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INTERVIEW: Ian Young

[WHAT]

1. ] by Nancy Macdonald @macleans.ca - interview with Ian Young on whats happening in the Vancouver real estate market

[WHY]

1. ] 

[WHERE]

1. ] READ THE FULL ARTICLE
1. ] http://www.macleans.ca/economy/economicanalysis/ian-young-on-vancouvers-freak-show-housing-market/

[WHEN]

1. ] 2016-01-0d

[EXAMPLE]

1. ] It is a world-class freak show. There’s something really strange going on here in Vancouver’s housing market. And you know, I hope that everyone appreciates that. 
2. ] The gap between income and prices—here we are in Dunbar, which is a very sort of middle class-looking neighbourhood, very average-looking homes, nothing particularly spectacular about them, you know, clapboard and shingle, but every single one of those houses is worth more than $3 million. What kind of city are we in where that happens? You know, people from outside Vancouver who see that find it very hard to believe. But for some reason, a lot of Vancouverites have very quickly accepted this is the reality, this is the norm, and this is what we’re stuck with. 
3. ] The style of foreign money flows into Vancouver has certainly been up there with Hong Kong. Hong Kong has suffered the same sort of issues. Other cities, you know, they might be expensive, but they’re not as unaffordable as Vancouver. Vancouver’s always been up there generally as the second-most unaffordable city behind Hong Kong. 
4. ] Salaries are low: Why is Vancouver, which is one of the richest cities in Canada in terms of wealth, also one of the most income-poor? How do we address that?
5. ] In terms of single family homes, we saw prices go up by 40 percent—not 14 percent, by 40 percent. Vancouver was really at the eye of this storm. You can’t see the forces that are dictating this in terms of interest rates or local economy or anything like that. It’s being driven by foreign money outflows, specifically from China, and by exchange rates. We had this perfect storm of this fear of the Chinese yuan devaluation in China last year concurrently with a Canadian dollar collapse. It triggered these big outflows, and a lot of it headed for Vancouver. 
6. ] why Vancouver: There’s this big infrastructure for ethnic Chinese people in terms of language, food, social networks, things like that. And that made Vancouver popular for mainland Chinese. It’s a policy issue too. The immigration policies and the tax policies made Canada a very attractive choice.
7. ] study results: It was crazy. We’re talking about something like 120,000 to 140,000 people since this immigrant investor scheme came into being in the mid to late eighties. Yet the average income tax paid by the principal applicants, by these millionaire migrants, was $1,400 per year in Canada. That’s kind of insane. What that demonstrates is that millionaire migrants tend not to earn their money in Canada after they have arrived here. Even their children do not go on to become big earners in Canada. 
8. ] impact on young homebuyers: For millennials, I think this is a huge social justice issue, a huge issue of fairness. And this idea that people can now get on a ladder, get on the property-buying ladder to work their way up like people did in the seventies, eighties, or even nineties or whatever, you know, it’s just ludicrous. 
9. ]  There is this gap that is often depicted as a gap of race in terms of the understanding of this situation. But it’s not a gap of race at all. What it is, it’s a gap of age. People who are under their mid-forties perceive this situation very, very differently to people who are over their mid-forties, who will say ‘I’ve seen it before, I pulled myself up, I managed to get on the house-buying ladder, you can do the same’. It’s not the same. We’ve never seen an unaffordability crisis like we’re experiencing in this city.
10. ] a one industry town: I don’t think it’s any secret that [Vancouver real estate marketer] Bob Rennie is Christy Clark’s go-to guy financially. 
11. ] whats next?: I think what’s happens is what’s already happening, which is the city is getting hollowed out. We’re becoming more and more akin to a resort community. We’re becoming a place where people come to retire, to go to school, to go on holidays, but not to live and to earn an income that can afford housing here. The fact that we’ve got such low levels of income demonstrate that. We should not be a city that has the highest levels of wealth in Canada and some of the lowest incomes. That’s just not right.
12. ] is it sustainable? It’s sustainable as long as the money keeps flowing. The problem is these are big global forces at play that are being allowed to do what they will with the Vancouver market. I wouldn’t want to predict what’s going to happen in the future in terms of prices or anything like that, but what I would say is that Vancouver is, as it has been, beholden to these big forces, and people need to be aware of that.

[HOW-TO]

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[REFERENCE]

1. ] SRC = r/vancouver, comments

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ID: 5106

NAME: vancouver-housing-ian-young-interview

DESCRIPTION: ] by Nancy Macdonald @macleans.ca - Macdonald interviews Young on whats happening in the Vancouver real estate market

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EDITOR: article.editor/s

PUBLISHER: article.publisher/s

STATUS: Write

PRIORITY: -5

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