> Anything short of taxing every residence which is not a primary residence AND banning foreign ownership AND reducing permitting toil AND raising interest rates, is going to fall short.
You forgot eliminating favorable taxation for real estate as well.
But actually if you kept all of those factors and simply just increased supply, it would still lower prices. It's not that complicated. It doesn't matter how many incentives you place on top of real estate. If you build more and prices decrease by 20%, it doesn't make demand shoot up by 20%.
The vast majority of people will never purchase more than one home, and will also never leave the metro-area they grew up in.
I think Vancouver people imagine the demand of Chinese real estate investors interested in their city is endless. It is not. Vancouver is the city that has the highest percentage of Chinese-owned real estate outside of China (globally) and its still at only 30%.
And the vast vast majority of cities do not have this dynamic or anything close to it. And the Chinese population is massively declining over the next 40 years, not growing.
> only 30%
That is a huge amount. I don’t blame immigration and foreign ownership as the only issues with Vancouver prices, but 30% of housing stock being owned just by Chinese population is massive. I knew several people who were Chinese nationals and owned a factory or large business in China and then bought a $4 million home in Vancouver. I don’t have any personal issues with these people and I befriend several, but I also realize that foreign capital from the richest residents outside of Canada were out competing locals.
Another thing to consider is that a large number of foreign nationals buying real estate in Vancouver come from countries that have strong capital controls (China, India) whereas Canada has basically no capital controls which results in a pretty onesided trade relationship.