<story><title>Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-06/canada-to-ban-some-foreigners-from-buying-homes-as-prices-soar</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CountSessine</author><text>You&amp;#x27;re fighting scarcity. You still won&amp;#x27;t win the bidding war - it just won&amp;#x27;t be as one-sided.&lt;p&gt;Stop championing scarcity by blaming scapegoats. Either we limit Canada&amp;#x27;s crazy-high immigration rate (1% of population every year) or we build more homes which is mostly gated by illiberal zoning laws passed by municipalities. But both of these policies are very popular so you&amp;#x27;ll be swimming upstream, politically.&lt;p&gt;While you&amp;#x27;re at it, you could go after other wildly popular policies that lead to high housing prices, like the primary homeowner capital gains tax exemption (probably, by value, the biggest tax dodge in the industrialized world), and Canadian cities&amp;#x27; extremely low property tax rates (0.3% of assessed value in Vancouver, for example).</text></item><item><author>boplicity</author><text>&amp;gt; During last year’s election campaign, Trudeau’s party also proposed a ban on “blind bidding” for houses -- the prevailing system by which offers are kept secret when someone is auctioning a home.&lt;p&gt;This is such a huge deal. Anyone who has had to go through the process of buying a home through a bidding war knows how unfair and one-sided this process is. It take a high-pressure emotional situation, and gives all of the information to one side (the sellers), while leaving the buyer stuck guessing at what the real price for the house is supposed to be. An absolutely horrible process that &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; be banned. Banning this is such a simple reform. I sincerely hope it happens, though I doubt it it will.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kbenson</author><text>&amp;gt; You&amp;#x27;re fighting scarcity.&lt;p&gt;No, they&amp;#x27;re fighting market inefficiency.  A free market requires accurate and timely information to be efficient.  This is literally people putting constraints on the market for what they are selling so the information is not available to one side, and the price is inflated.&lt;p&gt;A rational actor should walk away from a system like this, but if that&amp;#x27;s all that&amp;#x27;s available around you because of scarcity, you&amp;#x27;re forced to work at a disadvantage.&lt;p&gt;Banning this is akin to banning other anticomptitive behavior, such as collusion and monopolies.  That is, it&amp;#x27;s up to the government to decide whether the harm outweighs the problems regulation introduces (regulation always introduces some level of friction and problems, you just hope to minimize them and maximize the benefits it brings) and is thus worth pursuing.</text></comment>
<story><title>Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-06/canada-to-ban-some-foreigners-from-buying-homes-as-prices-soar</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CountSessine</author><text>You&amp;#x27;re fighting scarcity. You still won&amp;#x27;t win the bidding war - it just won&amp;#x27;t be as one-sided.&lt;p&gt;Stop championing scarcity by blaming scapegoats. Either we limit Canada&amp;#x27;s crazy-high immigration rate (1% of population every year) or we build more homes which is mostly gated by illiberal zoning laws passed by municipalities. But both of these policies are very popular so you&amp;#x27;ll be swimming upstream, politically.&lt;p&gt;While you&amp;#x27;re at it, you could go after other wildly popular policies that lead to high housing prices, like the primary homeowner capital gains tax exemption (probably, by value, the biggest tax dodge in the industrialized world), and Canadian cities&amp;#x27; extremely low property tax rates (0.3% of assessed value in Vancouver, for example).</text></item><item><author>boplicity</author><text>&amp;gt; During last year’s election campaign, Trudeau’s party also proposed a ban on “blind bidding” for houses -- the prevailing system by which offers are kept secret when someone is auctioning a home.&lt;p&gt;This is such a huge deal. Anyone who has had to go through the process of buying a home through a bidding war knows how unfair and one-sided this process is. It take a high-pressure emotional situation, and gives all of the information to one side (the sellers), while leaving the buyer stuck guessing at what the real price for the house is supposed to be. An absolutely horrible process that &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; be banned. Banning this is such a simple reform. I sincerely hope it happens, though I doubt it it will.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ch4s3</author><text>&amp;gt; Stop championing scarcity by blaming scapegoats. Either we limit Canada&amp;#x27;s crazy-high immigration rate (1% of population every year) or we build more homes which is mostly gated by illiberal zoning laws passed by municipalities. But both of these policies are very popular so you&amp;#x27;ll be swimming upstream, politically.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m all for building more houses in cities&amp;#x2F;high demand areas, but doesn&amp;#x27;t Canada only have a population growth rate of around 1%&amp;#x2F;yr? It seems like you could easily build your way past that without giving up the advantages of immigration and a little population growth.</text></comment>