Foreigners buying property in Boston

Why is J. Edgar Hoover on your Phone?

I don't know, he's on everybody else's, why shouldn't he be on mine?
 
Those bastard foreigners; my parents buying a three decker and living in it.
 
The point would not be to scapegoat "foreign buyers" it would be to incentivize actually occupying units that are bought, foreign or domestic. How it's structured would be the debate to have. Obviously you don't want to force snowbirds to rent their unit for half the year, but you also don't want investors snapping up units just so they have another crash-pad in another city that they'll visit twice in five years. Maybe there's no good way to do that, but it's an interesting conversation.
 
SeamusMcFly said:
Why is J. Edgar Hoover on your Phone?

I don't know, he's on everybody else's, why shouldn't he be on mine?
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By the way, that phone call from J. Edgar Hoover was for me. I'm going to go home and sleep with my wife.
 
BussesAin'tTrains said:
but you also don't want investors snapping up units just so they have another crash-pad in another city that they'll visit twice in five years.
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I hate that argument. From a public policy POV, people paying high real estate taxes on luxury apartments and using virtually zero city services is a good thing.
And from a development point of view, if the uber rich are buying units that they'll rarely use, thereby allowing a residential project to proceed (that otherwise might not be viable), that's a good thing too.
 
^ Fair points. But don't they also inflate prices for people who actually want to live here? Maybe that doesn't matter enough to influence policy.
 
Housing people rich enough to be competing in the market against wealthy foreigners buying crash pads are not really the people we need to concerned about housing. Yes there is trickle down in the market, so even if 50% of a building goes to truly part time residents, it's still a plus on the housing market.

I think all of this is really down the line of Greater Boston's ability to keep housing affordable for the middle and lower/upper middle class. To do that really just needs more housing pretty much everywhere.
 
I'd love to see the numbers on foreign buyers. It's certainly every right of people to invest in property in Boston if that's what they want to do, but it does indeed put increased demand on a supply which already is not meeting the needs of people who already live in Massachusetts. To me, it's a sign of two things: (1) Boston is becoming more visible and more desirable globally, which is certainly good for the region; (2) We need to keep building and figure out how to accelerate the building even more if we want Boston to be affordable for the middle class. The direction we do not want to go is trying to keep foreigners out or any kind of backwards crap like that.
 
AmericanFolkLegend said:
I hate that argument. From a public policy POV, people paying high real estate taxes on luxury apartments and using virtually zero city services is a good thing.
And from a development point of view, if the uber rich are buying units that they'll rarely use, thereby allowing a residential project to proceed (that otherwise might not be viable), that's a good thing too.
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It's not so great for local businesses who need a solid customer base to survive and for "eyes on the street" to keep neighborhoods safe.
 
What about this idea - city requires along with property taxes for every household to buy certain amount of vouchers redeemable at local businesses. Say 500$ for a year.
Unrealized vouchers get subdivided between those same businesses at year's end.
 
Collecting property taxes from people who don't use city services is great, but if the unit's occupied then you still collect property taxes, plus sales tax and income tax (indirectly through State Aid), and likely still have residents who aren't using up too much of the city services pot, which is even better. And that's not even getting into the externalities unoccupied units cause in the housing market.
 
Smartiro said:
What about this idea - city requires along with property taxes for every household to buy certain amount of vouchers redeemable at local businesses. Say 500$ for a year.
Unrealized vouchers get subdivided between those same businesses at year's end.
Click to expand...

Probably would be classified as an impermissible tax
 
Numbers are foggy. Asking a real estate agent, "So are you busy?" gets the expected response.
 
cden4 said:
It's not so great for local businesses who need a solid customer base to survive and for "eyes on the street" to keep neighborhoods safe.
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But again, if you put up a 300 unit building like the Kensington, Radian or Millenium Tower and lets say 25% (an absurdly high amount) of units are unoccupied foreign investments. We'll you still just added 225 occupied housing units to the market. That's probably something like 1,100 new "eyes on the street".
If there wasn't such a demand from foreign buyers, maybe that building never gets built at all (or gets built at a reduced size or different use).
 
Heavy foreign investment in commercial property, too (today's boston curbed).

How much foreign capital is investing in Boston?
"In 2013, 20 percent of the acquisitions were from foreign capital. That's up from about 9 percent in 2011-12, and this year that number is going to be closer to 30 percent to 40 percent …We probably have Chinese investors coming in every couple of weeks to get a market overview form our international capital group." – Rob Borden of Jones Lang LaSalle
 
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