Kris Wallace and Andy Ali of Vancouver say their search for a larger condo to give their family more room has been frustrating. Real estate and rental costs in the city are so high that their 26-year-old daughter is still living with them and they’re all feeling the squeeze.
But Wallace says that ban didn’t do much for her family.
“There’s all of these very luxurious buildings going in all around us that are outrageously priced,” said Wallace, after attending an open house at a promising $1.1-million condo. “The foreign buyers tax … I don’t think that’s making an iota of difference.”
Critics say the foreign buyers ban, which was aimed at making housing affordable for Canadians, had many exemptions and was more of a political manoeuvre. They say it’s clear housing remains out of reach for too many in Canada, and that the country should look to other places in the world to find strategies to foster home ownership.
Federal budget’s housing plan targets foreign and first-time homebuyers
Housing affordability is a key focus for the Liberals in their 2022 federal budget, with promises of a ban on some foreign buyers for two years and billions of dollars to help first-time home buyers get into the market.
Though Housing Minister Sean Fraser’s office declined an interview request, his spokesperson said the government had worked with cities across the country to help “over 250,000 new homes get built over the next decade.” Earlier this month, the government announced a deal with Vancouver — $115 million to fast track the building of 40,000 homes in coming years.
In an email, the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) said 2023 data from the Canadian Housing Statistics Program is not yet available to determine the ban’s full effect.
The CMHC said Ottawa is “working to ensure every Canadian … has an affordable place to call home,” citing moves to forgive GST from newly constructed rental units, $20-billion in apartment financing and other initiatives.
In Vancouver late last month, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said the ban “is making a difference” by preserving housing where people can live. Earlier in November, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said that rather than helping to make housing affordable, the government’s policies have instead “made the problem worse.”
The housing minister acknowledged the housing crunch earlier this month, but challenged Poilievre’s strategy. “He seems content to tap into the anxiety of Canadians without putting forward a plan that’s actually going to help them,” said Fraser.
The Prohibition on the Purchase of Residential Property by Non-Canadians Act was meant to bar non-citizens, non-permanent residents and foreign controlled companies from buying Canadian property as an investment, but critics say there are so many exemptions that the ban doesn’t make much of a difference. (Ben Nelms/CBC)
Exemptions watered down ban
CMHC data reveals that only two per cent of real estate purchases in 2021 were made by non-Canadians, according to communications obtained by Global News through Access to Information.
A few months after the ban was put into place more exemptions were added. These included students, first-time buyers and properties under $500,000.
“There were so many exemptions to the foreign buyer ban that it really didn’t make any difference at all,” said Tim Sabitov of Team 3000 Realty Ltd, in Vancouver.
Any impacts of the ban were short-lived, according to Brendon Ogmundson, the chief economist for the B.C. Real Estate Association. “The foreign buyer ban was more political than economic policy or housing policy,” he said.
This year, Toronto’s market has softened, but the average home price is still $1.1-million — and the typical price of a home in Vancouver was $1.2-million in September, according to data from the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB) and the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA).
Even as Canadian home sales fell off in October, the average sale price rose 1.8 per cent that month, compared to the same period in 2022, according to the CREA. It was up 5.8 per cent in Vancouver, with the benchmark price for a detached home rising to $2,001,400, according to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver (REBGV).
Though the number of home sales fell off in the month of October, the average price of homes rose, according to data from the Canadian Real Estate Association. (Ben Nelms/CBC)
Some success
In 2016, B.C. introduced speculation and vacancy or empty homes taxes. Ontario followed the next year. These taxes were applied to high-demand areas to discourage people from buying property as an investment.
Thomas Davidoff, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business, and UBC PhD student Keling Zheng studied the effect of foreign buyer taxes in B.C. and Toronto and found they resulted in an initial drop in the price of housing that soon levelled off.
The city of Vancouver says CMHC data showed that speculation taxes helped cool the market and convert vacant properties into long-term rentals between 2017 and 2021.
On Tuesday, Ottawa announced new measures intended to help Canadians with the affordability crisis, including funding for new affordable homes and a new “Canadian Mortgage Charter,” which the government says will give homeowners new rights when facing a mortgage renewal. Meanwhile, the B.C. government has been introducing its own slew of housing-related policies, including a crackdown on short-term rentals. Dustin Miller, a real estate broker from Victoria, joins CBC’s Tanya Fletcher to talk about the immediate aftermath of the province’s new regulations.
Based on that success, B.C. has expanded the speculation tax program to 59 municipalities and the federal government is adopting many provincial policies encouraging transit-oriented and multi-unit developments, according to B.C.’s housing minister Ravi Kahlon.
“The Federal housing minister just recently went to Toronto Council and said, ‘Adopt what British Columbia is doing,’ ” Kahlon told CBC in Victoria on Nov. 30.
“We’re not waiting for the federal government. We’re taking action here already.”
According to Davidoff, high-end home prices did plummet initially after the foreign buyers ban — but he says the real driver was soaring interest rates that triggered an economic slowdown.
“The most affordable products actually rose in price for whatever reasons after the foreign buyer tax.”
There are still units for sale in this 43-storey luxury West End Vancouver condo, the Alberni by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma. Experts say that though high-end home prices did plummet after the ban on foreign buyers was instituted, the real driver was soaring interest rates. (Andrew Lee/CBC)
He says he’s not sure focusing only on foreign buyers helps make things more affordable and believes the focus should be on how a property is used — not who owns it.
Mike Stewart, a realtor with Vancouver New Condos, says “the ban was maybe a way for certain federal politicians to do better at the next election as opposed to trying to help housing affordability.”
Canada’s ban ‘full of holes,’ critics say
Those who do advocate for taxes and bans say they need to be tougher to work.
“Canada’s ban was full of holes,” said Andy Yan, director of the City Program, a continuing education program focusing on urban planning and development at Simon Fraser University. “I would tell people it was more like cheesecloth than duct tape.”
Yan says places like Hong Kong and Singapore use much higher taxes and rigid buyer restrictions to cool prices.
The foreign buyer ban came long after speculation taxes already discouraged non-resident property investors in B.C., he and other housing experts note. And the country has other problems.
Stagnant wages, a lack of affordable housing stock and a legacy of attracting global property investors due to weak regulations all feed the affordability problem, according to David Ley, author of Housing Booms in Gateway Cities.
The retired UBC Urban Geography professor says Canada could learn from success stories like Singapore, which boasted one of the highest home ownership rates in the world in 2022 at 89 per cent.
A rapid transit train passes a public housing construction site in Singapore on Oct. 21, 2022. About 80 per cent of Singapore’s housing stock is public. (Roslan Rahman/AFP/Getty Images)
“Singapore has solved its housing question. Now, how many cities in the world could we say that of?” asked Ley.
He credits Singapore’s success to aggressive speculation taxes — 60 per cent compared to B.C.’s 25 per cent — and the use of those taxes to create robust public housing stocks.
Singapore’s housing is 80 per cent public, compared to Canada’s, which sits closer to six per cent.
Ley says Singapore controls “investor play” in the housing market “so there is opportunity for local buyers to be successful.”
Back in Vancouver, Wallace and Ali are still hunting for a condo, for they say many are priced too high, especially given today’s interest rates.
“Most of the building owners seem financially able to sit tight and wait. Which is frustrating for buyers,” said Wallace.
Kris Wallace and Andy Ali say they’re still looking for a new condo in Vancouver, but they’re finding many they feel are too expensive, especially considering how high interest rates are. (Ben Nelms/CBC)
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
