Good luck getting elected on that platform.

One other point, that I might also put forward, is that – and I’m a new convert to this way of thinking – is the construction of homes, rezoning of land for high rises, the community projects that result from amenity swaps and DCCs – don’t just contribute to the quality of life, they provide economic benefit in and of themselves. What was in Coal Harbour before that great seawall from the Bayshore to the Convention Centre? Search me. We all know that it takes time to develop authentic communities. It would be great to look at the Whistler Housing Authority model to see if there’s anything Vancouver can learn from that experience (probably not… due to lack of land). Still, all of this speculation over the past 15 years or so I think has pretty much everyone – including the developers – fairly agog at the numbers that have been thrown around re: property sales, etc.

“. . . he said that people are moving here because of the quality of life . . . Well if you go by . . .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Vancouver

. . . people are not moving here, despite Q of L!!!!!

Indeed the term concrete safety deposit box has been well coined for many of the world’s cities, Vancouver not the least, for itinerant loose footed change to find a safe have to weather the, supposed, coming financial debacle: the empty condo syndrome is international!

Or maybe some people have so much money they just don’t know what to do!

If I have more money than to know what to do with I’d live in Puerto Madero.

Official heads-in-sand policy makes it very difficult for real people to deal with real issues but I understand the fear/greed factor.

Anyway deluding ourselves isn’t going put bells and whistles on the future.

Conversely, Ian Gillespie made an argument in the G&M last month that non-resident offshore buyers actually have a larger net-contribution to the City since they help pay for infrastructure they don’t actually use.

“And Vancouver is one of only four cities in the world where 40 per cent of the population is born outside of Canada. The second thing I would say is that the foreign buyer is buying a unit that creates hundreds of construction jobs. That buyer closes on the unit, and then pays thousands and thousands of dollars a year in property taxes, and doesn’t use infrastructure that those property taxes pay for. If that’s the worst-case scenario, then maybe we have bigger problems.”

Of course, this can be simply dismissed as developer-spin, but I’m sad to say, people actually buy this and this notion is Vision supported.

For single-family homeowners, there are three ways to cash in:
1. Own in an area considered desirable by mainland Chinese buyers ($$$)
2. Own in an area that is rezoned by the City of Vancouver for higher density ($$$)
3. Fight tooth and nail against any densification or change in your neighbourhood – under the guise of preserving the integrity of the community of course – and hope that simple fundamentals of diminishing supply of single family lots eventually results in your value increasing so you can move to a bigger house or better neighbourhood($$$)

Show me a City of Vancouver homeowner that isn’t praying for one of these three scenarios.

FHL @ 7 Will do . . .

And until that time comes soon I’ve won enough awards and seen a bit of the world and put a bit away for the kids.

Now I’m really happy ensconced on the tenth floor of a downtown tower in . . .

http://www.theyorkshirelad.ca/2renewnan/front.html

. . . on the edge of the Salish sea (wot’s all this chatter about global warming upping sea levels? I’ve lived here 15 years: I don ‘t see any sea rise, but for all the high falutin’ big time economic and academic research and chatter I’ve read a lot of self-serving drivel coming from the usual suspects!)

Matt gave the example of his friend who bought a house in the early 90s for about $200k. It’s now worth almost a million. Did his friend put $800k of improvements into the house? No. Collectively, we all have made Vancouver a very desirable place to live. Collectively, we all have put Vancouver on the tops of the livability lists. Collectively, we all have contributed taxes, time and sweat. Yet, only his friend got rich.

Lots of good graphs and stats. Interesting maps. If you live south of 16th and east of Commerical, you’re pretty much in a wasteland of unengaged, uninterested residents who don’t vote and don’t open the doors during Halloween.

We bought in East Van 5 or so years ago, sold and bought again last year. The first house was a wartime bungalow we fixed up and every one of our neighbours asked why we didn’t just tear it down and build a new one.

It’s not just this boogeyman foreign investor that thinks that way.

We would have never been able to pay for our current house if the value of our old house hadn’t basically tripled since we bought it.

As for who gets rich from selling… sometimes that’s just the luck of the draw. We have all been fortunate enough to live here during for however long and have enjoyed the ‘riches’ of this area. My family has been in Vancouver since the 20’s and helped shape the City in many ways and the one constant is change. Whinging about it doesn’t help.

As per the termination of the current Investor Immigrant program: I want people who become citizens and/or who are ‘landed,’ to pay their income taxes.

This was not being done by the vast majority of very wealthy people who ‘invested’ here, in the last ten years. Paying global income tax as as per the law would ensure a greater contribution to the common wheel. Income tax avoidance has been a plague on this program since day –and especially so over the last 10 years as overseas investors sought new destinations for wealth.

That ‘investors’ were getting their crummy $800K back after 5 years in that program (not including their real estate investments) becoms almost becomes a trifle, when you factor in how much undeclared income tax has been lost.

Richard Whittstock, to suggest that wealthy immigrants who buy homes here are paying their ‘fair share’, solely through our relatively low property taxes—laughable.

Here’s an idea. Each home owner—be it individual or numbered corporation– be treated like the ‘beneficial’ owner he/she is. That means there is an identification of exactly who owns that property, and that is tied to their income tax form. Lawyers and accountants and real estate agents should be made culpable if they are aiding and abetting in the hiding of those persons.

Additionally, someone can be checked out if there is a suspicion of low balling their income tax declaration. And any arrears/assessments can be held against the sale of the property in the future.

If you make your ‘poor’ brother-in-law the beneficiary/owner of your home, he better be able to have a good story ready for Rev Can as to how he was able to scrape together $2 millin to make that purchase.

If, as Yan said. 15% of the West Side single family residences have helped triggered this rising housing pricing effect across the city, then our brothers and sisters at the tax collection agency have a relatively small geographical area to start their work on. Let it be ‘Ground Zero’ in the war against tax avoidance. The good folks at ‘Beautiful Empty Homes of Vancouver’ have an inventory they can start looking at…http://beautifulemptyhomes.tumblr.com/

I don’t have a solution for empty house syndrome, but am working on it. 🙂

Last time I checked Yan confined his research to the downtown peninsular.

Is that still the case?

@Tiktalik

Yan identified the growing senior population a a concern. Retirees—and the poor. More poor seniors in the DTES than anywhere else in Canada.

And rich retirees not contributing as working tax payers or business owners employing others does make Vancouver a resort city. Without a thriving economic base based on good paying jobs we become not only a vapid city but have the potential to see the income gap reach devastating new heights. A BA or Masters degree in this city is worth between $40k-$42k in annual pay now, by the way.

So, who has the economic developmet plan for this (lack of) jobs situation?

Unfortunately, I have family commitments in the evenings well into the new year, so all these Bula-Blog-Bashes are off my engagement calendar for the time being. The Guardian got there first, reporting earlier this week the same kind of shenanigans and the same kinds of unwelcome effects in real estate price contagion. I summarize the article here:

wp.me/p1yj4U-n3

It is interesting to see the comments and classify them into two categories:

(A) Those who do not see a bubble; and
(B) Those who do.

At about the time of Expo ’86 a fixer-upper on a 33-foot lot east of Main near 37th was selling for $98,000. Now, you can’t get anything anywhere for less than $1,000,000. That’s 10X the price in just 30 years with some price inflation factored in by the Class B World’s Fair.

I just want to make 3 points:

(i) The folks that cannot buy into this market are the ones just getting into the market, including young families. We are risking sending our talent elsewhere if we fail to regulate our economy.

(ii) Chatterjee’s comment at #4 is the one we really have to watch: If left unchecked, this can end up eroding our democracy. That’s not ‘world-class’ it is ‘third-world’. It becomes ‘fascism’ when the interests of government and business align perfectly.

(iii) I challenge the idea that the extra revenues are being used to improve the lot for the neighbourhoods at large.

My participation in the planning process for my neighbourhood (where I’ve owned property for 25 years); and the results coming in of planning processes in other neighbourhoods in the city—including the DTES—show something quite different.

The attention is all on identifying land that will leave a door open for future CD-1 tower re-zoning (the only way the city can collect CACs).

In the Mount Pleasant Plan there was no effort expended on improvements to the public realm, greening the streets, planning for transportation, social housing, you name it. The focus was exclusively on Main & Broadway without considerations about future transit options.

The streets themselves were not considered for revitalization under the plan. No ‘People Places’ would be created as a consequence of all the redevelopment. All that was discussed was changing zoning on fronting properties to jack-up the density on about 5% of the neighbourhood while the rest was left untouched.

We are facing unprecedented pressures in self-governance here in Vancouver. All the signals are pointing to an over-heated real estate market with the government feigning not to notice as they position themselves to maximize income from sales.

As an aside, I guess the Feds can slap an out of province property purchase restriction on all investor immigrants arriving via Quebec’s program. Even a five year limited restriction?

Not holding my breath on that though.

The contribution imbalance of offshore ‘residents’ is seriously compounded by the fact that many of these are absent parents (1 or both) with children and perhaps grand parents. They own a property, pay those taxes, but don’t pay federal or provincial income taxes. In the meantime they use our medical system, schools, etc. It would be interesting to know what the financial cost is for this tax loop-hole.

Brilliant @25 – Please learn to write, and spell. Good writers pen the histories that define our understanding of our culture. Neanderthals are long forgotten, especially misnamed ones who hide behind their misnomers.

@Randy…I believe you must have shown up late to the presentation as Am recognized the event and happening on unceded Salish territories and I talked about the millenia+ year old history of First Nations settlement and exchange in the region and how this relationship between Vancouver and the First Nations people will in part define planning and the region in the 21st century.

People are forgetting Andy’s slide about interest rates and easy money. Prices are so high (in the non-foreign investor parts of town) because payments are affordable due to the historically weird interest rates. When those go up, the prices will fall to the point where buyers can make the payments. The cash buyers on the west side are only competing against each other. That’s Home Ownership 101.

@Randy Chatterjee 2 – my apologies for the auto correct but I’m sure you got the point. History happens. Aboriginals in the Pacific Northwest were fortunate it was the British and not the conquistadores that colonized the area. Territory was conceded de facto when confronted by a more advanced society. And really COPE should learn that 90% of society is going to tune you out when you lead with something about unceded territory.

Mac @ 30: So, the laneway house option increases land values and makes otherwise SFH lots unaffordable, but upzoning to higher densities will not also increase land values and in fact proportionately more? Sure, you can spread the land costs over a larger number of units as you go up, but this will be immediately priced into the land cost when even hint of coming rezoning leaks out. (It already has!)

It’s a cat chasing its tail. The problem is of course the market for whom we are building almost all of our new housing product. Locals, in sufficient numbers, do not have the income to afford the concrete luxury high-rise condo with parking included. Only outsiders do. So a rational market is building for outsiders, and sending locals to the suburbs. Simple economics.

Solutions include strictly zoning for the construction of low-and mid-rise, ground-oriented wood-frame buildings built to local vernacular, which are just the products that are not selling to foreign, or local, speculators. Another option is to limit land assembly to 2-3 lots, so that small local builders can get in on the action and compete against each other on cost. We could house well over a million people in this city in low-rise forms alone, and yes, many of the single family blocks will become fee-simple rowhouses (legal in BC only since 2009) like every other mature city on earth.

Of course, then we have the problem of our road network being poorly designed for such volumes of people, and minimal transit capacity to move people around. And of course, how will we double our park space and community centres for double the population? Answers there include inclusionary zoning and TIFs (tax-increment financing), plus BRT, streetcar, and investing in a tunnel boring machine.

These are all steps that every modern, progressive, and livable city has taken over the past 100 years. We are truly backward, and now caught in a trap between a Hong-Kong-style future build-out or one like Boston.

I know where I’d rather live.

@Randy Chatterjee #36:
First Nations peoples in BC have a long list of eminently justifiable historical grievances against European colonialism and its long aftereffects, but when someone like you makes the absurd claim that “millions” of BC native peoples died of smallpox and “brutal massacres”, it trivializes their long struggle. For God’s sake, at least read some history before you make such preposterous statements. The 1862 smallpox epidemic, in which an estimated two-thirds of the 50,000 First Nations peoples in the Crown Colony of British Columbia died, was already a shattering tragedy without your wild distortions. And there were no “brutal massacres” carried out against BC First Nations peoples, unlike those in the American West. B.C.’s colonial administrators and their provincial successors, with typical British “restraint”, opted for the more “subtle” approach of simple cultural genocide through methods like residential schools, fishing bans, withholding the right to vote, removal from ancestral village sites (for instance Snauq, where Vanier Park is now located) and the banning of the potlatch. That BC’s native peoples and their culture survived disease and oppression to become the powerful force in this province they now are is a great tribute to their strength and the strength of their culture. They don’t need your crazy exaggerations. The historical reality was quite bad enough.

I suggest you read up on the topics you’re spouting off about before you further embarrass yourself. You could start here: http://haidagwaiihistory.blogspot.ca/2012/04/1862-smallpox-epidemic.html.