The last thing Vancouver needs is another tax.

I call this place the land of the nickle and dime. Never seen so many taxes.

How did they ever get away with charging all the additional taxes above PST. I am talking about recycling fees, disposal fees, environmental fees, even alcohol tax in a restaurant on taxed alcohol!

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Empty condos are bad for communities, and last time I checked, that's what a city were suppose to be places for people to live, not simple as an investment opportunity.

I say if people want to cause all the associated problems that this sort of practice causes. Make em pay.

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There's even a helluva lot of crappy 70's and 80's stuff– of the half-dozen 70's and 80's buildings that I inspected for a relative, all but one had been leaky condos, some of them even had their repaired walls go leaky again.

I wouldn't put any inherent trust into any age of buildings around here– crappy workmanship is endemic. There are good buildings, but you've got to do your own due diligence. All the Hardie siding and rainscreens in the world won't save you from incompetently-applied tar paper.

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All those wasted resources, all the environmental damage, for nothing good.

This housing bubble will cause all kinds of social and economic turmoil, that will affect even the richest wisest bears.

I hope to never see another housing bubble in my lifetime and will consider a wide range of government taxes and regulations to prevent it.

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I thought I was parroting Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance book… I do not claim this point of view to be a novel idea. I think that there are already government institutions in place to deal with the asset bubbles. These institutions are called central banks. Isn't it easier and cheaper just to make sure that the central banks do their job? Installing another governernment burocracy very often achieves the opposite effect from the original intention (take CMHC for example).

Do tell, what important role did the USA real estate bubble serve?

I see that my comment came through as though I think that asset bubbles are necessary and beneficial. The point I was trying to make is that the market is the cheapest way to regulate the economy. With the housing bubble for instance, on the surface it seems that trillions of dollars are irrvocably lost. But in effect, these "lost" funds will be slowly seeping back into the economy though cheaper post-bubble housing. I think that cheaper rents and property prices will be an indirect subsidy to the economy as a whole.

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The "commodity" that you're talking about is a place to live. Savvy investors rent and invest/save their money in other ways.

You're proposing that "savvy" aka intelligent people don't deserve to benefit. You might as well support a bailout for all those "poor regular people" who bought a house that is now worth 50% of their purchase price.

Sure, some people got lucky buying when they did. Some knew what they were doing, some didn't. Its called a free market.

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I think the "technology" of the boom may have been creative financing and the pooling of debts into securities.

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I don’t think speculation should be taxed. In the long run bubbles serve an important role: they create cheap and abundant supply of a commodity in question.

Way to parrot Daniel Gross's book.! You neglected to clarify that the commodity is only cheap for the savvy few investors who waited til post-bust to buy the assets.

However, the ignorant masses who were the ones to paid for all that commodity up-front, and they have nothing to show for it.

Do tell, what important role did the USA real estate bubble serve? Are you trying to tell us that the brand new technology of "housing" would never have caught on in a big way otherwise?

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"By the time those measures were in place in Phoenix last fall, however, the swarm of investors descending on the city was almost too much to stop. At one of the construction sites of big builder Toll Brothers, a van full of investors from Las Vegas pulled up to a sales trailer shortly after the antispeculation measures had gone into effect. According to a Toll Brothers spokesperson, the saleswoman on call was so flustered by the group's displeasure at being denied an opportunity to invest in such a scalding market that she had to radio headquarters for backup. "They all wanted to buy multiple properties, and they wouldn't take no for an answer," says the spokesperson. "They were trying to climb in and give her their deposits. She had to lock herself in the trailer.""

http://tinyurl.com/66ykxb

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