I grew up in Vancouver more than any other city, but left in 1986. It’s one of the most beautiful large cities in the world, and was a lovely place to live. Recently, due in large part to the influx of foreign money and buyers, it’s become unaffordable, both for buying and renting. The provincial government just slapped a tax on foreign buyers, and now the mayor is going to add another tax.

Vancouver plans to tax its vacant homes by the end of the year, the city’s mayor said on Wednesday, announcing the second government move in as many months to address foreign investments that officials say have helped drive up home prices.

This combination of action is absolutely the right thing to do, especially a tax on vacant homes (I assume it will include apartments and condos.) This action should be copied by cities around the world who are experiencing similar foreign buyer driven booms: like Australia’s large cities, London, and Canada’s Toronto.

This is what I have been pushing for for some time. The issue is that the fee must be punitive, and I fear that Vancouver won’t set it high enough.

As I wrote in 2015 in reference to a similar New York city proposal.

People who can afford luxury apartments can afford that fee. Make it simple: Put in a residency requirement. Someone must live in the apartment six months to a year. If they don’t, the tax rate is 50 percent of the ostensible value of the apartment. If that doesn’t work (and it might not, given how rich they are), well, then just make it illegal to own apartments that aren’t used and have the government seize the apartment and use it for social housing, or sell it. And if the next owner doesn’t use it, seize it again.

The simplest way to stop stuff is to just forbid it. Foreigners don’t have any “right” to buy property in other countries. It’s a privilege. If they’re making life miserable for the permanent residents of a city, there’s no particular reason not to just stop them buying more residences. There will always be ways around such bans, of course, but it will still make such purchases far fewer.

It’s not reasonable for a city’s rent and/or cost of purchasing a house to rise much faster than its economy. It’s not fair to shove out residents and people with jobs so that foreigners can have vacation homes or homes to which they can escape with their corrupt wealth if things go bad in their home country.

If they want such a house, well, there are plenty of small municipalities who would be happy to sell to them, but turning one of the countriy’s main, economically viable cities into a place its actual residents can’t afford isn’t smart or fair. The same is true of Toronto, London, or Melbourne.

China throws off so much money and wealth that smaller nations (and Canada, Australia, or Britain are all smaller where it matters in population) can be swamped just by their overflow.

Don’t let that happen.


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