Faced with an 18,000-name petition calling for a tax on foreign real estate investment, Premier Christy Clark responded with remarkable candor this week.
“By moving foreign owners out of the market, housing prices will drop,” she told the CBC.
That of course was the point of the petition, largely being pushed by young people who find themselves struggling or priced out of the market.
It was more important, Clark added, that homes have plenty of equity that could be used to “get a loan or use the money to finance some other projects.”
Cold comfort for those struggling.
But whether she intended it or not, Clark’s comments were unique among elected politicians in that she made a direct connection between foreign ownership and the absurd cost of housing here. Despite mounting anecdotal evidence, most politicians tuck tail and run whenever the issue comes up.
The desire to keep the party going, as well as our province’s very real and ugly history of racism, hamper our ability to have a serious conversation about what’s happening to our local housing stock and economy.
We are one of the few jurisdictions that not only has no rules on foreign ownership, we don’t even collect data. With bidding wars pushing tear-downs to more than $1 million in an area where the median household income is a little more than $70,000, it’s well worth looking into.
It’s time all three levels of government got serious about this because the economic impacts are going to be multigenerational.
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