I bet in 2024 American Democrats will move to be an anti immigration party in a tactic to win over moderate Trump voters in an attempt to fight whatever the new scary term for teabagger/maga/qanon is. It's going to take the form of less overtly racist forms and more economic arguments, (e.g. The housing crisis is because the Chinese are buying up all our houses.)
We will be accused of abandoning POC Americans by not supporting anti immigrant policies. Get ready.

  • TrudeauCastroson [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    i hear that a lot in :kkkanada: , but our housing market is just generally fucked because people are over-leveraging to get houses because it's a 'safe' investment that only goes up and housing has only gone up. So people are fine with that being their only investment, and boomers are loving it because that's their retirement. and we don't even have mortgages with fixed rates that last as long as american mortgages, so if interest rate changes in 5 years you're fucked. Also i strongly suspect real estate agents are colluding on price wars, there's a lot of sketchy shit in that industry.

    Bidding wars and having to bid over asking with no inspection to get your bid accepted is common here, and that's driven by the fear of everyone else doing it that real estate agents are loving. Even if you submitted a bid at asking and it was the only one, i'd strongly suspect that it wouldn't be accepted. And once that hysteria starts and your market is labelled 'hot' it doesn't stop, you need to live somewhere and overbid on a house to do so. It's like how NFTs are stupidly priced except on real estate you have some sort of real asset from all this speculation.

    None of our parties have a real plan on housing, but only the extreme right anti-vax conservative split-off party blames it exclusively on foreign buyers even though we already have extra foreign buyer tax and vacancy tax on landlords. To me it seems reactionary to blame it all on foreign buyers who might actually be buying a home they plan on living in at some point, knew more than one chinese person in my highschool who came to high school here to get into university easier in canada since they were basically smurfing by doing our high school.

    I also wouldn't be surprised if it's born more of good old domestic blackrock-style firms. also wasn't zillow fucking up housing prices in many places? Plus it doesn't make sense that people wanting to park money outside of china buy homes, it would probably make more sense to do real estate in a more financialized way, like buying into a swiss bank fund that does real estate building condos and renting stuff out in hot cities around the world.

      • TrudeauCastroson [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        rented the properties out to Chinese international students

        fucking A. they're doing exactly what the people from the non-orient are also doing and that's why I reject that other guy's weirdness about divining what the foreigners are like. My former student housing slumlord was doing exactly what these investment property buyers are doing because if you paid off mortgage on more than one property then it's stupid not to keep going at this point.

        It's exactly that, it's dumb not to have investment property and the type of white boomers who already own secondary recreational properties would be and are doing the exact same thing because housing is a fuck. And I highly doubt that is most of what's going on based on how i see condo presales going, where you deposit money to buy a condo that might be finished later but if it's not you're fucked, but you can speculate on this speculation that a shitty 'luxury' condo will be built and resell your rights to buy this thing for more than your deposit.

        I just wanted to get it out there that it seems like a reactionary wedge to blame it all on foreigners. The housing price rises are bleeding to within 2 hours commute of cities people want to live in and up here it's blamed more on the chinese than makes sense, because those units are being rented out to some sort of rich student who drives a luxury car which is what would happen if 0 chinese money could get into our real estate.

    • Funkydick [none/use name]
      ·
      3 years ago

      it would probably make more sense to do real estate in a more financialized way

      Chinese don't understand complicated financial products and don't trust them. What they understand is land. Property. Things they can touch. Especially the older generation that has money. Read Pearl S. Buck's "The Good Earth" to gain an understanding of this. It's an outstanding novel.

      who might actually be buying a home they plan on living in at some point

      They're not. It's just an investment. And it's not just Chinese, that's just because it was in Seattle. People all over the world are buying up our housing stock and they don't mind paying extra. Because the alternative is to keep it in their own countries and watch their awful governments run it into the ground.

      Housing is for people to live in. Not a global investment vehicle, which is what it is now. China knows this quite well, anyone who's not Chinese is limited to a single house, period. And even then good luck getting a bank loan on it.

      • CopsDyingIsGood [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Chinese don’t understand complicated financial products and don’t trust them. What they understand is land. Property. Things they can touch. Especially the older generation that has money.

        Yes, the asiatic brainpan is predisposed to struggling with such abstract concepts as finance. Very left, very materialist and decidedly not racist analysis of the situation.

        • Funkydick [none/use name]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Nobody said that. It's their culture. China has been through a very bad time these last 100 years and it's understandable that they'd feel that way. Taiwanese aren't like this. Neither are Singaporean, Malaysian Chinese, ABC, CBC, or any other Chinese people.

          Or just go read The Good Earth.

          • TrudeauCastroson [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            How is the good earth which was written by a daughter of a missionary in China in the 1930s applicable to modern Chinese investment vehicles?

            • Funkydick [none/use name]
              ·
              3 years ago

              It contains many themes that are timeless. I especially liked Wang Lung's relationships with his family members. It really explained a lot about how Chinese families are. You can read works from a thousand years ago and recognize today's China in them.

              Pearl S. Buck was a missionary kid. She grew up in China and spoke Chinese natively. Since she lived with the people, (parents basically 19th century hippies) she didn't get that walled-off expat experience most Americans get. She caught some flak for her novel back then, too.

              One of the isolating factors of my own experience has been that some of the morbidly sensitive modern Chinese, especially those abroad in foreign countries, have not liked it that I have written of the everyday life of their people. In all justice to them I must say that this attitude has changed in the last two years very much, so that I have ardent friends among these, but certainly The Good Earth at first displeased many Chinese in the United States. In China itself it was accepted without dislike except that it was a foreigner who wrote it. It was often said there, "It is a book which a Chinese should have written." But among the Chinese in my own country, who felt they had the honour of their country to uphold, it made distress. They had to deny it, to criticize it, to struggle against it. This also was as astonishing to me as the letter from the Fundamentalist board member. Apparently with the simplest purpose in the world, namely, merely to write novels, surely a harmless necessity for a novelist, and without any sense of wrongdoing, I was able to infuriate an astonishingly large number of people.

              -- Pearl S. Buck, "Advice to a Novelist About to Be Born" (1935)

              Seriously, just read it. It's an easy read that's not too long, and you can find it on archive.org in ebook format for free. Go to the bottom to download, ignore the book image. https://archive.org/details/goodearth00buck_1