Westender @ #51

“Vancouver Economic Action Strategy (2011)

This action strategy focuses on creating a climate for economic growth, supporting business investment and trade, and attracting and retaining talent. Strategies include expanding the green economy, protecting job lands and office space and promoting Vancouver as a desirable, livable city. To attract and retain businesses and talented employees the Strategy highlights the importance of creating vibrant neighbourhoods with a dense mix of activities and people, walkable and bikeable public realm, access to amenities and services, a range of affordable housing options, and convenient, reliable transit.”

In that light Westender the city, the province has shed all vestige of a wealth creating, fishing, mining, logging, economy I do not see how a green economy can substitute.

With a population, vis this conversation, besotted by shiny trinkets, gossiping over systems absolutely out of character, (Go to Moscow and you will see packed trains blasting in and out every two minutes or less.), oh yeah for Moscow, a supporting economy is a long way off.

Vancouver is an ingrown parasitical economy entirely depended on off shore real estate speculation.

The trinketeers need not concern themselves with an over crowded Canada Line if this thing ever gets off the ground.

Expect soon a deluge of buyers one rainy weekend: then hey presto the customary, sold out clarion.

After which the place will sit empty.

And if I may paraphrase you Glissie This is Vancouver and . . . errrrr . . Alice doesn’t live here anymore . . .

(Referring to Alice B. Toklass, famous for her brownies)

Roger # 52
“Vancouver is an ingrown parasitical economy entirely depended on off shore real estate speculation.”
Amen to that!
But the people of Vancouver are too enamored with the Green snake oil salesmen. Even the kids in elementary are being brainwashed, sorry , greenwashed as we speak…
No one pays attention to the little man behind the curtain! 🙁

@ Roger 52:

Vancouver is an ingrown parasitical economy entirely depended on off shore real estate speculation. . . .The trinketeers need not concern themselves with an over crowded Canada Line if this thing ever gets off the ground. . . .Expect soon a deluge of buyers one rainy weekend: then hey presto the customary, sold out clarion. . . . After which the place will sit empty.

Not necessarily.

This was written about the recent Telus Garden development:

Local sellers all say that it’s not foreign investors driving the market for the successful projects, but local investors and people planning to live in the condos themselves.

Ms. Goertz said Telus offered its employees priority in sales at Telus Gardens and 150 of them bought, even though the price discount was a modest one per cent.

The project’s developers, Telus and Westbank Projects, also didn’t allow anyone to buy more than two units.

Mr. Forsgren, whose company Intracorp sold out a tower instantly at Metrotown in May of last year, said the company has to track buyers closely because of requirements from FINTRAC, the agency that monitors money laundering and criminal organizations.

The personal information that had to be submitted for those units showed there were only four offshore buyers.

He said he expects Intracorp’s newest tower, Silver, to get about 50 to 60 per cent investors among the 3,000 buyers lined up for it. That’s similar to what Mr. McTavish said was the ratio for Marine Gateway.

But those investors tend to be local investors, people who are buying something for their children to move into some day and renting it in the meantime, or people who are looking for an investment that’s more stable than the stock market appears to be right now.

It’s ironic how accurate tracking of the now required personal information weeds out the criminal money laundering element — and gives the analysts quality data on where the buyers come from.

http://m.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/teluss-vancouver-condos-fly-off-the-market/article4098423/?service=mobile

@Frank Ducote 47-reduced to being the spelling marm, how sad. Yes, I realize your ilk likes to gloss over the wave of foreign investors who have driven up real estate prices. How else could you peddle the notion to the gullible locals that they should be thankful for the opportunity to shoehorn their families into one of these shoeboxes in the sky.

Brilliant not – whose peddling what, schoolmarm? At least you managed to avoid racist and political invective in this latest post, sticking only with personal insult. Oh well, that’s a tiny improvement for which I am grateful. Keep it up! Soon you may even be brave enough to reveal your identity so we can all know who it is that can post such diatribe.

“then the next best thing to do is ignore them”

Heed your own advice!

MB, I’m not indicating an objection to the intensification of development at Oakridge or the conversion of surface parking lots – these are probably positive things. I do find it odd that in 2007 the City completed a public process to arrive at a policy statement that would guide changes at Oakridge – but the content of the rezoning application doesn’t appear to reflect that policy, at least in terms of floorspace and heights.

Sadly Frank Ducote and waltsyss can’t see the bamboo for the trees. To ignore the obvious factor of foreign investors and to try and stifle discussion of it by bleating “racism” is as silly and inneffective as Visions affordable housing task force, which did exactly the same thing.

Vancouver has ALWAYS had a large number of foreign realestate speculators. It was built be foreign speculator (or at least out of province speculators like the C P R). I would venture a guess that based on the size of the city now versus say 1910 the portion of out of city speculators now is probably less. So apart from the complaint about foreign what is the problem? If it is housing affordability I would assume most speculators rent their units out (pretty stupid not to) so speculators make it more expensive to buy but cheaper to rent…and maybe not as much more expensive to buy as you think because the good market drives the creation of more units and with the world of supply and demand increasing supply decreases costs (the problem here is demand is increasing faster than supply).

Thought of The Day

“More Expensive & More Expensive… the Twin Brothers!”

Rico #38
“o speculators make it more expensive to buy but cheaper to rent…”
Yes & No
I’d say it’s become ‘more expensive’ & ‘more expensive’.
A 600sqft 1Bdr apartment “worth” $125,000 in West End in 1997 was rented with $600-700/mo.
Now the same apartment is “asked for” $500,000 and/or rented with $1,500 -1,800/mo.
Worth the money? Absolutely not.
Where there major improvements or fancy appliances or amenities added to this unit? Absolutely not.
Did the owner/ landlord earned that increase in the asking price? Absolutely not.
Is there a particulate self entitlement in the air vis a vis a real estate market speculation? Absolutely yes.

I liked and agree with what Roger #52 said too:
“Vancouver is an ingrown parasitical economy entirely depended on off shore real estate speculation.”

So…

We live in Vancouver and this keeps us busy.

@Brilliant:

I sense you may not understand the intent of the original metaphor.

cheers,
CK

The upper limit on density is always liveability, measured by established design guidelines. For this site it is easily twice the area proposed. The interesting question from a development perspective is; what does density mean in terms of overall energy consumption by society? We assume that TOD development is a sustainable strategy as an act of faith in the rhetoric of supporters. But what is needed is someone to do the environmental analysis on forms of development, travel patterns, and means of transport. Having armed ourselves with a bit of knowledge on the fundamentals, we might then amuse ourselves with urban design thoughts about getting things right.

Chris Keam writes, “…if a driver can rightfully expect there to be road space to use their vehicle, transit users should be able to reasonably expect a seat on transit for their fare during all operating hours…”

Oh wow! I post a silly suggestion while riffing on the ridiculousness (alliteration alert!) of “full” buses that area actually a third empty and the socially phobic North Americans that cause this, and I get a response that is completely divorced from the reality of the universe in which we live…yet apparently competely seriously intended. Oh my.

No public transit system anywhere in the world provides a guaranteed seat at all hours to every one of its riders. None of them even come vaguely close to such a thing, and in fact anything like it is simply impossible with current technology. I’m ruling out teleporters, you understand. There are often special services – e.g. designated, long distance commuter buses with severely limited hours, paratransit for the elderly and disabled – that do, but they are by far the minority of service provided. Why is this? Because a system that guaranteed a seat (or even a square metre of standing space so you don’t have to touch anyone else) would be ungodly expensive, not to mention wasteful since most of the massive number of vehicles that would be necessary at rush hour would sit empty the rest of the day. It would probably have to be either to a system of universally available chauffered (or Google driverless) taxis sitting on every street corner, or half the entire land area of the city devoted to rail lines and small rail cars going every which way. Since someone would have to pay for this (TANSTAAFL) it would either bankrupt the government, or would charge so much for each ride that no one would actually use the system (which would…bankrupt the government that built it).

p.s. The fact is that car drivers also sit in traffic jams rather than being guaranteed road space whenever they want it, and for the same reason. There simply is not unlimited space, money and technology to make it otherwise.

@Dan:

“The fact is that car drivers also sit in traffic jams rather than being guaranteed road space whenever they want it, and for the same reason. ”

That’s a false analogy. For starters, I don’t know of anywhere in Canada where one can’t get their car onto the street because there isn’t room. Travel speed is irrelevant, as bus passengers undergo similar delays during peak periods. The reality is that automobile users are allocated a huge excess of road space, as evidenced simply by standing at any major intersection in Metro Vancover at any time outside of peak hours. There are hundreds of kilometres of unused space going to waste for at least 20 hours a day… to accommodate peak demand. Why should transit users be treated differently? Further, for your analogy to hold water, as one got closer to a major destination, there would be an expectation for drivers to have smaller vehicles, to take up less road space, just as a standing passenger on a bus takes up less floor space than a seated one.

The actual reality is that it’s a question of prioritizing funding, not a lack thereof. After all, you can buy a train, bus, or plane ticket that will take you across the country for a few hundred dollars, seat guaranteed, and yet it’s impossible to ensure people can’t travel in comfort for a few kilometres for (soon-to-be) $2.75? It doesn’t wash.

Any other form of transportation is ‘full’ when all the seats are taken… and in an automobile it’s against the law to take more passengers than seat belts. Transit users are clearly second-class citizens to the people that hold the purse strings. It’s the only logical explanation, otherwise we’d spend less on blacktop and more on mass methods of moving people safely and comfortably.

A final point.

If we take your opinion that buses are two thirds full when only two thirds of the aisle space is being used, one could argue that all we need to do is roughly double transit capacity at peak periods, to ensure there’s seats for one and all. With Translink’s 2012 budget at roughly $1.3 billion (which of course includes road facilities, which would not have to necessarily be expanded to accommodate a larger bus fleet, and admin costs – [same as road vis a vis added expenditures not having to scale], it ‘only’ requires an additional $500m a year at the absolute uppermost estimate to guarantee a safe, comfortable experience for transit users. It sounds like a lot of money, but in reality, given what we know about the costs of other initiatives, from photo-opp fake lakes to $15m propaganda campaigns, (http://www.theprovince.com/business/Clark+must+defend+million+blitz/7504103/story.html#ixzz2BSxMKozA) what we have here is failure to prioritize.

Timely link for Dan Cooper:

http://sobadsogood.com/2012/11/18/the-nightmarish-reality-for-japanese-commuters-by-michael-wolf/