I am student at UC Irvine. I genuinely believe there is a back-door allowing these kids to buy their way in. You can't believe the lack of skills and extravagances you see. I saw someone offering $250 for anyone to drop a specific class, so that room would open. I suspect fake degrees. There has been numerous instances of Paid Test Takers. Most classes we literally now have to show our ID when we turn in a test, as a result of this cheating
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. I'm guessing there must be a big PC crowd on HN today. From my experiences at two separate colleges (neither of which is UC Irvine), this story is exactly true, and many of classmates took note of this as well. It seems to me that most Chinese (and not Chinese-American) students spend their time tinkering around with $100k sports cars than focusing on their studies while in the US. Personally, I'd prefer to see them rejected outright, and have more hard-working Americans take their places at college institutions
> I'd prefer to see them rejected outright, and have more hard-working Americans take their places at college institutions
Even if these lazy Chinese kids' rich parents are subsidizing the hard-working Americans' education? (You can bet a Chinese billionaire's paying the full tuition without financial aid.)
That influx of rich Chinese money is, if anything, slightly inflating the cost of education and punishing your referenced hard-working Americans. Identical to what it's doing in the real-estate market in, for example, Vancouver. Influx large sums of money into an especially finite system, and what you tend to get is inflation.
Taxpayers are mostly the ones doing the student loan subsidizing. Whether the loans are funded through the Treasury or semi-indirectly via the Fed, it overwhelmingly comes out of US taxpayer pockets one way or another.
The proper response would be to increase the supply---in real estate as well as in education. There are lots of people who'd like to be professors and teachers. Just hire more.
The effect is the same, but the key issue is private vs. public. The funding for a private school is, well, private. No tax dollars are paid by the government for educating a student. In California, the public UC schools take in tax dollars to help educate the students. Therefore, the cost of education is de facto a political issue. In California, the taxpayers give each student ~$10,000.00 per school year to attend in 2011-12[0], down from ~$16,000.00 in 2007-08. I believe this includes international student. The reason for this is long and goes back to the California Master Plan [1]. Essentially the point of the Master Plan was "anyone from anywhere in California could, if they worked hard enough, get a bachelor’s degree from one of the best universities in the country (and, therefore, in the world), almost free of charge." You can see how this legacy of the Master Plan clashes with the current tuition issues and influx of Pacific Rim scions. People grew up in California with a good chance of, though being poor, working hard and making a great life. We all knew mothers and uncles that studied their butt off and made it out of Salinas' fields, out of the camps in the Sierras, or out of the ghettos, all by working hard. No small part of the meme that 'if you go to college, you will escape poverty' came out of the Master Plan.
And it WORKED! People really went to Cal or Davis or Chico or Bakersfield and made it out of poverty. All because the tuition was cheap and the plan worked. And California became what it is today. Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the Salinas agriculture sphere, Napa Valley, the dairy and forestry, all these places exist in California in some way due to the success of the master plan. The UCs are THE Jewel of The West's crown because the people of California put their money where their mouth was. They believed that education was the way to good living for their children. Assemblywoman Dorothy Donahoe, for whom the Master Plan bill was named, believed in the children of California. She was a person that planted trees whose shade she knew she would never sit in, and she did for her love of the people of California. And California grew mighty for those sacrifices. The UCs are THE BEST universities that have ever existed, by nearly any measure. The people of California, for decades and generations, paid into this with their taxes and knew it was good.
And now, now we have the scions of the Pacific Rim are cheating and buying their way into these places. They are taking the seats from hard working sons and daughters of farmers and loggers, dentists and doctors, mechanics and architects. And they flaunt their wealth! They don't care that the janitors who dream that their daughters will attend Santa Cruz and UCLA see them do doughnuts in Lambos.
The influx of wealth strikes at the core of the Master Plan and the hopes and dreams of the people of California. The UCs are seen as just another playground for the elite in this way (not strictly true yet). But for some reason the people of California are stuck footing some of the bill.
that's a touching spiel, but all those rich kids pay full out of state tuition, which means they actually subsidize other students. that's why they're tolerated. you've lost your mind if you think somehow the people of california are paying for their education.
they also make up a tiny percentage of the overall student body. not that anyone gives a shit about that, because asian == foreign to most people.
1. Duude, I'm all along with you except your hate of the "PC crowd". Stop complaining, start working. Not helpful to the conversation.
2. I used to be uhh a foreign national in the U.S (as I still am), and assumed it was a known fact that Chinese nationals often buy their way through college. Somewhat related: Northeastern and their special- Chinese-student program that gives 4-year US degrees with 0 knowledge of
English.
3. It is not necessarily something to complain about, as long as it doesn't COMPLETE dilute the value of the degrees concerned. AFAIK, Chinese students (NOT Chinese American, mind) are the only students who will often pay 100% of the feels, with no request for scholarships. So to look at it the other way, you're subsidizing smarter students by taking in slightly less smart students (tbh, most Chinese students are extremely competitive, so we shouldn't be generalizing.)
Is it? There's plenty of tropes about dumb students who make it through Ivy league schools because their parents "bought a new wing" or somesuch. Same for rich children avoiding military service.
I can remember only once having to take out my ID for a test - and that too was a school ID and not a state one. I went to a high tier midwestern school.
That varies dramatically from one university to another. There's no national standard.
Think of each university in the US has having its own culture and way of doing things. Many universities certainly use best practices, but there are no federal regulations on such things as test identification.
Not where I went. Classes were often small enough that the instructors recognized you (the school itself was also small), and most tests were on the school LMS.
Note that not every American has state-issued photo ID, especially among the poor.
If you're willing to pay someone to take a test for you, you are probably also willing to pay for a fake ID for them. Or you could find someone who looks close enough to you and hope that no one looks too closely.
There is the problem that our ability to recognize and differentiate faces is quite lazy. It basically uses the simplest set of characteristics it can get by with. This creates a problem when someone interacts with very few people sharing some give phenotypes as their heuristic is far less likely to pick up on differences between the generic phenotype. Basically, the less familiar you are with members of a certain group, the more those members look alike.
Basically, the stereotype that all <insert group> look alike does happen, NOT because they do look alike, but because to someone who does not know members of that group, their facial recognition system (mental schema) are not developed enough to tell people apart.
Think of it like if you trained a neural network to do facial identification by only giving it white people. Compared to a near identical network where the only difference was that it was trained on a cross section of all of earth's people, which would you expect to do a better job?
Well, my professors were all able to associate my name with my face by midterms. A good portion of the teaching assistants were also able to identify me on sight. Though some of them knew me by "Log" rather than my proper name.
Strangely enough, the Chemistry Department was better at recognizing me than my own Comp Sci Department. Perhaps it was because my major stood out on the class ranking printouts. In one course, the profs gave out a new CRC Manual as a prize to the top scorer in the class, and they were lucky Sujata Bhatia beat me, because it might have been embarrassing to the department otherwise. Maybe lucky isn't the right word--the lady had mad skills with a molecule.
I suppose it would have been theoretically possible for me to have been impersonating another student the entire time I was at university, but so long as I answered to the same name during lectures and labs as I wrote on the test, and that name was paid up on tuition according to the bursar, that was pretty much all the verification that was needed.
Summary: Non-Californian students pay $23,000 more per year than Californian students, generating $600 million per year for the financially-strapped UC (University of California) system. UC is proposing to cap the number of out-of-state students at UC Berkeley and UCLA at 30% (its current level); no caps at other campuses. The total number of Californian students in the UC system will not increase; UC can't afford to admit more.
Someone in the student affairs office once mentioned to me that they do have a serious issue with fraudulent transcripts. Ultimately, you can't stop them all.
I think part of the problem is that the UCs are in a budget crunch and they were using out-of-state and international students to make up the shortfall. Supposedly, they're backing away from this strategy because it's starting to piss off the Legislature. People are complaining to their representatives because their kids aren't getting admitted, yet the number of out-of-state students keeps increasing. For me, the more annoying part is the fact that they're coming in with McLarens, Ferraris and Ashton Martins, and give off a level of amazing entitlement.
I live on Vancouver Island (short boat ride from Vancouver). This year I will graduate with a degree in computer science and already have a decent job working as a web developer. My wife has a well paying job with the government. We both have lots of family and friends in Vancouver but will likely never live there as we can't afford $700,000 for a starter home. Even here on Vancouver Island it seems the possibility of owning our own home is becoming unattainable as prices sky rocket. Something needs to be done about foreign investment.
I guess this happens all over the world. The rich get to live in the nicest cities and everyone else gets pushed out. I've lived here my whole life but soon I won't be able to call it home. I can't read many of the street signs in Richmond (Cantonese and Mandarin). I take the bus to University while some of my Chinese classmates drive their Maserati/Lambo/Mercedes. It feels like my home is being sold out from underneath me to the Chinese. I don't know how to solve this or even approach talking about it without offending people. Maybe I need to open my mind and not view this as a problem. But it makes me very sad to feel like I don't belong in the place where I grew up.
Just to take nationalism out of it; would you feel just as screwed if they were rich banker? You don't own that land and you can't use it unless it's literally a friend of yours. So what is the actual impact? Just the language on the signs?
Interestingly this is a bit of an exceptional case; it being a bubble and all you actually have leverage. The interesting thing about real-estate is that it's not like factories; the land doesn't itself produce value. If the people of Vancouver leave and it's nothing but investment property those prices will go down. Once they begin going down, it'll be a bad investment and they'll come down a lot (pretty common bubble situation). So if you think the market put the wrong price on those houses, just don't pay it and leave. Plenty of other good cities out there.
I can get the sentimental value of not wanting to leave your home, but why should anyone else care? There are plenty of other places out there to live that are far cheaper.
Full disclosure: I grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere and have never lived in a large city.
Yeah, but is it easy to find jobs in those places? Most economic activity happens in the big cities, so most people will want to live close to those cities in order to be in a reasonable commuting distance from work.
Of course, you could do remote work. But those kinds of jobs are not yet the norm. Plus, a lot of jobs require daily face-to-face interaction with clients, coworkers, or higher-ups.
If you are decent at IT you can find jobs. I know I've never had issues. They don't pay as much, but when you adjust for the price of living you can often end up with a better life style.
You have things backwards. To "be in a reasonable commuting distance from work" you must stay far from those cities. Well, assuming you want a family. Commuting into SF from some place in the central valley is not reasonable.
Pick the middle of Florida's east coast though, and you could afford a big house (perhaps half acre, 4 bedroom) within a mile of work. Yes, there are jobs.
Even here on Vancouver Island it seems the possibility of owning our own home is becoming unattainable as prices sky rocket. Something needs to be done about foreign investment.
Not really. Something needs to be done about parochial land use laws that prevent supply from rising to meet demand: http://www.amazon.com/TheRent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp.... Until that happens, prices will rise. Despite many efforts to the contrary, you cannot legislate away supply, demand, and prices.
Preventing new development appears to have really taken off in the 1970s, according to Chapters 7 and 8 of William Fischel's Zoning Rules!: http://www.amazon.com/Zoning-Rules-Economics-Land-Regulation.... Until we reverse that dynamic (or make cities less attractive places to live) we're going to see rising prices.
I think increasing supply is a good idea in the short run, but in the long run, I think the answer lies more in changing the way society views real estate.
As the article makes clear, real estate is increasingly viewed as an asset that can simply be purchased and held on to diversify a risky portfolio. Foreign property owners add little to no value (in a true, human, social sense) to the greater society. They do contribute tax revenue, but at the expense of making real estate unattainable for others by driving up prices.
Real estate used to be the center of a business owner's livelihood or a family's multi-decade investment in an area with family, good schools, a good community, etc.
While increasing supply would reduce price, foreign investors would simply purchase more. Demand for (perceived) stable assets to offset market volatility is at an all time high, especially in China where many are trying to export wealth.
When the market crashes, you'll have an oversupply of property that was built for people who did not actually inhabit the area.
LVT is thrown around a lot, but rarely understood by its proponents. Can you explain who would value the land and by what method it would be valued in order to guarantee fair payments from all parties? Would it completely replace the current property tax?
> Would it completely replace the current property tax?
Of which country?
There are lots of ways to implement LVT in different countries and different states (and it could even be implemented at even more local levels).
I have a softspot for methods that ask the owner themselves to value the land, but apply mechanism to keep them honest. (Like, `you have to sell at the declared value to any comer.') But honestly, those are probably not even the most practical ones.
Given the current supply constraints in that market, it will take a very long time to build up a level of inventory that will cause a crash. The solution to the problem you're describing is more units, not less.
Also, this transition in real estate's role is a result of globalization. Without some kind of capital controls it's very hard to undo it's effects. Your best bet is a supply-demand oriented solution.
When I talk about a crash, I mean a global correction in property and equity market values akin to the correction post-financial crisis. This would probably be triggered by a withdrawal of liquidity from public markets due to non-performing debt, or simply a prevailing market sentiment that investments have been channeled into the wrong assets following the great recession - not enough gov investment into TFP-raising infrastructure and decreasing lack of aggregate demand is a recipe for stagnation.
I don't see a mechanism whereby an increasing level of inventory causes a crash. I'm saying that when a crash happens, we'll be left with wasted excess capacity as investors rush to sell off ill-thought out high rise complexes, micro apartment buildings, second and third homes they can no longer afford to pay taxes on, etc.
The North American correction in property values post the 2008 financial crisis was due to two factors: 1) Increase in inventory levels as subprime borrowers tried to exit their mortgage via a fire sale 2) Total shut down of the mortgage markets, meaning only cash buyers could get deals done.
Given the profile of the typical buyer at the high end of the market in Vancouver, an outsized effect like the one described above is unlikely. These homes are not mortgaged and their owners have savings they draw upon instead of income from employment. Job losses a la 2008 do not affect them as much. For these reasons I doubt we will ever see the kind of corrections in Vancouver like we saw in places like Phoenix and Las Vegas in 2008.
Finally, a somewhat normative question, what's wrong with cheap housing? I agree with you that ill-thought out planning is detrimental to the city's quality of life. But to me at least it seems that the planning and permitting process is overly restrictive.
The spiking real estate in Vancouver is detached single family houses, which you cannot increase the supply of in Vancouver.
There is some component of demand that is buying these single family houses just for the extra space for their family. Rezoning detached houses to slightly more dense row houses will help increase supply for this group. The city is already doing this, but should certainly do more. The city can't do anything about people buying detached houses for investment and prestige reasons.
Vancouver is not SF. It has been building condo towers non stop since the 90s. Rent is not extremely unaffordable and condo valuations have been largely flat in comparison to single family houses.
Absolutely. Condo developers have been satisfied to build what makes them the most amount of money, which has resulted in heaps of bachelor pads.
More three bedroom apartments need to be built. This is a regulatory issue that shows how important the role of government and urban planning is. The city has already indicated that they're going to require developers to include a greater percentage of multi bedroom residences.
The biggest problem with housing is that it's just too easy to influence people to create an artificial scarcity when there is now, and in the few places there is no land laws will help as developers like to keep the supply short in order to increase it's value.
Even a small shortage (fake or real) can increase the value of properties by 100's of percent this means that building more isn't lucrative to neither developers nor investors, if you just bought a property as an investment you sure as hell do not want the developer going on and building 10 new ones as it will tank the price of your property. This means that even on the off chance that a developer might find formula that will allow them to build more the investors wont buy in and without that they can't build as no sane developer builds even a parking lot out of pocket these days.
On the other hand government housing isn't good either in most places government housing turns into ghettos faster than you can open a 7/11 and in the few countries it didn't like say Sweden it created the worse housing shortage anyone can imagine while creating a black market which corrupted the entire system.
If anything oddly enough China is taking the best approach just build entire cities, sure some of them rest as ghost cities for some years but unlike what the media reports in the west they tend to be filled almost instantly once the planets align.
The rich get to live in the nicest cities and everyone else gets pushed out
As a non-rich, this seems natural & unavoidable given the fundamental principals of economics & the free market. I'm not sure anything can be done about it, and I don't believe the people who say that if only we did X, everyone & anyone who wanted to live in Vancouver/Manhattan/Pacific Heights could.
The traditional way to handle too many rich people moving into town is to suck up to them as you charge extortionate prices on ordinary stuff that you can pretend is rare and exclusive.
One of the great things about rich kids is that they never really learned how much anything is really worth. So you can hand them pretty cocktails made from rail booze and gold leaf, and they gleefully hand you your next 20 car payments.
So you're looking at it the wrong way. It is an opportunity, not a curse. Turn that foreign investment into foreign spending. And try to make sure that a good portion is spent on you.
The problem is is that "normal" people can't afford those prices and when every shop becomes some "artisan" crap the only people who can afford to buy there are the rich and the hipsters that mooch of their parents / mount credit card debt while complaining about the student loans they had to take to get their medieval feminist arts degree and how the baby boomers that cover their bills ruined their future.
At least on Vancouver Island, it's not the foreigner's pushing up home prices, it's the locals.
Victoria is one of the few cities that actually tracks the citizenship of the buyer. In 2015, 97.8% of buyers of homes in Victoria were Canadian citizens. 0.68% were from Asia.[1]
Victoria is where the people who used to live in Vancouver come to retire. Sell your house in Vancouver for $2MM, buy a smaller one in Vic for $700k, and live off the difference.
> It feels like my home is being sold out from underneath me to the Chinese. ... But it makes me very sad to feel like I don't belong in the place where I grew up.
Don't worry. If how the English treated First Nations is any guide, you'll get a reservation at the end of the day.
(Really brief history for those from outside the region: ethnic-Europeans have been ruling British Columbia for less than two hundred years.)
capitalism sure does feel great when you're winning. but when someone shows up with more money, all of a sudden it starts feeling very unfair.
and nothing will be done about it because the powerful locals who make the laws are the ones getting rich (richer, really) selling all of the real estate to the foreigners.
and all of the anger will be misdirected at the chinese, allowing the process to continue indefinitely.
Pointing out how foreign nationals are buying up houses in the Greater Vancouver Area and feeding our local housing bubble is "slightly racist"?
Edit: Nevermind, your post seems to have completely changed. I suppose you're just afraid this will translate into Xenophobia against [presumably] people like you.
i was in the middle of editing my comment when you replied.
how is this any different than rich white dot com yuppies pushing lifelong latino or black residents out of San Francisco? am i supposed to feel sad for them, or sad for the white people getting pushed out of vancouver by rich asian people?
the answer is i don't really feel sad for either group. i'm sure it's sad if you're the one being pushed, but hey, apparently it happens to everyone.
I actually do feel sad for all groups being pushed out of their home, but as you rightly point out this is part of life. What is different about Vancouver is people are being pushed out of their homes and nobody is moving in. Seems a great waste of a beautiful location.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. One might inquire what the First Nations think about white man's towers of glass and Vancouver Specials in what used to be beautiful temperate rainforest...
> If how the English treated First Nations is any guide, you'll get a reservation at the end of the day.
Only if your vast assumption about China is correct, which it isn't. Their economy is in free-fall.
China's imports just collapsed by 19% in January, exports collapsed by 11%. Trillions of dollars of capital is rapidly fleeing their economy. Their government is in the midst of an extraordinarily violent and widespread crackdown on individual liberty, murdering billionaires and disappearing high-level executives and journalists. And they're going to have to dramatically devalue their currency, which will have the effect in real terms of slicing their economy down to size, including their wealth.
But that could be detainment. And it doesn't go into executives.
Of course you are right, I was just being lazy, but I was trying to be smarter about it than typing an obvious search into Google and reading dozens of articles with the hope that I found one informing me about the claims made by someone I've in the past observed to be interested in the news.
Where can I read about this? Of course if it's true, I could find a zillion dumb stories about it from various locations, but maybe you know a good, insightful, deep writup somewhere?
I'd never heard of this, so I am really fascinated.
EDIT: From a co-worker, the chairman of China is an old-school traditionalist Maoist who thinks all this Capitalism and Democracy BS has gone too far, and it's time to purge it all and have another cultural revolution. Still no good hard evidence links.
What about in London where the wealthy Chinese are also known to send their children, where complaints about their arrival can't be easily hand-waved away by saying that Europeans took the land from Native Americans or have only been there a short time themselves?
UK voted to sell itself out to rich people with mobile capital when they decided to stop being a manufacturing country and start being a finance country. That started in the 1980s and hasn't stopped since (witness Labour only ruling when they became "New Labour" stripping out all the too-Laboury bits). Plus it's hard to feel bad for people who reaped the benefits of colonizing half the world not too long ago.
Not to mention people in London usually complain about the wealthy Russians and Saudis these days
Although there could be a relevant point here, the combination of generic ideological tangent with snark is the worst way to make it. Please don't do that here.
One of the paragraphs that stood out to me the most:
I asked Bing Thom about the changes. The property boom has, of course, been good for the architectural profession, but Thom, who is now in his early seventies, is troubled by what is happening to his home town. “By all accounts, I have done pretty well in my business, but I made more money from sitting on my Vancouver property than I made by working an entire lifetime,” he said. “That tells you something.”
Eru beat me to the answer. Since the 1970s we witnessed a bunch of major trends: interest rates (lending costs) drop near 0, household incomes increase significantly due to women entering the workforce, continued urbanization, and rapid population growth. All of these trends supported massive appreciation of land and real estate. My perspective on this is that (especially urban) landowners were beneficiaries of an economic lottery that is unlikely to reoccur in our lifetimes.
Really fascinating article that spans a wide range of characters. Touches on a lot of important points:
Fuerdai come from the 2%, the 1% are comfortable in China and do not need to export wealth
Extreme poverty is only 1-2 generations away for many Fuerdai
"Astronaut" dynamic where father sends child/wife to establish home abroad
Spoiling children of the elite due to an apprehension of their coming of age
Vancouver has become a "hedge city" against volatility at home
State is addicted to tax revenue from international buyers
"City has become a hotel" and "countries are selling citizenship"
Fuerdai caught between Western and Chinese culture, belong to neither
Author ends the piece with this quote from a Weymi, a fuerdai: [In reference to Weymi's mother] She didn’t want to be like her mom or older sister, always gossiping about those in the village a smidgen better off than themselves.” Weymi put down her chopsticks. “It’s that kind of typical provincial pettiness, but that was her entire life if she had stayed.” She shook her head and drew a breath. “I mean, can you just imagine?"
The irony is deliciously tangible. Great piece with a lot to think about and chew on.
From the article: "The Chinese are currently transferring money out of the country at a rate of around four hundred and fifty billion dollars a year. Most of that money has gone into real estate." It's not just looking for an economic safe haven. There's fear of having too much money in China. As the article points out, within a few years of appearing on Forbes' list of the richest people in China, the Government of China tends to do something negative to those people.
Much of the buying is in a small number of places: London, New York, San Francisco. The impact there is huge.
The US built 965,700 housing units (this includes apartment units) in 2015.
Toronto and Vancouver would likely be at the top of the lists of chinese real estate investment.
Toronto had more condo buildings being built a few years ago than any other city in the world outside of a few cities in China. Something like 10x more than Chicago which was the #1 in the US for building construction.
I know quite a few people living in them who talk about how they are empty most of the time except when the Chinese owners children come to visit. Renting isn't always viable since there is a glut of condos available. Housing prices continue to go up there while condo prices actually went down for the first time in forever.
Don't put hate on people with money and speak different language you don't understand, my constructive suggestion for you is that earn it by yourself. Guess what, these richest people also pay the most expensive tax in Canada, and you are welcome.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadEven if these lazy Chinese kids' rich parents are subsidizing the hard-working Americans' education? (You can bet a Chinese billionaire's paying the full tuition without financial aid.)
Taxpayers are mostly the ones doing the student loan subsidizing. Whether the loans are funded through the Treasury or semi-indirectly via the Fed, it overwhelmingly comes out of US taxpayer pockets one way or another.
Why do you say it's a finite system?
personally i don't see much of a difference. i know plenty of both types and they're basically the same except for skin color.
And it WORKED! People really went to Cal or Davis or Chico or Bakersfield and made it out of poverty. All because the tuition was cheap and the plan worked. And California became what it is today. Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the Salinas agriculture sphere, Napa Valley, the dairy and forestry, all these places exist in California in some way due to the success of the master plan. The UCs are THE Jewel of The West's crown because the people of California put their money where their mouth was. They believed that education was the way to good living for their children. Assemblywoman Dorothy Donahoe, for whom the Master Plan bill was named, believed in the children of California. She was a person that planted trees whose shade she knew she would never sit in, and she did for her love of the people of California. And California grew mighty for those sacrifices. The UCs are THE BEST universities that have ever existed, by nearly any measure. The people of California, for decades and generations, paid into this with their taxes and knew it was good.
And now, now we have the scions of the Pacific Rim are cheating and buying their way into these places. They are taking the seats from hard working sons and daughters of farmers and loggers, dentists and doctors, mechanics and architects. And they flaunt their wealth! They don't care that the janitors who dream that their daughters will attend Santa Cruz and UCLA see them do doughnuts in Lambos.
The influx of wealth strikes at the core of the Master Plan and the hopes and dreams of the people of California. The UCs are seen as just another playground for the elite in this way (not strictly true yet). But for some reason the people of California are stuck footing some of the bill.
[0]http://www.ppic.org/main/publication_quick.asp?i=1119
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Master_Plan_for_Hig...
they also make up a tiny percentage of the overall student body. not that anyone gives a shit about that, because asian == foreign to most people.
2. I used to be uhh a foreign national in the U.S (as I still am), and assumed it was a known fact that Chinese nationals often buy their way through college. Somewhat related: Northeastern and their special- Chinese-student program that gives 4-year US degrees with 0 knowledge of English.
3. It is not necessarily something to complain about, as long as it doesn't COMPLETE dilute the value of the degrees concerned. AFAIK, Chinese students (NOT Chinese American, mind) are the only students who will often pay 100% of the feels, with no request for scholarships. So to look at it the other way, you're subsidizing smarter students by taking in slightly less smart students (tbh, most Chinese students are extremely competitive, so we shouldn't be generalizing.)
That kind of thing is very hard to acknowledge in the USA, even if true. It strikes close to past civil rights struggles.
And diluting the value of that degree at the same time by graduating not learning anything.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/01/...
Is there no such procedure at US institutions?
Think of each university in the US has having its own culture and way of doing things. Many universities certainly use best practices, but there are no federal regulations on such things as test identification.
Note that not every American has state-issued photo ID, especially among the poor.
Basically, the stereotype that all <insert group> look alike does happen, NOT because they do look alike, but because to someone who does not know members of that group, their facial recognition system (mental schema) are not developed enough to tell people apart.
Think of it like if you trained a neural network to do facial identification by only giving it white people. Compared to a near identical network where the only difference was that it was trained on a cross section of all of earth's people, which would you expect to do a better job?
Strangely enough, the Chemistry Department was better at recognizing me than my own Comp Sci Department. Perhaps it was because my major stood out on the class ranking printouts. In one course, the profs gave out a new CRC Manual as a prize to the top scorer in the class, and they were lucky Sujata Bhatia beat me, because it might have been embarrassing to the department otherwise. Maybe lucky isn't the right word--the lady had mad skills with a molecule.
I suppose it would have been theoretically possible for me to have been impersonating another student the entire time I was at university, but so long as I answered to the same name during lectures and labs as I wrote on the test, and that name was paid up on tuition according to the bursar, that was pretty much all the verification that was needed.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/ubc-s-vantage...
Summary: Non-Californian students pay $23,000 more per year than Californian students, generating $600 million per year for the financially-strapped UC (University of California) system. UC is proposing to cap the number of out-of-state students at UC Berkeley and UCLA at 30% (its current level); no caps at other campuses. The total number of Californian students in the UC system will not increase; UC can't afford to admit more.
I think part of the problem is that the UCs are in a budget crunch and they were using out-of-state and international students to make up the shortfall. Supposedly, they're backing away from this strategy because it's starting to piss off the Legislature. People are complaining to their representatives because their kids aren't getting admitted, yet the number of out-of-state students keeps increasing. For me, the more annoying part is the fact that they're coming in with McLarens, Ferraris and Ashton Martins, and give off a level of amazing entitlement.
Nice to see another anteater, though!
I guess this happens all over the world. The rich get to live in the nicest cities and everyone else gets pushed out. I've lived here my whole life but soon I won't be able to call it home. I can't read many of the street signs in Richmond (Cantonese and Mandarin). I take the bus to University while some of my Chinese classmates drive their Maserati/Lambo/Mercedes. It feels like my home is being sold out from underneath me to the Chinese. I don't know how to solve this or even approach talking about it without offending people. Maybe I need to open my mind and not view this as a problem. But it makes me very sad to feel like I don't belong in the place where I grew up.
Interestingly this is a bit of an exceptional case; it being a bubble and all you actually have leverage. The interesting thing about real-estate is that it's not like factories; the land doesn't itself produce value. If the people of Vancouver leave and it's nothing but investment property those prices will go down. Once they begin going down, it'll be a bad investment and they'll come down a lot (pretty common bubble situation). So if you think the market put the wrong price on those houses, just don't pay it and leave. Plenty of other good cities out there.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/investigations/questiona...
Full disclosure: I grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere and have never lived in a large city.
Of course, you could do remote work. But those kinds of jobs are not yet the norm. Plus, a lot of jobs require daily face-to-face interaction with clients, coworkers, or higher-ups.
Pick the middle of Florida's east coast though, and you could afford a big house (perhaps half acre, 4 bedroom) within a mile of work. Yes, there are jobs.
Start by not worrying about this. You're entitled to your own opinions.
> Maybe I need to open my mind and not view this as a problem.
That's literally the opposite of opening your mind, that's self-brainwashing.
> But it makes me very sad to feel like I don't belong in the place where I grew up.
You're not the only one feeling like this. It's happening in many places in the West.
Not really. Something needs to be done about parochial land use laws that prevent supply from rising to meet demand: http://www.amazon.com/TheRent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp.... Until that happens, prices will rise. Despite many efforts to the contrary, you cannot legislate away supply, demand, and prices.
Preventing new development appears to have really taken off in the 1970s, according to Chapters 7 and 8 of William Fischel's Zoning Rules!: http://www.amazon.com/Zoning-Rules-Economics-Land-Regulation.... Until we reverse that dynamic (or make cities less attractive places to live) we're going to see rising prices.
As the article makes clear, real estate is increasingly viewed as an asset that can simply be purchased and held on to diversify a risky portfolio. Foreign property owners add little to no value (in a true, human, social sense) to the greater society. They do contribute tax revenue, but at the expense of making real estate unattainable for others by driving up prices.
Real estate used to be the center of a business owner's livelihood or a family's multi-decade investment in an area with family, good schools, a good community, etc.
While increasing supply would reduce price, foreign investors would simply purchase more. Demand for (perceived) stable assets to offset market volatility is at an all time high, especially in China where many are trying to export wealth.
When the market crashes, you'll have an oversupply of property that was built for people who did not actually inhabit the area.
> Would it completely replace the current property tax?
Of which country?
There are lots of ways to implement LVT in different countries and different states (and it could even be implemented at even more local levels).
I have a softspot for methods that ask the owner themselves to value the land, but apply mechanism to keep them honest. (Like, `you have to sell at the declared value to any comer.') But honestly, those are probably not even the most practical ones.
Also, this transition in real estate's role is a result of globalization. Without some kind of capital controls it's very hard to undo it's effects. Your best bet is a supply-demand oriented solution.
I don't see a mechanism whereby an increasing level of inventory causes a crash. I'm saying that when a crash happens, we'll be left with wasted excess capacity as investors rush to sell off ill-thought out high rise complexes, micro apartment buildings, second and third homes they can no longer afford to pay taxes on, etc.
Given the profile of the typical buyer at the high end of the market in Vancouver, an outsized effect like the one described above is unlikely. These homes are not mortgaged and their owners have savings they draw upon instead of income from employment. Job losses a la 2008 do not affect them as much. For these reasons I doubt we will ever see the kind of corrections in Vancouver like we saw in places like Phoenix and Las Vegas in 2008.
Finally, a somewhat normative question, what's wrong with cheap housing? I agree with you that ill-thought out planning is detrimental to the city's quality of life. But to me at least it seems that the planning and permitting process is overly restrictive.
There is some component of demand that is buying these single family houses just for the extra space for their family. Rezoning detached houses to slightly more dense row houses will help increase supply for this group. The city is already doing this, but should certainly do more. The city can't do anything about people buying detached houses for investment and prestige reasons.
Vancouver is not SF. It has been building condo towers non stop since the 90s. Rent is not extremely unaffordable and condo valuations have been largely flat in comparison to single family houses.
More three bedroom apartments need to be built. This is a regulatory issue that shows how important the role of government and urban planning is. The city has already indicated that they're going to require developers to include a greater percentage of multi bedroom residences.
The biggest problem with housing is that it's just too easy to influence people to create an artificial scarcity when there is now, and in the few places there is no land laws will help as developers like to keep the supply short in order to increase it's value.
Even a small shortage (fake or real) can increase the value of properties by 100's of percent this means that building more isn't lucrative to neither developers nor investors, if you just bought a property as an investment you sure as hell do not want the developer going on and building 10 new ones as it will tank the price of your property. This means that even on the off chance that a developer might find formula that will allow them to build more the investors wont buy in and without that they can't build as no sane developer builds even a parking lot out of pocket these days.
On the other hand government housing isn't good either in most places government housing turns into ghettos faster than you can open a 7/11 and in the few countries it didn't like say Sweden it created the worse housing shortage anyone can imagine while creating a black market which corrupted the entire system.
If anything oddly enough China is taking the best approach just build entire cities, sure some of them rest as ghost cities for some years but unlike what the media reports in the west they tend to be filled almost instantly once the planets align.
As a non-rich, this seems natural & unavoidable given the fundamental principals of economics & the free market. I'm not sure anything can be done about it, and I don't believe the people who say that if only we did X, everyone & anyone who wanted to live in Vancouver/Manhattan/Pacific Heights could.
You're saying that one ideological change won't enable that for me (and every one of the other 100 million like me)?
One of the great things about rich kids is that they never really learned how much anything is really worth. So you can hand them pretty cocktails made from rail booze and gold leaf, and they gleefully hand you your next 20 car payments.
So you're looking at it the wrong way. It is an opportunity, not a curse. Turn that foreign investment into foreign spending. And try to make sure that a good portion is spent on you.
Victoria is one of the few cities that actually tracks the citizenship of the buyer. In 2015, 97.8% of buyers of homes in Victoria were Canadian citizens. 0.68% were from Asia.[1]
[1]http://www.greaterfool.ca/2016/01/31/of-debt-data/
Don't worry. If how the English treated First Nations is any guide, you'll get a reservation at the end of the day.
(Really brief history for those from outside the region: ethnic-Europeans have been ruling British Columbia for less than two hundred years.)
and nothing will be done about it because the powerful locals who make the laws are the ones getting rich (richer, really) selling all of the real estate to the foreigners.
and all of the anger will be misdirected at the chinese, allowing the process to continue indefinitely.
Edit: Nevermind, your post seems to have completely changed. I suppose you're just afraid this will translate into Xenophobia against [presumably] people like you.
how is this any different than rich white dot com yuppies pushing lifelong latino or black residents out of San Francisco? am i supposed to feel sad for them, or sad for the white people getting pushed out of vancouver by rich asian people?
the answer is i don't really feel sad for either group. i'm sure it's sad if you're the one being pushed, but hey, apparently it happens to everyone.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. One might inquire what the First Nations think about white man's towers of glass and Vancouver Specials in what used to be beautiful temperate rainforest...
Only if your vast assumption about China is correct, which it isn't. Their economy is in free-fall.
China's imports just collapsed by 19% in January, exports collapsed by 11%. Trillions of dollars of capital is rapidly fleeing their economy. Their government is in the midst of an extraordinarily violent and widespread crackdown on individual liberty, murdering billionaires and disappearing high-level executives and journalists. And they're going to have to dramatically devalue their currency, which will have the effect in real terms of slicing their economy down to size, including their wealth.
I'm not worried about your premise in the least.
This one at least mentions disappeared billionaires (if the first 3 do, I missed it):
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinas-crackdown-on-graft-media-...
But that could be detainment. And it doesn't go into executives.
Of course you are right, I was just being lazy, but I was trying to be smarter about it than typing an obvious search into Google and reading dozens of articles with the hope that I found one informing me about the claims made by someone I've in the past observed to be interested in the news.
Where can I read about this? Of course if it's true, I could find a zillion dumb stories about it from various locations, but maybe you know a good, insightful, deep writup somewhere?
I'd never heard of this, so I am really fascinated.
EDIT: From a co-worker, the chairman of China is an old-school traditionalist Maoist who thinks all this Capitalism and Democracy BS has gone too far, and it's time to purge it all and have another cultural revolution. Still no good hard evidence links.
Not to mention people in London usually complain about the wealthy Russians and Saudis these days
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11105754 and marked it off-topic.
I asked Bing Thom about the changes. The property boom has, of course, been good for the architectural profession, but Thom, who is now in his early seventies, is troubled by what is happening to his home town. “By all accounts, I have done pretty well in my business, but I made more money from sitting on my Vancouver property than I made by working an entire lifetime,” he said. “That tells you something.”
The irony is deliciously tangible. Great piece with a lot to think about and chew on.
Billionaires are going 'missing' every month and the government can pretty much take over your business and take all of your money, for any reason.
To make any kind of money there, you need to pay huge bribes.
Much of the buying is in a small number of places: London, New York, San Francisco. The impact there is huge.
The US built 965,700 housing units (this includes apartment units) in 2015.
Toronto had more condo buildings being built a few years ago than any other city in the world outside of a few cities in China. Something like 10x more than Chicago which was the #1 in the US for building construction.
I know quite a few people living in them who talk about how they are empty most of the time except when the Chinese owners children come to visit. Renting isn't always viable since there is a glut of condos available. Housing prices continue to go up there while condo prices actually went down for the first time in forever.