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Two views of the Vancouver real-estate scene: two worlds colliding

November 17th, 2015 · 9 Comments

I can’t imagine what it’s like for average residents in Vancouver to try to square these two perspectives, which drifted across my screen last week.

Peter O’Neil’s story in the Vancouver Sun, titled “Canada a friendly home for illicit cash, corrupt real-estate buys, report says”

And this series in New Canadian Media, with a very different view of the Vancouver housing situation by local writer Ng Weng Hoong.

 

Categories: Uncategorized

  • Kirk

    Multiple differing viewpoints presented in the news isn’t limited to Vancouver’s housing market. It’s extends to bigger things like war and climate change. As a reader, it’s easy to be manipulated because articles are written specifically to sway a point of view. Personally, I try to stick to mainstream news with a mix of both sides centring around the left-middle because that’s my view of the world. So, CBC (leftish), G&M (rightish — and going off the deep end on Trudeau. I love our Vancouver bureau though.), NY Times (left), NBC News (left), the Postmedia locals (right, is there any other choice??), and then a bunch of other left local stuff like the Vancouver Observer and the Tyee. A right-leaning person would probably read a very different mix, like Fox News and Sun Media.

    Frances, as a journalism expert, can you give us your take on the balance/fairness/reseach of the two articles? Or, any general take on media consumption? Don’t want to put you on the spot, so feel free to stay out of it.

  • Mike

    From the second story: “He said the “real” housing crisis in Vancouver lies not with the middle class, but society’s lower rungs, which have long been plagued by the problem of homelessness and severe unaffordability.”

    This is what bothers me about the “don’t have 1 million” people and the obsession with the high end of the market. Vancouver is in desperate need of social housing and market rentals, but this didn’t become a media shitstorm until working professionals woke up one morning and realized they couldn’t buy a house west of Main. Surely external forces must be at work, since nothing else could explain single family homes within 5-10 km of both the beach and downtown being prohibitively expensive!

    Anyway, we can synthesis the “Chinese are buying all our houses” problem with the real affordability problem (and humour the No Towers doofuses to boot) by taking a metaphorical bulldozer to the RS zoning and a literal bulldozer to the west side and allow 4 story rental apartments throughout the city. I hereby announce the creation of the Haussmann Party: A second empire for Vancouver!

  • bregalad

    It’s true that many desirable cities are seeing prices rising far faster than incomes. That doesn’t make our situation any better, it just means we’re far from unique.

    The focus on the single family housing market might appear misplaced when there are much bigger problems than school teachers having to commute long distances, but the housing market isn’t a collection of isolated strata. What happens at one price point affects other price points.

    For whatever reason mid level professionals who once filled Metro Vancouver’s inner suburbs can no longer afford to live there. The next generation of lab technicians and hygienists have been forced to look at either the next ring of suburbs or accept a small space that may be unsuitable for raising a family. They have displaced the kind of person who previously bought in the suburbs, people now forced into either the exurbs or a smaller suburban space. The poor are hit with a double whammy of gentrification and the absence of other places to go.

    It has been suggested that we have a problem with tax avoidance. If that’s the case then we need to find ways to collect tax that aren’t so easily avoided. Raising taxes on desirable and expensive things is a good way to guarantee that prospective buyers can afford the increase and guarantee they won’t avoid paying. Higher property taxes combined with increased taxes on real estate transactions would work very well. There would still be loopholes (hello Christy Clark’s blind trust), but they would require more effort and there’s no reason why some of those loopholes couldn’t be legislated out of existence.

  • Burt

    With respects Mike, you’re missing the point of #donthaveamillion.

    Since when did an East Van teardown become high end of the market? These homes now trade at a million+, South Van ditto, forget the actual luxury enclaves where prices are nearing the 3 million mark.

    How do you suppose we fund anything in the city, let alone social housing, if our number one agenda continues to be pushing out young, tax paying, professionals?

    Further to this, concrete towers are part of the issue. The construction costs on these are prohibitively expensive, before we even begin to consider the stratospheric land prices, concrete is costing $200 a sq/ft to build. That still means 1000sq/ft costs $200,000 to build, less, CAC’s, land costs, and developer profit.

    The solution was in the zoning, but I’m not sure of that anymore either. The SFH market has clearly been priced for future density, eliminating any bonus from then creating that density because the premiums are priced into the assembly as it stands.

    We created a real issue here with no simple solutions. Focusing on the low end or high end are both mistakes, lets focus on where the 90% of us live – the middle.

  • Mike

    East Van teardowns are the high end of the market because **all single family lots close to major, desirable urban centres are the high end of the market**. The collective problem we’re having as a city is that many of us remember a time when this wasn’t the case.

    “Further to this, concrete towers are part of the issue”

    Concrete towers are clearly not a panacea for housing affordability, but if you believe the housing situation would somehow be better if we hadn’t built Yaletown then I don’t know what to say.

    Regardless, concrete towers aren’t in the Haussmann Party’s platform, since we propose to build cheaper low- to mid-rise apartment buildings throughout the entire city in all current RS1 neighbourhoods, negating the need for highrises. These buildings will be 100% rentals, negating the effect of speculators and keeping rents roughly tied to incomes. What limited single family lots that remain will of course explode in value, causing doofuses to complain that it’s not fair that these lots are unaffordable. The rest of us will happily decide to either rent in the CoV or buy property in a city that we can afford.

    “our number one agenda continues to be pushing out young, tax paying professionals”

    Does Vancouver have fewer 25-40 year olds than it did 20 years ago? While people are certainly being priced out of the city, I suspect on the whole this number is growing. Vote Hausmann and make it grow ever faster!

  • jenables

    I know you were asking Frances but you may or may not find the disclaimer on the new media site revealing:
    New Canadian Media provides nonpartisan news and views representing all Canadian immigrant communities. As part of this endeavour, we re-publish aggregated content from various ethnic media publishers in Canada in an effort to raise the profile of news and commentary from an immigrant perspective. New Canadian Media, however, does not guarantee the accuracy of or endorse the views and opinions contained in content from such other sites. The views expressed on this site are those of the individual writers and commentators, and not necessarily those of New Canadian Media. Copyright © 2014 All rights reserved

    Maybe all sites which do not generate their own content.anstheir post a similar warning

  • Kirk

    Thx. Like others have said, it feels like the climate change debate. Pretty much everyone believes it, but there’s always the same small handful of denier spokespeople getting quoted in the media — they don’t have data to disprove it either.

  • A Taxpayer

    “Pretty much everyone believes it”

    Yes most people believe the climate changes, but not too many think it is the existential threat you alarmists believe it to be.

    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/24/the-paris-effect-97-of-americans-dont-believe-climate-change-is-top-concern/

  • MB

    You have a good point regarding the high price of land. Wood frame housing isn’t unaffordable, but tack on a 4,000 ft2 hunk of land (a standard lot) and it soars. This is where efficient land use planning is really needed. Theoretically, two standard lots can accommodate five or six rowhouses, three or four with legal mortgage-helper suites, thus the land value is thinned by dividing it into more units.

    In reality, preserving character houses and large trees and recycling structural materials (rather than applying for a demolition permit) can all add to the cost of housing. This is where the city needs to show more creativity and flexibility. Allowing an existing character home to be relocated to the side of a site, decreasing the over-generous 24-foot front yard setbacks of last century, and allowing one or two additional units to be built on a site created by consolidating three or four lots could help stabilize the housing price even though the overall project costs would rise from the above mitigation measures.

    Low rise apartments and rowhousing could be built using precision-made modular components that can be bolted together on a site very quickly (e.g. glue-laminated timber framing, pre-fabricated wall swections, etc.).

    I find that articles like the ones linked in Frances’s post generally conflate standard West Side lot prices with all housing prices. This is erroneous. The detached home with an accompanying piece of land is not a condo or a townhouse or a house on a small lot. They all differ in price quite significantly.