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SUMMARY - The decline of Vancouver

[WHAT]

1. ] by @sfard @saeidfard.com - Saeid takes a look at the cities home ownership , and how the youth and talent are abandoning it for locales with more opportunity.

[WHY]

1. ] 

[WHERE]

1. ] READ THE FULL ARTICLE
1. ] The decline of Vancouver 

[WHEN]

1. ] 2015-03-22

[EXAMPLE]

1. ] Vancouver, once a city with its own unique spin on Canadian ideals and culture, is well on its way to becoming a vacation city for the world's rich, its economy transforming into one predicated almost entirely on catering to their luxurious proclivities, and its citizens transformed into modern serfs permitted to live in smaller dwellings on the city's periphery, if you'll allow me to exaggerate for effect.
2. ] In Vancouver the average person who owns a detached home made more money from capital gains on their property, roughly $100,000 per year in the last decade or so, than the average Vancouverite made in income, roughly $65,000. 
3. ] it’s effectively impossible for average people without seed capital to join in on the boons of the Vancouver property boom, and so their role in the city’s largest source of wealth generation, property ownership, becomes catering to those who can take part, 
4. ] Real estate appreciation is not unique to Vancouver. Calgary and San Francisco, for instance, have seen gains in the real estate market near Vancouver rates, but those gains were a result of booming economies and income growth in those areas from oil and tech respectively. Vancouver has experienced no commensurate economic or income boom.
5. ] According to Teranet's housing price index, over the past 5 years Vancouver's property prices have grown by about 23% (annually) compared to about 16% in Calgary - this despite Calgary's economic growth running near double that of Vancouver's over the same period.
6. ] Foreign ownership is, of course, the culprit. Beneficiaries of the property boom, homeowners, developers, and the politicians whom they finance, often claim that foreign ownership isn’t actually as big of a problem as we make it out to be. This category of people cherry pick misleading statistics propped up by biased stakeholders and lobbyists like real estate agent associations, and almost always has something to gain.
7. ] The CHMC released a survey in 2014 indicating that only 3.4 percent of property in Vancouver was owned by foreign buyers. China happens to be the biggest country in the world and a flight away from our city, and thus represents the greatest influx of foreign buyers in Vancouver, but it is not Chinese people that are the problem. It is about a stream of wealthy elite corroding the vibrancy of Vancouver. 
8. ] There were several problems with this survey that the media largely ignored. One problem was that its figures excluded the tens of thousands of Canadians (30-50% of whom estimated to buy property in Vancouver) who bought their residency through the recently defunct Immigrant Investor Program. Indeed, there is an estimated 300,000 – 400,000 Canadians living in China, the majority of whom are ethnic Chinese. 
9. ] The problem is not just home ownership, but the erosion of communities and the long-term viability of Vancouver’s economy. I work at a successful startup in Vancouver with growing revenues, employees, and capital - by all means the kind of success story that cities like to flaunt as a case study in creating the environmental conditions to support innovation and small business. Our choice to headquarter in Vancouver was based mostly on the city's livability and proximity to the tech hub of Seattle.
10. ]  Picture an elephant in the room. This elephant has a large bed sheet poorly covering half its body. Most in the room say “hey look it’s an elephant.” Property owners say “no, we can’t be sure it’s an elephant, there’s a bed sheet covering part of it”. Politicians say “we can’t be sure it’s an elephant, we need to study it more”. And developers say “we did a survey and concluded it’s a hamster.” 

[HOW-TO]

1. ]

[REFERENCE]

1. ] SRC = hn - comments 
2. ] The New York Times recently wrote an investigative piece about the growing problem of shady wealthy foreigners scooping up luxury property. The leading paper had no qualms about directly questioning the value of foreign real estate buyers with quotes like “this flood of capital has created colonies of the foreign super-rich, with the attendant resentments and controversies about class inequality
3. ] vancouver tech map circe 2000
4. ] SRC = r/vancouver comments https://www.reddit.com/r/vancouver/comments/43p6zf/decline_of_vancouver/ (2016-02-01)

 

Details

ID: 4440

NAME: the-decline-of-vancouver

DESCRIPTION: by @sfard @saeidfard.com - Saeid takes a look at the cities home ownership , and how the youth and talent are abandoning it for locales with more opportunity.

AUTHOR: article.author/s

EDITOR: article.editor/s

PUBLISHER: article.publisher/s

STATUS: Write

PRIORITY: -5

OWNER ID: 75

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