Empty Homes
(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology)
TLDR: Combining our two major sources of data on the “foreignness” of property owners suggests at least half of those owning property in high demand parts of BC but living outside of Canada are Canadian citizens or permanent residents.
How Foreign Are You?
BC housing discussions have often focused on various aspects of “foreignness” – foreign buyers, foreign owners, non-resident owners, foreign capital, home owners with non-anglicized last names, out of province buyers, buyers on 10-year entry program, foreign landlords – the list goes on in bewildering variety, and each category comes with it’s own range of interpretations and definitions.
(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology)
Empty Homes Taxes are back in the news!
In a very short time period, we’ve got Vancouver raising its Empty Homes Tax rate from 1% to 3%, based in part on a report from CMHC about a sharp rise in condos on the rental market, we’ve got Toronto eyeing its own Empty Homes Tax, and now reports suggest that even Ottawa is considering getting in on the game.
(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology)
Do people select cities from diverse alternatives? Or do cities select residents from diverse flows of people?
The answer is pretty much: both.
People can look around and consider where they want to end up. And cities, through municipal policies, can and do work to select their residents. EXCEPT cities can’t do this directly. At least across North America, cities generally aren’t allowed to establish and maintain their own immigration policies.
(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology)
Empty homes are in the news again in West Vancouver after a West Vancouver council motion asking the province for the power to levy their own Speculation and Vacancy tax.
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT the Provincial Government provide local governments with the power to levy their own Speculation and Vacancy Tax, so that they too can address housing affordability and other community effects of vacant homes.
It’s been over two years now since the news media reported on John Rose claiming that Vancouver has a surplus of housing and Rose shared his Working Paper, Version 1 detailing his claims of some mythical oversupply of housing in Vancouver.
We have written about this on several occasions, but we were missing a piece of data that can greatly simplify our arguments: Cross-tabulations of structural type by document type (whether a dwelling was occupied by usual residents, or occupied by temporarily present persons, or unoccupied) for the censuses 2001-2016.
