JoeJustJoe 51
It appears Fabula debunked your supposed debunking quite some time ago:

“…Here’s my latest reporting on this issue. I talked last month with the city’s longtime housing centre director, Cameron Gray, who has forgotten more about housing policy than most people in Vancouver will ever know. He’s been unable to verify the 18,000 number, but he does say, in spite of that, that there is a problem of empty housing units in the city. No one ones exactly how many there are. The last census in 2006 showed there were 20,641 empty houses, condos, duplexes and whatever in Vancouver proper. Approximately 4-5,000 of them are downtown. (NOT all 18,000.) No one knows whether those are second homes, investor properties kept empty or what. But, says Gray, they’re a worry….”
http://francesbula.com/uncategorized/the-ongoing-story-of-the-empty-suites/

Allowing scare land and housing resources to be scooped up with non-Canadian dollars (or maybe I should call them “non-taxed” Canadian dollars) really emphasizes the “hollowing-out” of Vancouver.
We have allowed the conduits for these offshore dollars (just because the daughter of a wealthy offshore person signs the papers, doesn’t mean it’s not offshore money) to push working people of all classes to the perimeter or into to small spaces.
Be it a doctor, lawyer, accountant, money manager…..if you are in your 20’s or 30’s now, you just can’t financially justify the $2.5-$3.0 million house that previous generations of the same professions could easily have afforded (even at 14% interest rates).

Hearing some of the ALR defenders last night cry bloody murder about the Port lands out in Tsswaassen being optioned to a developer really cracked me up. The irony of it!

Steeves was going on about the intention of the ALR for “food security”.
What none of these dinosaurs want to remember is that the ALR was a direct response to the climate change fears of the early 70’s.
These fears were about global cooling and the possibility of a coming mini ice age.

Today, for Canada, global warming would actually lead to more agriculturally viable land at higher latitudes…..which flies in the face of the “food security” dinosaurs.

Yet i guess that if you asked the ALR commission if they believe global warming is a threat, they would all raise their hand.

Yet if they believe it’s a threat, there’s really no need to defend keeping the ALR.

Meanwhile, the city gets hollowed out by offshore dollars funnelled through non-income tax paying Canadian residents.

rico (Apr 4, 2012 at 9:09 pm) notes, “I do not understand why someone would buy a property and then not utilize it. If you are intending to keep it for a period of time but not using it you are losing lots of money by not renting it out.”

I do understand the thinking on not renting it if you plan to sell it again later. Essentially it comes down to: renters can be quite hard on a property, thus reducing its resale value, and expenses can be high and unpredictable. I know people who swear up and down they will never be landlords again, after dealing with the tenants from hell who almost destroyed a house inside, as well as just not paying rent. When I sold my old house elsewhere and bought my condo here in Vancouver a year before arriving, I rented the condo out on a nine month fixed-term lease through a property management firm. The tenant was decent enough, and I did come out financially ahead of where I would have been not renting at all. But, with payments to the property manager, $90/hour-plus-travel-and-tools calls to tradesmen every couple months to do things like use a plunger on a stopped-up toilet (I was never quite clear why this was my responsibility, but being on another continent working at the time it was hard to push the point), replacing the refrigerator when it went out, and just general wear and tear to the carpets, walls, counters…I was far from making a profit. For an older condo like mine, the wear and tear is not such a terrible thing, but if you were buying one of these shiny, new, supposedly-ultra-luxury (at least in a stereotyped, Donald Trump kind of way, and maybe truly) places, would you want to risk it? And what if the renters – unlike mine – don’t pay their rent on time, or at all? More expenses all around.

Of course, if the bubble bursts it doesn’t matter how nicely kept your apartment is; you’re going to lose on the investment if you really were buying just to hold and flip.

@ rf #54 re: ALR.

Man, ya don’t know of what you speak. In fact, your interpretation of the ALR is patent drivel. Further, your definition of “land” may well be led by the prefix “Disney.”

The Agricultural Land Reserve is based first and foremost on soil classifications. It’s intention is to preserve the teeny, weeny rare bits of dirt that are capable of growing food in BC. These bits comprise like — jayzus, hold on to your hat! — 4% of the provincial land mass.

I know you prefer to eat your pesticide-saturated Mexican lettuce, but that doesn’t mean we have to kill the multi-billion dollar BC agricultural industry and roll out the tacky, cheaply built, subsidized … er … “affordable” subdivisions filled with plaster palaces, malls and super-sized roads over what little food-growing land we have left.

Global cooling >>>global warming >>> pineapples in Prince Albert? That’s a Class A leap in logic, rf.

What do you know of the soils under those swaths of boreal forest north of the prairies? Pobably nothing, I suspect.

It’s thin forest duff over Canadian shield rock, pal. Hardly the once magnificant, now eroded black prairie gold underlying the waving fields of wheat to the south that once got our hearts beating in time with the anthem.

@ brilliant, greenhouses are an important part of agriculture in a temperate climate. Love to see the Canadian orange someday … especially under glass on the sunny prairies.

Moreover, you can build greenhouses almost anywhere, but I’d say using cheap industrial lands would be the most ideal in order to preserve the soils in the ALR.

Most greenhouses burn sawdust, brilliant. Not that I agree with that, especially seeing that potentially huge quantities of industrial waste heat is not very far away at the Burns Bog dump where methane from rotting garbage could be burned to create steam for both power and heat and distributed to nearby greenhouse operations. This is not dissimilar to the Central Heat Distribution network downtown.

The carbon tax could help pay for job-creation and green initiatives like that instead of allowing the raw methane to vent into the atmosphere with over 20 times the punch that CO2 has as a greenhouse gas and absolutely no added value.

how many of these empty condos are sitting in buildings where the strata corp has limited the number of rentals allowed?

I think the tower in question would be on milross street

rf @ #54

“What none of these dinosaurs want to remember is that the ALR was a direct response to the climate change fears of the early 70′s . . . ”

Where on earth did you pick up that McTwaddle rf? GW, CC, AGW. HCGW hadn’t even been invented back then!

I was there quite close to the seat of power: Mary Rawson and Bob Williams were the main drivers.

Their purpose was to put a break on the likes of Genstar’s manic drive (Jeez are those guys still at it?) to buy up the Fraser Valley for future speculation.

Climate change? For gawds sake that’s a recent invention. But don’t worry they’ll find something else to bamboozle us gullibled out of our money long before we admit we’ve bin had!

Thanks FactChecker (#61).

I agree 100% that purchasing a condo near the transit lines, and near all essential urban amenities is always a great investment. Provided you are paying the right price per square foot, and the builder is not selling based on future values.