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Comment by Bahamut | Hacker News Reader

At least from what I understand about around Palo Alto (this may be incorrect), wealthy chinese buying up houses around the $1 million range in the area is part of what makes it difficult for Americans to compete for houses, especially since those wealthy chinese often do all cash transactions.

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When we were recently shopping for a house in palo alto and los altos, we heard about and competed against Chinese nationals. I don't know how many of these all-cash offers were capital flight or how many were simply people looking to buy a house. Many of these stories came across as anti-immigration racism, but it very much wasn't limited to the ~1m market.

If that were true, Americans could simply vote for a local government that increased density allowing new units to be built.

Foreigners can't vote and therefore ultimately do not control that part of the process.

No, but they can just keep buying up a large share of the houses you build.

You probably can keeping building to a point where foreign investors begin to lose interest — but Americans do not generally like very dense housing, so this sort of becomes throwing out the baby with the bathwater. You're potentially making housing more affordable by turning the neighborhood into a ghetto.

That sounds great to me. Build a dense section of town and soak up obscene amounts of foreign money. I don't think super expensive apartments are the most likely to become a ghetto.

You get a chicken-egg effect. The already resident majority homeowners like the rising property values, so they have a built in incentive to be NIMBYs and block development. They also chose the city for it's specific characteristics and do not want it to change into something else.

Because in America, the interests of the wealthy never get more attention from government than the interests of the community at large.

All-cash just cuts down on transaction time.

As long as you're willing to offer a higher price, there's a monetary value the seller will accept in exchange for typical 30-day closing time required by lenders.

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