancy

I can't imagine that going into effect and rent/house prices _not_ going down

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That tax applies to the city of Vancouver. Most houses in Canada are outside of Vancouver.

Did it have any effect? From what I hear, Vancouver has one of the costliest real state markets in Canada

It’s utterly bonkers. The median single family home in Vancouver costs CAD $1.9M (USD $1.5M).

Vancouver is famous all over the world as an attractive city (for example I live in Berlin, Germany, and many people I know would like to visit Vancouver). I've never been there, but I have heard it is next to the sea AND next to the mountains, and it lies in a first world country with a solid economy and good health care. Maybe the prices just reflect demand?

All true, and all were true 20 years ago when prices were not this out of line with local incomes.

And likely it will not be affected much by the climate change.

Hasn't British Columbia where Vancouver is at, had terrible weather this year? Looks like Vancouver is actually more vulnerable to the climate crisis compared to other major Canadian cities; https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57654133

Yeah, that’s not playing out well. Vancouver and the surrounding region experienced 800 deaths relating to June’s unprecedented one-in-a-thousand-years heat wave.

Even more bonkers is the average house price in Canada (all of it) is over $700k now.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/photos/canada-real-estate-pri...

It’s half that in the US.

I wonder if thats because most of the Canadian population is localized to their mega cities like Toronto, Vancuver etc while US has a much larger rural population.

Or could it perhaps relate to the Canadian government’s historical support of housing markets through the distortions of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, which intervenes heavily in the mortgage wholesale market to provide liquidity whenever the economy stumbles…?

There was hints of things maybe cooling off, then covid hit and prices have been spiking since.

Yes; it's caused several people to leave their empty houses in a permanent state of not-fit-for-inhabitance, which allows one to avoid paying the tax.

Does any government official have to inspect and confirm? Building inspector?

Well it does sound like it worked but the problem is that they forgot to apply the tax on all land (even empty land), not just the vacant properties.

There is also a province-wide speculation tax that levies a charge on unoccupied or secondary residences. The rate is 2% for foreign owners and 0.5% for locals.

https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/taxes/speculation-vacancy...

If the problem is caused by too many people wanting to live there, rather than empty houses, it wouldn't help. Nobody likes to blame themselves, but everyone living in a high-priced area is partly to blame for the high prices, not just some faceless evil baddies.

There are more empty homes (or occupied just enough to avoid the tax) in vancouver than there are unhoused people here.

Unhoused people? Homeless people aren't the market for house buying. It's people who aren't even in Vancouver because they can't afford to live there.

But they are in need of a place to live. One of the consequences of the current housing market in vancouver is that housing is unaffordable even as a renter. Those vacant homes, if they were available for rent would drive down rents for everyone and help house some of those unhoused people.

Sure, there will be some downward pressure on rents (not necessarily an actual decrease) but that's not an argument that empty homes are a major contributor to the high prices. It might not even be discernable above the noise. The argument of counting homeless people and empty homes is disingenuous because it seems superficially like that's the whole problem when it's surely not.

Idk, my empathy for middle income people struggling to buy a home is tiny in comparison with the empathy i feel towards people living in their cars or tents. I can’t see a way that we would get to full housing without radical changes to the way land is used and commodified, that would likely have upstream benefits that would help with home affordability

That tax was for the city of Vancouver. I heard it did help to some degree, and may have caused a shift in foreign buyers from Vancouver to Seattle, which is not too far away.

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