The differences between the middle of the country and the east & west coast, since 2000, is startling.
I'd love to see this sort of graphic normalized against wage inflation as well. Is what we're seeing just fairly flat wage stagnation in the midwest, but wage inflation on the coasts (leading to a rise in housing prices)? If we start to see salary multiples of 3x, 4x, or 5x, if you just live on a coastline, what will that end up doing to interstate trade and commerce? Will the middle of the country begin to lose some of their buying power, purely because their inflation rates are lower?
I bet it's a combination of things. West coast cities are more desirable for younger people, there's better weather, a more socially liberal climate, more employers and other young people to interact with, and the networking opportunities. Plus overseas investors looking to put their cash in safe haven, but I would ascribe most of it to it just being a more desirable place to live.
According to all the generation-war articles, young people don't have any money, so in that view the places desirable to young people would be declining in value.
I have a feeling the truth might be simple. Normal home values are mostly stagnant or down (due to the 2000s bubble), no further explanation needed. Regions that are exceptionally down are just actually in decline economically. Regions that have risen slightly are economically rising. Regions that are exceptionally up are a combination of economic success and intentional real estate manipulation for financial motives (for example, property owners purposefully obstructing the development of new homes, which is a common accusation in bay area threads on this very site.)
Not necessarily. Young people might not have enough money (or income security) to afford a down payment and mortgage, but they do have enough money to split rent for an apartment/condominium/house with 1 or more other people. And the folks migrating to the desirable cities are probably more resourceful than the ones who are not, but their extra earnings are captured by landlords, who can then use the higher rents to justify higher property prices.
Edit: I wonder if it's possible the quantify the role income security, or lack thereof, plays in home prices.
A more relevant metric is net new household formation. The rust belt and southern metro areas you see the decline since 2000 are fighting a losing demographic battle.
In many west coast locations, house prices are far beyond the prior housing bubble peaks, I often come across places that are 75% to 100% more than they were during the mid-2000s bubble.
Pick any popular western location, city, or neighborhood, and you'll find prices 300% and 500% higher than they were in 2000 and often double or more what they were in the first housing boom. And no, incomes have not increased that much. Many of these areas have price-to-income ratios into the absurd of 10x-15x. Outside of San Francisco, does anyone really think that is sustainable?
In the former case, the inflation was due to sketchy MBS's. In the latter case, price inflation in major city center's suburbs are causing the cost of building materials to go sky (lumber I believe is up 16% in the past 6 months), thus making a house that was once 100$ a square foot to build now 135$ a square foot.
Not a problem for those who already have assets and can ride the wave. Well, I guess not a problem as long as they have the cash flow to keep it going, or at least 1 non-leveraged home.
Mark Blyth is fond of observing that "The Hamptons are not a defensible position".
Here in the UK we're finally seeing signs that the political worm is starting to turn. Partly a realization, growing for a while, that permanently excluding everyone who doesn't already own a home from any kind of financial security is maaaybe not the most far-sighted electoral strategy. Partly the shock of the recent General Election where the young actually voted for once. (I don't think they voted for anything helpful, in this context, but the mere act of voting means that their problems are suddenly being taken seriously in a way they weren't before.)
I would love to see some real data on this. I hear the blame for high real estate prices go to Chinese foreigners very frequently, yet I have never seen any real facts.
This is what I see happening with real estate right now.
I feel like the majority of people who are driving up the prices are the people who were lucky to buy property at the right time and right place in the past and are cashing in now and trading up to a much nicer property in a different less expensive city or even in the same city they live in.
It can make sense to stay in the same city and trade up, the economy is better now, they most likely have higher paying jobs and their profits from their old property effectively reduces the cost of new properties to house prices many years ago assuming they use their profit as a down payment.
It is the people who were not homeowners before who are suffering in this market. This is why house values have no attachment to wages. Wages are not what are determining prices. It is the profits from previously purchased property which is fueling this market.
Rich Chinese we're blamed for the housing bubble in Vancouver and Toronto. They finally started tracking it and it was barely above 5% (all foreign purchases). And only if you focused on certain neighborhoods.
95% of purchasers were Canadian citizens or permanent residents. Low interest rates and willingness to take on a lot of debt is what drove the bubble in Canada.
What impact does the other 95% of Canadians who now hold record levels of real estate debt have?
Do foreign purchases have an impact on the market? Sure. Would the market still be crazy overheated and ready to collapse without foreign purchases? I'd bet it would.
In Vancouver it was over 5%. In some suburbs - Burnaby and Richmond - (not neighbourhoods) it was over 15% of purchases. When you consider that most of these purchasers aren't selling houses at the same time, then it becomes an even bigger % of actual demand.
edit: just looked at the stats. Metro Vancouver was at about 12.5% of sales, and Richmond was at nearly 25% of sales before they put in the foreign buyers tax.
This is a very good point - many normal purchasers will be selling a house at the same time that they're buying one, so there's a net zeroing in additional housing demand. Renters who are buying a house will leave a rental unit open, and cause a tiny decrease in rent prices. But investors frequently just take housing off the market, and contribute to a shortage. And as with most life necessities, housing is somewhat inelastic in terms of demand, so shortages cause skyrocketing prices.
How many "Canadian citizens" are a wife and kids with zero taxable income and free social services while the husband is back at home earning money with no taxes paid to Canada? We'll never know the real number because Canadian home owners and the government are happy to turn a blind eye.
"There is one Canadian citizen in every 13 households in Hong Kong, says a new survey by Vancouver-based Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. About 300,000 Canadian citizens are living and working in the metropolitan city and 8 per cent of households there reported to have at least one Canadian over the age of 18 among them."
"Only 16 per cent of the Canadians surveyed considered Canada as their home “all the time,” while 37 per cent said “never.” Worse, 35 per cent said they would “almost never” or “never” consider returning to Canada."
Some more interesting anecdotes can be found in threads like these, such as:
"I've had a number of them come into my dental office. They all get their kids on the Healthy Smiles program which pays for dental care for children of low income families in Ontario. They claim they're low income so they qualify for it and they roll up to their appointments in brand new Lexus' and Audi's. Not only are they pricing Canadians out of real estate but they're abusing the social security system."
https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/5krd4n/canada_overw...
Canada serves two purposes:
- free education and healthcare
- escape plan if the sh*t starts to hit the fan at home
And it's the perfect country for abuse due to a culture of extreme politically correctness. (e.g.: Citizens of Chinese ethnicity won't be audited as it could be perceived as being racist):
You can hardly even get any truth from social media any more, /r/Vancouver moderators will ban you if you post anything implying any wrongdoing may be happening. /r/Canada still seems to allow it, for now.
It could be only ~5%, but it could still have a >5% effect. The existence of a big price-insensitive well of cash buyers in the housing market could easily set off a feedback loop / bubble.
It'll be impossible to get such data, but it's probably a huge amount, coming in different sources:
- direct purchase of RE by Chinese nationals
- international trade disproportionately benefiting coastal cities and major metros, attracting more people to those regions and making them richer
- money channeled from China into investment funds, which in turn invest in mortgages, and collectively with other hot money, drives down mortgage rates thus making it cheaper for people to invest in RE.
Well sure, it's a "supply issue" in that demand exceeds supply, but that avoids the important question, which is why does demand exceed supply? The author is quite frank that the exact nature of the excessive new demand is not known, but he presents several theories, each of which contributes to an unknown degree.
There is an unknown amount of foreign demand that is amplifying the lack of supply to an unknown degree. Saying it is "just a lack of supply" is disingenuous.
With a relatively small amount of effort the government could dramatically improve the amount and quality of data on the topic, but it is very clear their goal is to obfuscate what is really happening as much as possible while giving the appearance of transparency. See: the ridiculous 5% foreign transactions claim.
I read the entire article, yes. Read it again yourself and pay attention for words like "may", and "might". Those words are used because it is inconclusive, and it is inconclusive because the government refuses to publish and often even collect the data that would be required to come to a reasonably accurate conclusion. This is crystal clear to anyone actually paying attention, but don't worry because almost no one is - the majority of Canadians are profiting from it.
Here is one example: someone that buys citizenship in Quebec and then purchases a house in Vancouver is considered non-foreign.
Here is another example: wife and kids get citizenship or permanent resident status, and the husband does not. This way, the wife can buy a house with overseas money and make tax free capital gains, plus the whole family gets free medical, dental, welfare cheques, GST rebates, and they don't even have to declare overseas income because the husband is not a citizen (not that the CRA would even check, because front line auditors have been told clearly that auditing certain people is not allowed.) To be fair, Canada does (I think) receive sales tax on the purchase of a few Mercedes, Ferraris, Porsches, etc.
This second approach is a common strategy because it's easy and foolproof - there's actually a guy on reddit that posts the various different ways around the various laws that are supposedly intended to stop this sort of thing, there is always a gigantic easy to work around loophole. Whether that is accidental or deliberate, no one knows, and there's no way of knowing.
So, any "stats" that anyone quotes might as well just be made up. They're not "wrong" or "lies", but the specific stats they quote are meaningless considering the exceptions I've noted.
This seems to reflect the "graying" of rural America: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/the-gra.... Younger generations are moving to denser areas, driving property values up. This isn't a bad thing per se (denser populations are more environmentally friendly), but is probably driving some of the division in the USA today.
"Real estate cannot simultaneously be affordable and a good investment."
As soon as someone becomes a homeowner, it becomes in his/her best interests to make sure others cannot become homeowners at anything but a higher price. It's one of the most extreme perverse incentives in modern economies.
To provide a little more detail on davidw's comment: In several US states, your property tax is locked in when you buy a house.
So you could have two identical houses next door to each other, one last sold in 1975, the other 2015, and their property taxes would likely differ by a factor of at least 30x.
'Competition' is about competing for the available housing. If there's less housing, because of zoning laws and NIMBYism, the competition will be fiercer and prices higher. No one is saying that San Fran will ever be dirt cheap, just that it could be a lot cheaper if the market were allowed to function there.
"Oh, looking at this it is worth remembering that NIMBYism and real estate prices are one of the biggest drivers of inequality in the world."
I am not sure that is the case.
Certainly the growing inequality between the falling middle class and the increasingly rare upwardly mobile class could very well be due to the factors you cite.
But the biggest inequality (both globally and locally) is between people who have literally nothing - as in, zero dollars - and people who have (anything more than zero). Even if you live at the poverty level and have no assets you are still infinitely better off than someone with nothing.
That inequality gap is not due to zoning laws or illegal sublets or OMI evictions or whatever.
That's exactly the case I talked about, growing inequality, driven by higher returns on capital, is drive actually by higher returns on housing, due to NIMBY laws.
>Housing doesn't have to be expensive. It is, mostly, due to political reasons.
And it's made even more expensive because of interest on mortgages--which isn't real money to begin with. That's right, the banks charge you interest on money they created out of thin air.
Pittsburgh has a thriving tech and financial sector, driven by CMU and PNC respectively. Buffalo has never quite been part of the "rust belt", they're more east coast. They have lot of stable government employment because of New York state.
Surprisingly, no. Though the Buffalo areas' ports of entry draw about as much cross-border traffic as Detroit (but not including Port Huron-Sarnia also in Michigan), Toronto's proximity to Buffalo is not often felt.
A few trade and investment groups have been working in the last 15 years to attract Canadian companies to Buffalo with good success, but largely Canada's influence grows towards Michigan and approaching Chicago, and it's the US' influence that grows along the Niagara border into Canada's Greater Toronto area.
There are a few that surprise me here -- declines for Indianapolis, Columbus -- these first two are really odd, but also Columbia, Augusta, and almost all of Alabama.
I know none of these places have the draw of the coasts, but are solid metros that have seen some growth since the recession.
Is it just that they're being outcompeted by larger regional neighbors, like Atlanta, Charlotte, and Charleston?
Why is all of Indiana and Ohio so blue when the two state capitals and their suburbs have been recovering much better than that region's other cities?
> Why is all of Indiana and Ohio so blue when the two state capitals and their suburbs have been recovering much better than that region's other cities?
I'd love to have an answer to this question, too. I grew up in rural central Ohio. There is still some industry hanging on, but just barely. All that I can hazard to speculate now is that it will be very interesting to see what happens to those areas when the coming trucking-industry revolution hits.
This is going to sound paranoid, obviously, but I was thinking if China ever wanted to start a war with North America, it has quite a sizable population in the US and Canada that could potentially contribute to that aim.
Much of middle-America (and Canada) was settled by huge numbers of German immigrants. At the start of WW1, there were similar concerns about German sympathies.
It just doesn't work that way. These people have made their homes here and count themselves as Canadians and Americans. They might have sympathies for the old country (much as many of us in North America do), but the stronger these sympathies are, the less likely we'll go to war in the first place.
German-Americans were, for a long time, the largest national-ethnic group in the US. After the World Wars, calling oneself a German-American went out of fashion.
There are some interesting articles on the matter:
There are lots of people of Chinese ancestry in the US, sure, but there is no reason to believe any substantial number of them have any devotion to the present government of the People's Republic of China.
Quite a lot of them are from families that have been American much longer than the PRC has existed.
Everyone here is talking about bubble, overpricing, inflations etc. But the long term demographic shift is coastal growth at the expense of the rest of the country. The West coast especially has a booming economy and is growing at a very rapid pace.
I think most of the price increase is just a supply/demand issue. Lots of people moving to coastal areas and American cities are terrible are high density housing and planning.
76 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadI'd love to see this sort of graphic normalized against wage inflation as well. Is what we're seeing just fairly flat wage stagnation in the midwest, but wage inflation on the coasts (leading to a rise in housing prices)? If we start to see salary multiples of 3x, 4x, or 5x, if you just live on a coastline, what will that end up doing to interstate trade and commerce? Will the middle of the country begin to lose some of their buying power, purely because their inflation rates are lower?
I have a feeling the truth might be simple. Normal home values are mostly stagnant or down (due to the 2000s bubble), no further explanation needed. Regions that are exceptionally down are just actually in decline economically. Regions that have risen slightly are economically rising. Regions that are exceptionally up are a combination of economic success and intentional real estate manipulation for financial motives (for example, property owners purposefully obstructing the development of new homes, which is a common accusation in bay area threads on this very site.)
Edit: I wonder if it's possible the quantify the role income security, or lack thereof, plays in home prices.
Pick any popular western location, city, or neighborhood, and you'll find prices 300% and 500% higher than they were in 2000 and often double or more what they were in the first housing boom. And no, incomes have not increased that much. Many of these areas have price-to-income ratios into the absurd of 10x-15x. Outside of San Francisco, does anyone really think that is sustainable?
It's like drinking alcohol to ease the suffering caused by a mental health problem. You just make everything worse.
Here in the UK we're finally seeing signs that the political worm is starting to turn. Partly a realization, growing for a while, that permanently excluding everyone who doesn't already own a home from any kind of financial security is maaaybe not the most far-sighted electoral strategy. Partly the shock of the recent General Election where the young actually voted for once. (I don't think they voted for anything helpful, in this context, but the mere act of voting means that their problems are suddenly being taken seriously in a way they weren't before.)
This is what I see happening with real estate right now. I feel like the majority of people who are driving up the prices are the people who were lucky to buy property at the right time and right place in the past and are cashing in now and trading up to a much nicer property in a different less expensive city or even in the same city they live in.
It can make sense to stay in the same city and trade up, the economy is better now, they most likely have higher paying jobs and their profits from their old property effectively reduces the cost of new properties to house prices many years ago assuming they use their profit as a down payment.
It is the people who were not homeowners before who are suffering in this market. This is why house values have no attachment to wages. Wages are not what are determining prices. It is the profits from previously purchased property which is fueling this market.
95% of purchasers were Canadian citizens or permanent residents. Low interest rates and willingness to take on a lot of debt is what drove the bubble in Canada.
I don't closely follow that story and I haven't seen your sources, but in general a 5% marginal increase in buyers can completely transform a market.
Do foreign purchases have an impact on the market? Sure. Would the market still be crazy overheated and ready to collapse without foreign purchases? I'd bet it would.
edit: just looked at the stats. Metro Vancouver was at about 12.5% of sales, and Richmond was at nearly 25% of sales before they put in the foreign buyers tax.
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2011/02/24/hong_kong_asi...
"There is one Canadian citizen in every 13 households in Hong Kong, says a new survey by Vancouver-based Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. About 300,000 Canadian citizens are living and working in the metropolitan city and 8 per cent of households there reported to have at least one Canadian over the age of 18 among them." "Only 16 per cent of the Canadians surveyed considered Canada as their home “all the time,” while 37 per cent said “never.” Worse, 35 per cent said they would “almost never” or “never” consider returning to Canada."
Some more interesting anecdotes can be found in threads like these, such as:
"I've had a number of them come into my dental office. They all get their kids on the Healthy Smiles program which pays for dental care for children of low income families in Ontario. They claim they're low income so they qualify for it and they roll up to their appointments in brand new Lexus' and Audi's. Not only are they pricing Canadians out of real estate but they're abusing the social security system." https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/5krd4n/canada_overw...
Canada serves two purposes:
- free education and healthcare
- escape plan if the sh*t starts to hit the fan at home
And it's the perfect country for abuse due to a culture of extreme politically correctness. (e.g.: Citizens of Chinese ethnicity won't be audited as it could be perceived as being racist):
http://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-cana...
http://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-vanc...
You can hardly even get any truth from social media any more, /r/Vancouver moderators will ban you if you post anything implying any wrongdoing may be happening. /r/Canada still seems to allow it, for now.
- direct purchase of RE by Chinese nationals
- international trade disproportionately benefiting coastal cities and major metros, attracting more people to those regions and making them richer
- money channeled from China into investment funds, which in turn invest in mortgages, and collectively with other hot money, drives down mortgage rates thus making it cheaper for people to invest in RE.
http://www.sightline.org/2017/07/05/stop-blaming-foreign-hom...
tl;dr - that's not really the problem. It's a supply issue.
With a relatively small amount of effort the government could dramatically improve the amount and quality of data on the topic, but it is very clear their goal is to obfuscate what is really happening as much as possible while giving the appearance of transparency. See: the ridiculous 5% foreign transactions claim.
Here is one example: someone that buys citizenship in Quebec and then purchases a house in Vancouver is considered non-foreign.
Here is another example: wife and kids get citizenship or permanent resident status, and the husband does not. This way, the wife can buy a house with overseas money and make tax free capital gains, plus the whole family gets free medical, dental, welfare cheques, GST rebates, and they don't even have to declare overseas income because the husband is not a citizen (not that the CRA would even check, because front line auditors have been told clearly that auditing certain people is not allowed.) To be fair, Canada does (I think) receive sales tax on the purchase of a few Mercedes, Ferraris, Porsches, etc.
This second approach is a common strategy because it's easy and foolproof - there's actually a guy on reddit that posts the various different ways around the various laws that are supposedly intended to stop this sort of thing, there is always a gigantic easy to work around loophole. Whether that is accidental or deliberate, no one knows, and there's no way of knowing.
So, any "stats" that anyone quotes might as well just be made up. They're not "wrong" or "lies", but the specific stats they quote are meaningless considering the exceptions I've noted.
This seems to reflect the "graying" of rural America: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/the-gra.... Younger generations are moving to denser areas, driving property values up. This isn't a bad thing per se (denser populations are more environmentally friendly), but is probably driving some of the division in the USA today.
Housing doesn't have to be expensive. It is, mostly, due to political reasons.
https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/2164734...
As soon as someone becomes a homeowner, it becomes in his/her best interests to make sure others cannot become homeowners at anything but a higher price. It's one of the most extreme perverse incentives in modern economies.
So you could have two identical houses next door to each other, one last sold in 1975, the other 2015, and their property taxes would likely differ by a factor of at least 30x.
https://i.imgur.com/kltiDm4.png?1
But at least people with $10 million houses are spared the indignity of paying for local services.
And competition is high because supply is constrained by NIMBY zoning regulations. It's an artificial constraint.
> And competition is high because supply is constrained
I think you and the person you're replying to are using the word 'competition' differently.
If demand increases and you pass laws forbidding the increase in supply, prices will increase.
I am not sure that is the case.
Certainly the growing inequality between the falling middle class and the increasingly rare upwardly mobile class could very well be due to the factors you cite.
But the biggest inequality (both globally and locally) is between people who have literally nothing - as in, zero dollars - and people who have (anything more than zero). Even if you live at the poverty level and have no assets you are still infinitely better off than someone with nothing.
That inequality gap is not due to zoning laws or illegal sublets or OMI evictions or whatever.
And it's made even more expensive because of interest on mortgages--which isn't real money to begin with. That's right, the banks charge you interest on money they created out of thin air.
A few trade and investment groups have been working in the last 15 years to attract Canadian companies to Buffalo with good success, but largely Canada's influence grows towards Michigan and approaching Chicago, and it's the US' influence that grows along the Niagara border into Canada's Greater Toronto area.
I know none of these places have the draw of the coasts, but are solid metros that have seen some growth since the recession.
Is it just that they're being outcompeted by larger regional neighbors, like Atlanta, Charlotte, and Charleston?
Why is all of Indiana and Ohio so blue when the two state capitals and their suburbs have been recovering much better than that region's other cities?
I'd love to have an answer to this question, too. I grew up in rural central Ohio. There is still some industry hanging on, but just barely. All that I can hazard to speculate now is that it will be very interesting to see what happens to those areas when the coming trucking-industry revolution hits.
It just doesn't work that way. These people have made their homes here and count themselves as Canadians and Americans. They might have sympathies for the old country (much as many of us in North America do), but the stronger these sympathies are, the less likely we'll go to war in the first place.
There are some interesting articles on the matter:
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/23/opinion/whatever-happened...
[2] https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21642222-americ...
Quite a lot of them are from families that have been American much longer than the PRC has existed.
https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://...
It's interesting how many things generally correlate with urban/rural population distribution, too...
I think most of the price increase is just a supply/demand issue. Lots of people moving to coastal areas and American cities are terrible are high density housing and planning.
Shift+scroll pans the map left and right.
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