We appear to be standing our ground!
Not my preferred choice of source but NatPo has more detail than some of the alternatives I saw. It includes some numbers as well as comments about the difference between Meta’s and Google’s approaches. Hint: they’re not the same, so there’s already cracks in the effort to make an example out of Canada.
That’s a very very small part of the issue, it’s just the most frustrating so that’s why people focus on it so much. The lack of social housing built/administered by the government or non profits is a much bigger issue. 100% legit corporations owning thousands of doors are much more of an issue than money laundering through the housing market.
Social housing isn’t the solution, everyone is struggling now even skilled professionals are hemorrhaging money buying overpriced condo’s and apartments. It’s more a zoning issue if you don’t want to blame foreign investors. The Chinese government wanted to hunt down illegal funds being washed in Canada (they got turned down).
https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/following-a-trail-of-tainted-money-from-china-into-vancouver-real-estate
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-high-price-of-chinese-money-laundering-in-canada/
If you have money what do you do with it? You invest it in property be it some billion dollar company or some corrupt Chinese national doesn’t matter the scale does.
What do you think happens when housing supply increases at the cheapest level? Prices lower in general because private apartments don’t get rented anymore at the price they’re at, that makes condo prices lower because people stop buying instead of renting because it’s now cheaper to rent and so on…
We were building affordable housing until the early 90s, prices have been increasing exponentially since then. The reason you’ve got foreigners buying here is because prices go up, it’s speculation, but it’s been proven many times that stopping foreigners from buying just means locals get more opportunity to do exactly the same thing. Anyway it’s not as if rich Chinese buying 5m$ houses in Vancouver were the reason why people can’t find affordable housing in Sudbury.
Supply and demand. That’s it. Flood the market with more affordable housing than is required (and that’s inaccessible to speculators!) and regular people will get access to a cheap roof and speculation will not be profitable.