Comment by hnpolicestate
3 days ago
You correctly blame corporate buy up of real estate as a problem but nobody ever cites upper income new immigrants as a problem. Where I live the only people purchasing $600k - $1 million residential properties are newly arrived Chinese, Eastern European, South Asian and Arab immigrants.
Makes for a very angry native population who are being pushed out of the places they were born for new arrivals. We'll never be able to build enough housing to account for the continual flow of well to do immigrants and native population.
In a twist that has multiple levels of irony, I've heard that there's protests going on in Mexico right now about this, with the wealthy immigrants/tourists being from the US.
I feel like Portugal had the same problem with wealthy foreigners purchasing all the real estate.
Are you claiming that they’re already well to do (by American standards) when they arrive?
I can’t count a single immigrant in my network that was rich by American standards (which makes them filthy rich by most other nations standards) and then chose to move here.
Sure my sample size is probably 30 families (across a dozen countries) but that’s not nothing.
Every single one built their net worth here. Meaning that opportunity is also available to natives.
> immigrant in my network
These people are too rich to talk to you.
https://www.benhams.com/news/london-property-market/foreign-...
"almost 27% of the total London properties sold in Q1 2024 were acquired by foreign buyers, recording a 3% YoY rise."
Note that "foreign buyer" and "immigrant" aren't precisely the same thing; you can buy property in the UK without having to be resident.
Where do you live? If you’re in SV or NYC, extremely easy to meet these rich families.
If you’re meeting someone who has a Masters or PhD from a US university and came from another country - often their family is well off. Certainly better off than a typical middle class family in the US that can’t pay for college for their own kids and aren’t even paying international rates.
I promise I'm not gaslighting you. The majority of individuals buying residential real estate where I'm located are new arrivals or 1st generation. The Chinese circumstance is bizarre and has been going on for over 10-15 years. So they all use Chinese banks right? The rumor for years is that the Chinese government funnels the financing somehow to new arrivals to buy up real estate. They used to go up and down Brooklyn buying properties with over a million in cash. But barely speak English! It's just bizarre.
Oh yes we have that too in the DC area. Especially from China.
It made it extremely difficult for us to buy our house because we kept losing out to all cash offers from China, and that was 10 years ago.
My point was meant more that I also knew tons of immigrants that made their money here with the same opportunities available to locals, and not some unfair advantage.
Most of these immigrants are not rich before they get here with maybe the exception of the Chinese who explicitly buy real estate as investments outside of China.
Yeah, that's a good one too. I remember reading that China was allegedly trying to curtail this by limiting money movement out of the country for large transactions, but we all know that the people with that kind of money will find a way (if those "efforts" were even really being made).
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