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Comment by namdnay | Hacker News Reader

the problem is that the majority of active voters are using real estate as an investment vehicle. convincing an investor in X to ban investment in X is pretty tricky ...

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That can be a very different scenario though - a family using one (or even multiple) properties as investment vehicles that they are themselves residing in (even if its just part of the year) does not seem unethical at all to me. Foreign investors who are not planning to even live on the property nor rent it out at all? Definitely a crapshoot. It is a small overall percentage of the pie but every bit counts. And giant corporations scooping up tons of single family homes and small apartment complexes is maybe even scarier.

Lets face it though - there's a separate problem and it is pretty simple - we just need more housing in places where the demand is high. Personally I think it would be especially helpful in the short term if there were big incentives for individuals to ADU's or inlaw units and things like duplexes, triplexes, or "bungalows" on one property. Easy sell for the public and would open up all of the single family home zones to much more housing and maybe even incentivize families across generations to live together again.

a small overall percentage? More than one third of Vancouver Canada's real-estate is foreign owned.

That sounds exaggerated.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-a... seems to say 2-6%

https://blog.remax.ca/are-foreign-buyers-still-purchasing-va... says 1.4% in 2020.

As someone who lives in Vancouver, its quite a different story, and most of those I know, really don't understand where these stats come from. There is not a week that goes by I have someone knocking on the door of our family home asking to buy it. There are four owners left on our street that are the original owners, the rest are vacation homes for Chinese, and completely vacant. This is far from exaggerated.

https://www.fortunebuilders.com/one-third-of-vancouvers-real...

https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/taxes/property-taxes/prop...

We sold my daughter's condo 2 years ago, and we're still getting email solititations to buy it. Apparently there's a company sitting behind about a half-dozen shell companies, and they're trying to buy up enough units that they can sit on the association board, and convert the whole complex to rentals; forcing the remaining owners to sell.

I'm glad I got her out of there 2 years ago. The rising crime problem there was the motivating factor.

You're right, but I assume there would be an exemption for the home you live in. That would be a great exemption too since it might be incentive for people to subdivide their home to create more dwellings.

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