The reason why is because foreign home ownership has never been the core of the issue. This law was a distraction from the reality that Canadians are plenty willing, and more likely, to be the one exploiting you.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/46-28-0001/2023001/article/00001-eng.htm
In Nova Scotia, more than 1 in 20 houses is used as an investment by a person living outside the province or the country
[…]
In-province investors owned, as investment properties, between 8.7% of the houses in New Brunswick and 12.4% in Nova Scotia, and, as such, they owned more houses used as an investment than all the other types of investors combined.
As always, the core of the issue is that home ownership is treated as a commodity. Sort of a fundamental reality of putting a thing into a competitive market is that you’re going to have winners and losers. And losers in the housing market leads to, you know, homelessness among many other social ills.
I tried to point this out on Reddit and Lemmy so many times and usually got downvoted. People want to believe there’s some nefarious boogeyman buying up houses and keeping them vacant, but the reality is that virtually all homes in Canada have occupants. We just don’t have nearly enough housing for the population.
Edit: it’s still happening. In the other thread on this board about this article, people are saying “it’s not the foreign buyers we should tax, it’s the corporate buyers”. People will do all sorts of mental gymnastics to avoid considering the possibility that we need to densify our housing.
We need to change the ways we build our cities. The suburban experiment has failed and we need to address that. Commiting nearly every scrap of residential zoning for exclusively single family homes has had massive impacts on the urban fabric of our cities, the scarcity of housing, and the dependance on cars.
We don’t need to eliminate all single family homes, but we do need to make it possible to build multi-residences and mixed use areas. We also need to address how we tax residential properties because as it stands, single family zoning is often subsidized by the denser areas of the city.
but the reality is that virtually all homes in Canada have occupants.
Vancouver and Toronto are currently sitting about 7% and 7.4% homes that are empty or not for usual residents. That’s a fucking massive number, imo.
Okay and you could have 50% more homes available if 20% of the SFH in a city was converted into apartments. 7% is nothing if we actually would densify what we build rather than just sprawling suburbs.
“empty or not for usual residents.” is a useless metric. Student houses are considered “empty” if the the students have a family home to return to and haven’t updated their mailing address.
It’s the kind of thing that might occur if people don’t have pensions and need to secure some sort of income that would sustain them when they retire. 🫠 Perhaps in addition to tackling the lack of density, number of non-market units, etc. we should also look at the industry pushing people to create their own pensions.
