Like where? I know towns that will offer you a plot of land for $1, so long as you promise to develop on it.
You do get high housing costs in places where populations are rising faster than housing development can keep up, or where development makes no sense (would you build an apartment block in a shrinking town?)
But like...I can point you to a bunch of cities in the US where housing prices are still quite cheap. You probably won't want to live in those cities. That's why they're cheap. Supply and demand in action.
You have to be a complete moron if you think the problem isn't enough supply.
The population of the US is growing. And the percentage of people living in cities is rising. That's lots of people looking for housing in cities. At the same time, single-family zoning (which account for around ~80% of land in US cities--before accounting for industrial and commercial) prevents the development of more housing. Old neighborhoods are effectively full, mostly owned by the same families that bought them in the 70s through 00s. New development is waaaay out on the fringes of the city, and expensive as hell because it's in such high demand.
There isn't enough new housing being developed to satisfy the growing demand for housing, so prices rise. It's that simple! The problem is exacerbated, because the rising prices attract investors (corporate and private) and AirB&B etc. But the fundamental problem is that most of our cities are seas of already-occupied single-family homes, and at the same time populations are rising. This is obvious.
But politicians love to blame foreigners, immigration, corporations, AirB&B. You know why? Because the root of the problem is middle-aged surburban majority-white families that don't want more people (with associated traffic, noise, whatever) in their neighborhood. And that's their core voting base. Old white people vote like clockwork, young renters reliably don't. If politicians go on a crusade against the single-family-dwelling suburbs, they know they'll get voted out. So they throw you these stupid bones: "it's the Chinese who are making housing expensive, by buying 1% of units (and mostly living in them)! It's AirB&B, with a few thousand units for rent in a city of 6 million people! It's the corporations, doing...things nobody can quite explain, that somehow involve buying housing and then just letting it sit there unoccupied? Or something?"
You're a sucker, believing that bullshit. It's the voters (the ones who actually vote) who are the problem.
Zoning laws: yes, strong agree, but the bad guy there isn't corporations, it's NIMBYs. People with houses don't want any development of any kind near them, and being residents they're the ones who get to vote on it. They almost always vote no.
Foreign people buying land as assets is a thing. You know how you defeat that? Build more housing. If the value of the assets fails to rise, or even falls, then people won't hold them as assets--and by dumping them on the market, they'll further decrease the price.
Companies buying up houses to sell (usually after developing or refurbishing them) or rent is ECON101 in action.
If you can solve problem #1, the rest falls into place. But corner apartments overlooking the water in nice cities are still going to be expensive relative to other housing.
Well I mean...more and more people want to live in cities, and they're not making more waterfront apartments. Lots of people want that apartment now, so the price is higher. I don't know what you can do about that: you can't provide a beautiful corner apartment overlooking the water in a desirable city for $700 to all the millions of people who want one.
Capital gains tax isn't 'much' lower, it's like 5% lower, depending on the bracket.
Loans make it possible to avoid taxes--temporarily. You eventually have to pay off the loan, at which point you'll pay taxes. Of course, if you're making more from your investments than you're paying in interest (and with plenty of collateral, you can get lower-interest loans), it makes sense to just pay the interest and never the principal of the loan. Of course, if loan interest rates shoot up (which they now have), this can suddenly stop working.
And right now, there is a loophole related to carrying loans--but it requires you to die. When you die, your heir is allowed to sell assets to pay off your loans without paying capital gains tax (or not as much? I don't quite remember).
I don't mind bidets, though I've never installed one, since I can't imagine they'd be fun to clean.
Here's the thing, though...I have a system I consider superior to a bidet in pretty much every way. See, I noticed a long time ago that I poop somewhere between 0.9 and 1.1 times per day on average, and I aim to shower at least once per day. I don't know about you, but I noticed a certain opportunity for synergy there. I call it the PoopShower system (patent pending), and after many years of using it, I don't feel adequately clean even after using a bidet. So my personal ranking is: PoopShower, (looooong gap), bidet, TP, newspaper, leaves.
On that note, backup your stuff - set it to do it automatically daily.
Mainly /home/. As long as you have a backup of that, you can usually recover almost everything if something goes wrong by just installing all the same software. Configs, documents, downloads, saves, and so on are almost always stored in /home.
Canadians in many fields make 2/3rds or less than their American counterparts.
Also, education is more subsidized in Canada.
Are American doctors just in it for the money?
This is a strange question. You think European or Canadian doctors are just more noble and selfless? They all take the best salary they can get, all other things being equal. But the US has a higher median income along with a convoluted medical system in which profits are unusually high, and doctors get a share of that.
Tourist money doesn't go into a hotel employee's pocket and just sit there forever. Employees involved in the tourist industry buy food, clothing, and entertainment, and hire plumbers and painters and construction workers, and pay taxes, which in turn fund schools and roads and emergency services (like, say, firefighters).
You can't get rid of tourism and the 25% of GDP it represents, and just go on with the same quality of life.
But I mean, if Hawaiian want to stop tourism, they should vote to stop tourism. There's nothing stopping them from banning hotels or whatever.
More to the point, voters assume that to be true. They'll enthusiastically vote for the politician who promises easy solutions over the one stressing the ambiguities and complexities every time.
This is what caused spez at Reddit and Musk at Twitter to go into desperation mode and start flipping tables over. Their investors are starting to want results now, not sometime in the distant future.
Definitely TP before shower.
And I dunno. occasionally the timing doesn't line up, but the vast majority of the time...I can just wait.