The investors are the like-minded people who banded together to raise property values and benefit from it directly, while also exerting their will to keep new people out, or at least keep out everyone except the very wealthiest.
Calling this behavior "protective" of the city is tantamount to saying that the city is only for the investors.
The exact topic of this article: Small quantities of investors with different economic incentives can result in big effects.
> The investors are the like-minded people who banded together
I rather doubt that it was a concerted effort to band together. It's more akin to "curse of the commons": Each individual actor acting in their best interest results in emergent behavior.
The solution being pursued is to change the rules to dissuade certain behaviors that negatively impact the populace as a whole.
By your logic, liberal silicon valley techies should band together to fire/cancel/censor conservatives who do not share their values. After all, like-minded people need to band together to out-compete the outsiders who think differently right?
Of all the people in the world the people geographically close to you and that share citizenship or nationality are the most likely to think like you or share goals that benefit both parties.
Even if nationality is sometimes moderately correlated with the values you hold, when a stronger correlation exists, your alleged ideological commitment to forming in-groups and out-groups based on shared values should mean that people have the right (or even obligation) to discriminate based on non-nationality-based factors (e.g. liberals discriminating against conservatives in tech).
Nationality is correlated with the values you hold in the broadest sense. Easy example: a natural born citizen in the US is far less likely to believe in the validity of Sharia law than someone born in an Arab state.
In even more abstract terms, what is good for you is likely to be location dependent. People in Germany have different problems from people in the US or France, and those are different from African, Asian, and South American countries. There are of course common trends, but to pretend all of politics is some shared set of problems is ridiculous.
People discriminate based on traits all the time. Liberals in tech do discriminate against conservatives (or perceived conservatives) all the time. They are free to do so, most people don't see many things as something you can protect as a class.
Why would the most beneficial group of people that we want to band with be optimal when limited to a subset of the population, whether that's simply a random selection, or a potentially bigoted selection/identification mechanism like skin color, wealth, religious sect, family name, etc.?
I don't understand why a broader grouping (possibly global) of people wouldn't outcompete a smaller group, the larger group by definition has a larger capability...intra-group communication may be slightly more difficult with language barriers and cultural differences, and the relative contributions of sub-groups of members may differ based on their resources, but the sum total would still be greater.
As opposed to the domestic billionaires who have deep compassion for the interests of the working class?
I'm not trying to boil this down to "foreigners bad. locals good." But there are various factors that play in to how much one cares about their impact on others, with physical and political distance being two of them.
Ability to pool resources, ability and will to bend rules for the sake of promoting group's interests (ie. nepotism).
"Protecting" communities by excluding people means that the only people that get in are the wealthiest, and because exclusion is the baseline, every new wealthy person kicks out a less wealthy person.
The exclusion is an excuse to enforce austerity, the classic means of squeezing the less wealthy to the benefit of the more wealthy.
But the manner in which the community is "protected" in this case is by excluding wealthy foreigners who swoop in and pay huge sums over asking, sight unseen, for properties. Not sure how that could be detrimental to someone who isn't wealthy.
Seriously, "xenophobia towards investors" strikes me a bit like the Silicon Valley bit about comparing the plight of Billionaires to enemies of the third reich.
You completely ignored the point I made. How is an investor from China buying real estate in Vancouver purely for investment purposes with no intention of having anyone live there any different than someone from Toronto doing it? Why is the former punished harsher than the latter?
If you are solely worried about the tax base, wouldn't bringing in foreign investors into real estate investing while letting domestic investors focus on some other investment vehicles lead to more tax revenue?
That one group has less stake and can be discouraged through legislation while another has some constitutional-like protections is not a compelling problem compared to the one in the paragraph above.
I'm making no judgment calls here, just pointing out that an easy, pat answer is not sufficient.
What there are complaints about are foreign investors who bid up property prices but don't move to the city, at least not before retirement age.
This causes a huge disconnect between the price of land in an area, and the earning potential in that area. For people who hope to own land but don't already, it's always out of reach, because they aren't competing with their peers, and the wealthy pockets that are buying homes aren't customers of other local businesses. It's not quite the same as a cluster of unicorns driving up tech salaries to the point where teachers and nurses can't compete on the market. There are no unicorns based in Vancouver. It's hard to identify any career path, even doctor, rockstar engineer, or lawyer, that a high school graduate today could expect to follow while working in this city and be on track for home ownership when time comes to start a family. Assuming that the trend continues, that is. And if it corrects, then it's a question of who was unlucky enough to catch the knife -- because any young locals in the ownership market are going to be highly leveraged, there's no other way.
That might read like xenophobia, but actual immigrants who intend to live, work, and raise families here are generally warmly welcomed and appreciated no matter where they come from. There are some people who get their signals crossed but it's a small minority.
How do you differentiate it from xenophobia?
In this sense, these foreign investors are taking advantage of a functional social/legal system that lowers risk, but in the cases documented nearby, they aren't giving back to ensure the longevity of the system. Indeed, their remotely-executed purchases increase its instability.
The Government of Canada has the ability to published (anonymized) data (real estate sales correlated to the buyers historic income taxes/wealth, etc) that could eliminate most of the opaqueness of what is really going on in Canadian housing markets, but they do not, despite vowing to "get to the bottom of" the situation.
The media could point out that the Canadian Government has this ability but does not do it, but they do not, despite claiming to be trustworthy, unbiased reporters of the affairs that are important to the public.
As is often the case, what is actually true is unjustly (and "democratically") hidden from view of the public, coverage is provided (intentionally or not) by the media, and the end result is that the populace is split into various camps who then fight among themselves. Is this situation the actual "will of the people", as we are endlessly told is what Democracy (and nothing else) delivers? I believe there is a fairly substantial amount of evidence that it is not what people want, although that sort of topic seems a bit socially taboo, so all one can do is speculate.