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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

> I feel like it’s almost an attempt to appease citizens by blaming the issue on “foreigners”

There is truth, however. The Wenzhou house wife property speculator trope has some basis in reality, and Chinese markets are already rife with massive speculation that has seeped into foreign markets popular for Chinese emigration (Toronto, Vancouver, and to a much lesser extent NYC and west cost American cities). You don't have to look hard to see the effects in Vancouver, where condo buildings and housing remain empty due to being seen as speculative assets.

American and some western European housing markets (e.g. UK) are a bit unique in that they haven't limited foreigners from buying and speculating on real estate. Whereas in China, many tier 1 and 2 cities have strict residency requirements before you can buy an apartment (but these also apply to Chinese via their hukou residency system).

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There is a huge crowd of local Canadian landlords that own or seek to own more than one property. This is the group that benefits from the narrative that Asian foreigners are buying up the local estate.

The really affluent immigrant groups aren't buying multiple properties, they already have a great deal of income, and their properties are well outside most of what HN can afford and do not impact the condo market which is the most competitive, accessible and volatile.

They already taxed and stopped foreign buyers but the home prices in Vancouver keep going up as sales amongst local Canadians make up most of the volume.

Now they announce this virtue signaling to appease the other Canadians who can't afford homes but the problem will not change.

In fact, without outside capital constantly coming in, the Vancouver real estate market is not sustainable. It literally is just another game of musical chairs, it is the news of some Chinese communist elite member buying a mansion in West Vancouver that gets local Canadians eager to own properties.

I'm no stranger to the anti-asian sentiments in Vancouver, just head over to r/vancouver to see people regularly blame Asians for the fact that they can't afford to live there. In fact in the 80s, they blamed Japanese, 90s they blamed Hong Kongers, 2000s they blame Taiwan, Mainlanders.

It's really disgusting to see the blatant racism against one group that is normalized but not for others. It literally is the same attitude that people with anti-semitic views constantly deride Jews of their financial success that largely came out of merit.

> They already taxed and stopped foreign buyers but the home prices in Vancouver keep going up as sales amongst local Canadians make up most of the volume.

These were always easy to work around: how many Chinese students come to Canada to study and just happen to have a few million dollars to spend on a house? The new proposal is also easy to work around, the Canadian government isn't serious about solving the speculation problem.

> In fact, without outside capital constantly coming in, the Vancouver real estate market is not sustainable. It literally is just another game of musical chairs, it is the news of some Chinese communist elite member buying a mansion in West Vancouver that gets local Canadians eager to own properties.

Perhaps. We already went through this in the 80s with the Japanese, and after the Japanese real estate bubble burst, Vancouver real estate was depressed for almost a decade (I remember the signs for condos starting at $100k in 1997! And no one was blaming the Hong Kongese for that at the time). China is just Japan 2.0 in this regard: after the Chinese property bubble bursts, Vancouver real estate will be heavily effected.

> Perhaps. We already went through this in the 80s with the Japanese, and after the Japanese real estate bubble burst, Vancouver real estate was depressed for almost a decade (I remember the signs for condos starting at $100k in 1997! And no one was blaming the Hong Kongese for that at the time). China is just Japan 2.0 in this regard: after the Chinese property bubble bursts, Vancouver real estate will be heavily effected.

Now this is why I love HN, its to see another fisherman!

I remember the 90s were depressing time for Vancouver. The economy was in complete slump and NDP took the fall for that.

Now the Chinese real estate market is incomplete shambles, people are in complete denial about that the Vancouver real estate market lags behind. Already the bubble has started to burst in Montreal, which I remember were the last to join the party!

> Now the Chinese real estate market is incomplete shambles

Chinese real estate prices are still pretty high. The government keeps things from bursting by controlling the real estate agents and their companies (owned mostly by red families, they just taper off on sales volume instead of letting prices fall). We will see how long they can keep juggling that. Which is why rich Chinese like to invest in western property markets in the first place: there is more liquidity in Vancouver and Toronto vs. Shanghai or Beijing.

BTW, I'm not from Vancouver, I just visited a lot in the 90s (when I was going to school in Seattle).

the Chinese communist party elites send money abroad is to put it out of reach. Very tough for the CCP to auction off your property in Canada or United States.

For the Japanese it was cheap debt that exported property inflation which led to an immediate drop in liquidity however currently there is cheap debt locally and its the locals participating in the real estate speculation.

the actual foreign ownership is like less than 5% in Vancouver yet the media and establishment constantly loves to shift attention away from REIT and institutional money, rich Canadians and against scapegoat groups.

unlike the melting pot system you have in America, Canadians fall into ethnic tribalism, safety in similarity. There's an idea that everyone can be Canadian/American but its implicit understanding that it is false. Canadians have this sort of superiority complex and see themselves holier than thou, it is far more broken than America in some ways and just in my personal interactions, Americans by large, were far more "Canadian" than real Canadians.

The country honestly feels very much broken and the more dystopian and divided it becomes, the more it will push people on the fringes away to isolation. Ethnic enclaves aren't by choice, they are a byproduct of an unwelcoming and implicitly hostile incumbent establishment.

> the actual foreign ownership is like less than 5% in Vancouver

It is probably much higher than that, 5% is just what ownership can clearly be traced to a non-resident foreign owner. But you have a lot of property owned by Chinese students. The government is really conservative when they measure these numbers. Heck, I think the empty Seattle townhome next to mine, which I know is owned by an old retired couple in Beijing (the daughter told us as much before she left), is not counted as foreign owned even though it for all practical purposes is (and was bought with money from China...but then again, I bought my townhome largely with money I earned in Beijing as well).

I'm sure plenty of resident Chinese and Indians own property in Vancouver also (since there are so many of them), but I wouldn't count those as foreign owners either. At that point, it is mostly Canadian money chasing after Canadian assets, rather than Chinese or Indian money. Here in Seattle, it is rich techies driving the market, and many of those just happen to be Chinese or Indian (citizens, permanent residents, and H1s). That is a different problem (rich techies like us bidding up the market, not that many techies are Chinese and Indian).

>Now this is why I love HN, its to see another fisherman!

Is "fisherman" supposed to be a Canadian expression?

Lots of bigots have latched onto Vancouver housing issues as a way to further their anti-immigration views. It's gross.

This doesn't mean though that there haven't been real issues with the Vancouver market that involve foreign wealth.

Prior to the foreign buyers tax we were seeing condo developers explicitly opening up sales offices in foreign cities, explicitly marketing their condos as pied-a-terres. I understand why people didn't like that. That sort of thing really doesn't help the local buyer or renter.

I'm happy to see that while Canadian politicians have brought in these rules to deal with some distortions of the real estate market from foreign wealth, we really haven't our politicians embrace the bigoted anti-immigrant rhetoric around this topic of the sort that you occasionally see on twitter and reddit.

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