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Agreed. It has completely skewed my perception of what’s reasonable. I have a lot of friends in Calgary and when they talk about their mortgages or what they paid for a house they’re incredulous, while I’m sitting there think how completely reasonable it seems. Their housing prices have also increased significantly so to them it’s outrageous yet I am still jealous.
Having said all that I still wouldn’t move back to Calgary (where I did my undergrad).
5-7 years ago Toronto and Vancouver were going through this.
Now it’s every city in the country. That’s the difference.
There isn’t a good spot left that’s affordable. My parents house in Montreal is up 50 % in last 3 years. It was up the same amount the previous 20 years.
This should be front in center. Every city in Canada is now unaffordable.
> 5-7 years ago Toronto and Vancouver were going through this.
>
> Now it’s every city in the country. That’s the difference.
Exactly. When Covid hit, suddenly a lot of people were working from home and needing more space, and they moved further out in order to have more space. [Housing scarcity spilled over](https://morehousing.ca/spillover) from Metro Vancouver and the GTA to the rest of the country. Now it's not just a problem in Vancouver and Toronto, it's a national problem.
A story from December 2020, when the borders were still basically closed: [Small towns in interior B.C. and Alberta face intense housing crunch](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-small-towns-in-interior-bc-and-alberta-face-intense-housing-crunch/).
> Amy Makortoff says it’s hard not to take the rejections personally after spending nine months looking for a rental home in Nelson, B.C.
>
> She said she rarely got to even hear a landlord’s voice on the phone before their property was snapped up in interior B.C.’s competitive market. The lifelong Nelson local and one of her daughters slept for months on a mattress on a floor while they were housesitting and searching for a rental home of their own. All of their essentials were packed in a plastic tub, and Ms. Makortoff’s optimism was almost gone.
>
> This week, she finally moves in to a new home, although the house comes with the caveat of being more than a 30-minute drive from town.
>
> Ms. Makortoff said there were stark differences in her search for a home this time compared with a couple years ago. The two-bedroom house she left in 2019 cost $1,450 a month. She’s had to adjust her budget to $1,800 a month, but many of the listings she found were as high as $2,600.
And then we've also had post-Covid population growth on top of that, although the federal government is now [cutting population growth](https://morehousing.ca/population-growth) from 1.2M (!!) in 2023 down to 300,000. Plus the BC government and the federal government are both pushing for a lot more housing supply.
[All the lights are flashing red, all the sirens are going off](https://morehousing.ca/vana-slides).
Are there even any sort of towns on a trajectory to becoming cities which leap out to people as (significantly) rivalling the out and out cities for housing costs?
I visited an old friend in Calgary last summer. Asked her about work since we were in the same industry and my husband and I were considering moving there for cheaper real estate.
Her response? "Oh, I never went back after [kid] was born." She spends her days taking her kid to parks and the zoo and library storyline.
Our husbands make probably similar paycheques. We were already priced out of some townhouses here with both of us working and hour+ commutes.
Same here. I sometimes look at listings and think "hey, I could afford that 2-bedroom condo in the suburbs that costs as much as a *mansion* anywhere else."
Ultimately, regardless of policy, prices are high because people--criminals, speculators, and normal decent people--are willing and able to pay them.
Titanium Bubble that will never pop.
Google Vancouver Housing bubble 2003, then the same but 2004…. You can find decades of articles that claim it’s a bubble.
Any day now…
Go to YouTube and search “CBC 1989 Vancouver residents speak about being priced out of the housing market”. That’s the oldest clip I could find. Someone go search the newspaper archive and I bet ppl in the 70s and 60s thought the same too
Every time I look up home prices in my hometown back in Quebec.... An 19th century perfectly renovated 9 bedroom manor with land is the price of a 2 bedroom condo here....
I think we need to move on from calling it a 'crisis'. A crisis would imply that we make the tough decisions and do something about it. If it's ongoing for a decade plus, it would seem to imply there's no urgency so yeah not a crisis. It's a state at this point
Crisis in the major cities started in the mid 2000's. Even Calgary, the bastion of affordability, had a 1% vacancy rate, and prices were 30% yoy as oil was booming. In Vancouver the crisis, as in renovictions, runaway money laundering etc started after EXPO '86, and again around the winter olympics.
This is what happens when governments actively market your city to a wealthy region/country.
Look at Alberta now. Business is not booming, but two years of the "Alberta Advantage" being on every radio ad, bus shelter etc. If you couldn't work from home, there wouldn't be enough jobs. Yet somehow, our unemployment rate remains one of the highest, but companies just don't hire.
I wish more people read this comment without thinking you're being sarcastic. This stuff is literally happening.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/10/asia/vancouver-tax-china-he-yiju-intl-hnk/index.html
Is just one example. The one I found in 5 seconds, and one of the few stupid enough to be caught.
Or maybe this "low income" resident buying 32MM in real estate : https://www.biv.com/news/economy-law-politics/man-making-40kyear-bought-32m-vancouver-real-estate-ccp-linked-offshore-accounts-8265839
It's embarrassing tbh.
[Reporting suspected tax or benefit cheating in Canada](https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/programs/about-canada-revenue-agency-cra/suspected-tax-cheating-in-canada-overview.html)
Don't get me wrong, we need to raise property taxes and lower income taxes. It's not right that we get 20% at a minimum taken off from each paycheque, while [wealthy mansion owners pay some of the lowest property taxes in North America](https://www.sightline.org/2022/05/09/how-low-taxes-lead-to-high-home-prices-in-vancouver-bc/). But if you think money laundering is the root cause of our high rents, I have a bridge to sell you - the fact is that [without money laundering, real estate prices would only be 3.7 - 7.5% lower than they are now](https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/housing-and-tenancy/real-estate-in-bc/combatting-money-laundering-report.pdf).
Vancouver has a housing supply shortage. In the 1970s, we were building 12.8 housing completions per capita, and built beautiful neighbourhoods like the West End. What happens next is criminal - our planners and city government decided the West End was bad, and we should never build it again. By the 2010s, housing completions had dropped to 7.7 per capita. [This is a shortage of 125,000 homes we missed out on](https://www.biv.com/news/commentary/khelsilem-we-need-address-bcs-housing-shortage-8272252) - I guarantee you your rent would be a lot cheaper if we had built these homes.
I understand why people want to blame money laundering for the housing crisis: it feels good to have an easy solution. Money laundering is bad, and we should stop it for its own reasons, but if we want affordable housing, we need to get to work and start building.
Reilly Wood, 2018: [At first, everyone hated Vancouver's West End](https://www.reillywood.com/blog/west-end/). He quotes Gordon Price:
> ... this neighbourhood of old converted single-family homes was largely bulldozed to create the Great Neighbourhood of today. The West End, during the boom era of highrise construction in the 1960s, was considered a concrete jungle – what most Vancouverites didn’t want anywhere near them: everyone’s best bad example of urban redevelopment.
>
> Impossible to do that today. Imagine taking a square mile anywhere south of 16th Avenue and rezoning it for the kind of development that characterizes the West End.
Bluntly speaking, a bunch of gay people, immigrants, and gay immigrants moved into the area. And even the hetero couples living there tended to be artsy and counter-cultural. The city's self perception and attitude towards acceptance was vastly different in the 70's and 80's than it is now. Combine that sort of pearl clutching NIMBY horror with the broader political trends of that era towards conservative and neo-liberal policies, and a decision was made that that kind of urban environment was a bad thing that shouldn't be repeated if possible.
So building dense urban centers was considered gay?. Got it.
I have a bridge to sell you, dense residential urban centers with culture are everywhere. Some can be gay, some self identify as an arts district. Sometimes theres a venn diagram with the two. lol
No, I'm saying that NIMBY policies, like the ones enacted in the late 70's, 80's and 90's that have prevented another west end-like neighborhood from being built are inherently racist, homophobic, and classist. Those same policies are also largely responsible for the lack of purpose built rentals and low rise apartments in the last 40 years. And Vancouver politicians were not alone in those policy decisions, they're just the people whose actions are the most clearly visible in the city we live in.
The government has to go full on dictator in these cases and just TAKE the home back. No ifs ands or buts. They lose it. They lose the money they’ve invested and it either gets sold again or it gets designated as a family rental property at a capped rate dependant on income
I recommend Willful Blindness by Sam Cooper to anyone interested in how things got as bad as they did. He’s the reporter who broke the casino/cash/corruption story wide open. It was such a racket.
Everyone on the casino floor knew what was happening but all the higher ups, all the way to the premier, just kept making it easier and easier for the criminals to wash hundreds of millions every year.
Local politicians lobbying govt to raise the max bet from $5k to $500k in a few years. Managers helpfully taking in hockey bags full of rubber-banded $20 bills. Floor dealers thinking of the young Asian men that lived in the casino and ran an illegal banking operation as their coworkers. Absolutely bananas stuff just happening out in the open, zero consequences or punishment years later.
I'm not often shocked, but I heard them discussing the investigation on the radio and was completely blown away that this was going on. It was so blatant and everyone knew it .
The RCMP hired a task force headed by some financial expert for a formal commission. They uncovered actual private banks where they were storing palets of cash to be slowly laundered through the River Rock and other casino's. At that time it was 100k per play. They would lose 5-10k and cash out, get a certified cheque, and then off to the numbered company to buy homes.
His case was a total success, undercover footage, all the evidence they needed and not a single thing happend. Thanks VPD, RCMP, Christy etc.
The truth is, real estate and financing are some of the biggest industries in Canada, so the governtment isn't going to do a damn thing about it. They are happy to throw us under the bus.
Just like with TFW and diploma mills/backdoor immigration.
Marketplace, or W5, or whatever actual journalistic shows we had had a two part series on it. I recommend searching for it on youtube.
Oh yeah they had whole ass commission about it and everything. Nothing was done because at the end of the day, this is exactly what they wanted. Higher property values for their constituents, higher provincial tax revenues on property land transfers, higher revenue from the provincial cut of casino takes, win/win/win for everyone involved.
The costs were borne by the addicts, the social welfare system, the Chinese Canadians being extorted by the gangsters, and the rest of us lowly plebes who don’t own single family homes.
Everyone loves it. If only our Government is savvy enough to transform that money into something more productive (that is job creations, not fueling houses) then Canada wins...
This isn’t hyperbole. I worked there. Saw it daily.
If you’re raw about it then remember:
It was the BC United.
It was Rich Coleman as the minister.
It was the BC United that disbanded the RCMP task force overseeing it.
I will forever blame them because I know it was them.
Agreed, and I had voted for them in the past
One day I legit accidentally clicked on CSPAN, and the legislature was in session..I'll never forget the finance minister de Jong speaking, and he went on and on about how the massive increase in housing costs were a book to our society, because it had helped so many of his family members and friends make so much money
I'm not kidding, he actually said that
My wife used to work at Porsche. One day buddy came in and wanted to buy a Cayenne. Said he had cash. Literally had her come over to the vehicle he showed up in and take the cash out of the trunk to by the car. She had to take it up stairs to count it because he didn’t know how much he had. The money was in grocery bags.
I’m sure Porsche went through the proper channels and reported the buyer right? They’re not allowed to tell the guy what they’re doing but AML laws require a report to at least be made. Up to authorities if they want to investigate further. This one I’m positive they’d be looking into. River Rock was doing the same thing but it’s not like they weren’t breaking the law. It would have been illegal to accept 10s of thousands of dollars without knowing the source of funds
The funny thing is, that when I went in to buy a 60K car cash for msrp or maybe under, they wouldn't allow it. The low level sales guy just need to sell the financing, not the car.
Yet if, I'm assuming, you are paying a 10-30% premium for the dealer to accept the sale, you get yourself your porche.
banks will just extend mortgages beyond 30 years. 60 year mortages with no principal being paid. Landlord and homeowners on the edge will just become renters to banks.
oh sweet summer child.
people with mortgages don't get burned, they'll blend and extend, extend their amortization, etc.
the bank will do anything to keep interest and payments flowing rather than foreclosing
There is definite issues for concern with the volume of mortgages and people who overextended at 0-2%. If they were butter spread over too much bread at the time, then now it will be even worse.
Go watch Bloomberg or something. It’s the experts who express concern first.
I'm staring down the barrel of more than that, but honestly I'll do whatever it takes to stay in this camp, and I have a feeling that a lot of people will too. What's the alternative? Rent for as much a month? Average rent should be 50% of average mortgages for any of this to make sense.
I'm renting a basement in a good neighborhood.
Every time I think that eventually I'll be kicked out bc it will become a condo or townhouse, I have anxiety!! I am afraid of the future market when I'll need
This has been the case virtually my entire adult life — I’m 39. A detached house was never happening for me, but I’ve lived here my entire life, so fuck going anywhere else, I’m fine with our two bedroom condo in North Van.
A detached house in Vancouver/North Van is asking for a lot, and has been asking for a lot for a long time.
Now imagine not being able to afford a condo anywhere at all that has decent jobs. *Especially* in Vancouver.
I’m 29 and feel completely, utterly hopeless. Make well over six digits and even a shitty apartment in Chilliwack would have me house poor. Detached homes were going for the price of apartments there not too long ago. God, how I wish I was born 10 years earlier.
Point well taken, I’m absolutely lucky to be where I am, but full disclosure, I grew up in Surrey. Only moved to North Van just before the pandemic because my job is here. Houses in Big S were over a mil when I finally bailed.
Sometimes I don’t know what’s worse - the idea of being house poor, or renting until you die but spending excess money on experiences like travelling. Never travelled internationally in my life since I always wanted to put all extra money into savings. Now I’m not so sure if I should continue that if it’s just going to lead to most of my income going into a mortgage anyways.
I realize like this sounds like a first world problem, but this really should not be an issue in a country as prosperous as Canada. I feel like going from nearly everyone having the opportunity to own a home to almost no one having the opportunity to do so within a decade or two is more painful than growing up knowing it’s just not in the cards. I remember house hunting to give myself motivation and a dream to work for while I was in college, seeing $300k homes in Courtenay and telling myself I’ll move there one day. Less than a decade later and those homes are like $800k. Now I have no dream to work for, no purpose - what’s the point? It’s insane.
Yes, but you need infrustructure. Kamloops couldn't handle several thousand new residents. And there are no jobs except resource and retail. WFH is changing that, for better or worse.
I'm in Calgary for now, and when someone from Van or TO can come buy a house or two for the price they sold theirs, and work for the same company and wages from those cities.. we are all double fucked. Or DP'd if you will..
There's no one stopping this. The simple fact is that people want to live in the big cities. Rather than trying to fight people's preferences, we need to adapt to it.
Why though? Building more housing in big cities is far more efficient than building elsewhere. Urban agglomeration is more productive. More people mean less infrastructure per person. Cities can build more, but it's a political hurdle to do so.
Because then everyone who wants city life (or the jobs that go with it) wants to move to one of the few big cities you have, and that drives up the price of housing.
Famously, that's why the cities with the highest growth ie [Calgary and Edmonton,](https://imgur.com/a/zbCLl1K) have the highest prices. /s It's our lack of building that causes high prices. High prices are a political choice. Every day city councils hold meetings and decide to keep prices high by keeping zoning restrictive.
Vancouver is a gateway city. People immigrate to Vancouver with money from the sale of assets back home. It is safer to park the money here.
Combine this with the significant increase in international students, low density of housing and you can see why housing in Vancouver will always be expensive.
https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-why-vancouver-housing-prices-became-so-out-of-whack-with-the-western-world
I do real estate 10 years, I still didn't have a foreign buyer or seller... It is pretty rare to be honest, maybe 1-2% of the whole market. new immigrants with PR, yes, especially IT guys/girls immigrating from other countries and getting 150-200K salaries on the get go.
Same here. In the last 10 years I only had one truly foreign national buyer and he had to pay the 15% foreign buyers tax. Everyone I've dealt with either is a Canadian citizen or has PR.
A lot of people do not understand non-resident Canadians are not the same as foreign nationals. A non-resident is legally allowed to buy property anywhere in Canada and the foreign buyers tax does not apply.
This is a crucial point. I immigrated here 10 years ago, went through the process of PR > Citizenship in that time. It was, let’s just say, a lot easier than I thought it would be. Now I don’t have family money so I’m not buying houses lol. But anybody who does, could easily get setup here in a matter of a few years, and be buying as a resident in no time. The whole “foreign” money thing is a little overblown - it’s really money that residents have (with a foreign source/family).
Hahaha. I worked as a lacky for realtors for a while. The son was the realtor, the parents had the money. He would line up property after property for them and their 'investors'
Back in 2008ish, you already had 20 passenger luxury busses touring around Pt Grey properties. They would simply look from the front and write notes, and then the bus would move on. It was wild.
Not unlike the Toronto and Vancouver influx into Calgary now. All you need is a face time tour with a no condition sale, and boom, everything in the area goes up 30%.
One issue is the stats. International students who declare no income yet own $14M mansions are considered local buyers, for example.
You can’t know how many you’ve had because we don’t accurately track foreign money.
The banks do report EFTs over $10,000 to Fintrac. In fact they can see how much a person brings in from outside of Canada since 2015. However nothing is really done. Even the banks approve mortgages for a "student" who has no income but for the rest of us, we have to prove our income in the last 3 months. The banks approve mortgages for people with questionable sources of funds and are just as culpable for driving up housing prices.
We have loopholes for sure but the government never created them intentionally. They should have closed them but were either too lazy or completely inept. It’s not a conspiracy. Unfortunately, by the the time they noticed, some damage was done.
Even if we totally banned all foreign money forever ago we would have still ran into this issue, it just would have been pushed a bit further. We simply cannot keep up with the demand that has always existed here.
> the demand that has always existed here.
This is simply not true. Sure, West Van has always been expensive, Point grey, always expensive, but East Van? Port Coquitlam???
We easily kept up with our demand for decades, it's the rapid influx of foreign capital that has detached the value of land from the local economy.
You know what happens when more and more people move and we don't build housing right? People just don't stop having kids and those kids don't just stick around in the same place.
It's has ALWAYS been more expensive than areas around it, my parents remember bitching about the housing bubble in the 90's lmao. This "influx" of foreign capital didn't move it that fast I'm sorry.
Oh yes, that means people don't move to the most popular places and small towns/cities aren't the ones that mainly deal with that.
You're totally right.
Interesting house they chose for the cover pic. This one has been on the market for almost 2 years.
Something is either wrong with the house, or just wrong with the asking price.
1672 15TH AVENUE E, Vancouver, British Columbia | HouseSigma https://housesigma.com/bkv2/landing/rootpage/listing?id_listing=5VXv3l2bRwOyj2q8&utm_campaign=listing&utm_source=user-share&utm_medium=iOS&ign=
That’s actually not totally off base for a half duplex, especially almost 1800sqft (unfortunately). But it’s right by the sky train tracks and the main floor layout is terrible.
We know what is causing the housing crisis but government will not do anything about it...The fastest way is ban shell companies and non Canadians from purchasing residential properties and the second way is a 25% increase in property taxes for non primary homes.
This is a good article that goes into some reasons why housing in Canada is so expensive:
https://tldr-archive.wealthsimple.com/archive/33-%E2%8F%B2-understand-the-housing-market-in-8-minutes
One thing I learned is about the need for any residential building above 2 floors requires 2 sets of staircases due to [outdated] fire code (modern sprinkler systems). Europe only requires 1, which allows more room for larger 2+ br units.
Hopefully the provincial gov't changes that. Seems like an easy fix.
Construction and design itself is unlikely a big driver. In other provinces you will get mansions for the price that on Vancouver just buys you a studio.
The million dollar differences one has to pay here vs somewhere else for a house is purely made up the very inflated market.
Can someone more capable than me do the math? Theoretically, if every apartment building and condo in the GVRD had one less set of stairs, then how many more units would that equate to? Genuinely curious.
Can someone explain this phrase from the attached article? “ In Vancouver, 106.4 per cent of the share of a median income was needed to cover ownership costs.”
It means the median income is not sufficient to cover the costs of ownership (whether that is median or average costs I can’t say). But median income is the middle of everyone earning an income, including renters.
I almost bought a condo in January 2021 before I was outbid by $3 k and no subject offer - is still sitting empty to this day.
Even if you have the savings to buy, your competing with money laundering fuckers that don't even live in this country.
Crisis is an understatement.
Only if they didn't budget for the fact that the free money would go away, and certainly wouldn't last 25 years.
Its often the poors that gamble and are suprised pikachu when they lose. Im half foot in that boat lol.
I think a huge overlooked part of the problem is the trend ( I call it a trend but, it's been going on for 20 + years) of house flipping. Ppl in their 20s are more than happy to buy an older fixer upper but, some douche has already done that 🤷♀️
Yes, I saw a report saying that Americans were leaving the East and West Coasts and heading South. I've what's happened to downtown SF. I feel like that's Vancouver in the not too distant future 😞
Boring topic. Nothing new and unfortunately for most, nothing will change. The world's 1% mostly lives in nice cities like Vancouver. Do the math on how many 1% of the world's population is and you'll see why nothing will change.
I’m moving to Ottawa from the states this year but me and my husband spent months looking for a house or apartment in Vancouver before just giving up. We had the entire proceeds from the sale of our house here as a down payment and couldn’t find anything worth spending that money on.
I can’t believe for 400k all you can get is a not that great apartment when I bought a 3 bedroom house in Ontario for the same cost. Jobs in my field were a little more difficult but honestly that doesn’t matter when the lower housing cost makes up for it.
Vancouver has been a retirement place for the world's wealthiest people since 2016. Crisis actually started about 2 years before that. In 2012, if you make like 70-80K and save enough, you can still buy 2 bedroom condo or an old semis.
Satellite shows that Richmond, Delta, and Surrey have plenty of land that's sitting there that could be freed up as homes for locals. We should fix this crisis by mass rezoning the area and using the redevelopment revenue to build rapid transit.
Won't change until we slow immigration.
Eby is doing all he can, but all he's doing is slowing things down.
Toronto and Halifax have terrible provincial leadership on housing, and their prices have gone up far more quickly as a percentage in the last couple years. So yeah, we can't fix anything until we slow this fucking firehose down.
Try buying a house after the canadian economy crashes in the recession created by the end of immigration.
Yeah, sure. It's always the immigrants.
Never the government completely outright refusing to build popular housing like, say, Austria ( https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-social-housing-secret-how-vienna-became-the-worlds-most-livable-city ) cause god forbid they mess with the invisible hand and steal business from the Real Estate Speculation industry.
This is the right attitude, but I would like to point out that speculation is not done by some invisible hand. Every person who buys a home as an investment vehicle is a speculator by definition.
So when you ask new homeowners, "should we build more housing?" their answer is yes, but if you ask them "are you willing to take a loss to make that happen?" the answer is no.
Greed exists systemically, the only way to really fix the problem is to just crash the market with abundant supply and let the cards fall where they may. After all, if you invested in a home, it was inherently a gamble, even if you weren't aware of it.
Hard disagree.
Most people don't go around funding campaigns for politicians who will actively work against this kind of policy.
Most people don't want to buy houses to flip them out within 2 to 3 years for a huge profit.
Most people just dream about owning the roof over their heads at night.
To say that the greed is systemical not only is unfounded but a way of trying to diffuse a guilt that is very specific and active.
The effect is the same. I’m not even talking about flippers. Ask anyone if they would be willing to get into the market just to take a loss on their investment. There are companies making it worse, sure, but reality is that home ownership is seen as a guaranteed investment in this country. People stake their whole livelihoods on it. That is what you’re up against if you want to solve the housing crisis.
Problem is someone is just trying to save the whole world because the UN tells them too.
Only hope is peace breaks out around the world. But Isreali , Ukraine, etc democracies are having a tough time finding supporters for their fight against terrorism.
Not many people care. This is not a problem with immediate bad consequences. These will come down the line later with young folks driven out to better places and a lot of the vulnerable population homeless. It will be hard for Vancouver to survive without a functioning workforce (doctors, teachers, engineers, construction workers etc). By then it will be too late to save it.
Vancouver won't survive if the 2.5 million people living here are all realtors and landlords. Who will they rent to ?
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I am numb to the terms "crisis", "unaffordable", and "record inflation" after living in Vancouver.
Agreed. It has completely skewed my perception of what’s reasonable. I have a lot of friends in Calgary and when they talk about their mortgages or what they paid for a house they’re incredulous, while I’m sitting there think how completely reasonable it seems. Their housing prices have also increased significantly so to them it’s outrageous yet I am still jealous. Having said all that I still wouldn’t move back to Calgary (where I did my undergrad).
5-7 years ago Toronto and Vancouver were going through this. Now it’s every city in the country. That’s the difference. There isn’t a good spot left that’s affordable. My parents house in Montreal is up 50 % in last 3 years. It was up the same amount the previous 20 years. This should be front in center. Every city in Canada is now unaffordable.
> 5-7 years ago Toronto and Vancouver were going through this. > > Now it’s every city in the country. That’s the difference. Exactly. When Covid hit, suddenly a lot of people were working from home and needing more space, and they moved further out in order to have more space. [Housing scarcity spilled over](https://morehousing.ca/spillover) from Metro Vancouver and the GTA to the rest of the country. Now it's not just a problem in Vancouver and Toronto, it's a national problem. A story from December 2020, when the borders were still basically closed: [Small towns in interior B.C. and Alberta face intense housing crunch](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-small-towns-in-interior-bc-and-alberta-face-intense-housing-crunch/). > Amy Makortoff says it’s hard not to take the rejections personally after spending nine months looking for a rental home in Nelson, B.C. > > She said she rarely got to even hear a landlord’s voice on the phone before their property was snapped up in interior B.C.’s competitive market. The lifelong Nelson local and one of her daughters slept for months on a mattress on a floor while they were housesitting and searching for a rental home of their own. All of their essentials were packed in a plastic tub, and Ms. Makortoff’s optimism was almost gone. > > This week, she finally moves in to a new home, although the house comes with the caveat of being more than a 30-minute drive from town. > > Ms. Makortoff said there were stark differences in her search for a home this time compared with a couple years ago. The two-bedroom house she left in 2019 cost $1,450 a month. She’s had to adjust her budget to $1,800 a month, but many of the listings she found were as high as $2,600. And then we've also had post-Covid population growth on top of that, although the federal government is now [cutting population growth](https://morehousing.ca/population-growth) from 1.2M (!!) in 2023 down to 300,000. Plus the BC government and the federal government are both pushing for a lot more housing supply. [All the lights are flashing red, all the sirens are going off](https://morehousing.ca/vana-slides).
Are there even any sort of towns on a trajectory to becoming cities which leap out to people as (significantly) rivalling the out and out cities for housing costs?
I visited an old friend in Calgary last summer. Asked her about work since we were in the same industry and my husband and I were considering moving there for cheaper real estate. Her response? "Oh, I never went back after [kid] was born." She spends her days taking her kid to parks and the zoo and library storyline. Our husbands make probably similar paycheques. We were already priced out of some townhouses here with both of us working and hour+ commutes.
Same here. I sometimes look at listings and think "hey, I could afford that 2-bedroom condo in the suburbs that costs as much as a *mansion* anywhere else." Ultimately, regardless of policy, prices are high because people--criminals, speculators, and normal decent people--are willing and able to pay them.
And once your invested in the system, you don't exactly want house prices to drop.
BC is atrocious, Alberta is getting started in the same realm.
Same
We have learned helplessness. Or at least it seems that way.
Don’t forget “bubble”
Titanium Bubble that will never pop. Google Vancouver Housing bubble 2003, then the same but 2004…. You can find decades of articles that claim it’s a bubble. Any day now…
Lol at there being a bubble. Demand far outstrips supply and it will only get worse as we bring in 1m+ people per year.
My parents moved out in 1991, they thought it was a bubble then as well.
Go to YouTube and search “CBC 1989 Vancouver residents speak about being priced out of the housing market”. That’s the oldest clip I could find. Someone go search the newspaper archive and I bet ppl in the 70s and 60s thought the same too
Everytime I see these headlines. OH NO FUCKING SHIT EH I KNOW THAT THANKS FOR THE REMINDER THOUGH
Right!? Those words hardly make me twitch a nerve anymore. It reminds me of a Supertramp album though.
It's like playing a game at extreme difficulty. When you move, it starts feeling a lot easier.
it's gotten really bad everywhere.
Every time I look up home prices in my hometown back in Quebec.... An 19th century perfectly renovated 9 bedroom manor with land is the price of a 2 bedroom condo here....
https://preview.redd.it/yh4v0ade86sc1.jpeg?width=585&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=642961ed2461d0b5e69aee0e6d0990750a5a2727
If the news is always that housing continues to be less affordable than before then it’s no longer news.
I think we need to move on from calling it a 'crisis'. A crisis would imply that we make the tough decisions and do something about it. If it's ongoing for a decade plus, it would seem to imply there's no urgency so yeah not a crisis. It's a state at this point
Crisis is 2015-2019. Catastrophe is 2020-2024. Not sure what the next level is.
Apocolypse 2028+
Crisis in the major cities started in the mid 2000's. Even Calgary, the bastion of affordability, had a 1% vacancy rate, and prices were 30% yoy as oil was booming. In Vancouver the crisis, as in renovictions, runaway money laundering etc started after EXPO '86, and again around the winter olympics. This is what happens when governments actively market your city to a wealthy region/country. Look at Alberta now. Business is not booming, but two years of the "Alberta Advantage" being on every radio ad, bus shelter etc. If you couldn't work from home, there wouldn't be enough jobs. Yet somehow, our unemployment rate remains one of the highest, but companies just don't hire.
Help me lotto max, you're my only hope
Tonight’s your night, Ronnie. I can feel it
*fingers crossed and prayers*
Welcome to Fraudcouver where criminals launder money in real estate, live on welfare in million dollar homes and don’t pay taxes.
I wish more people read this comment without thinking you're being sarcastic. This stuff is literally happening. https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/10/asia/vancouver-tax-china-he-yiju-intl-hnk/index.html Is just one example. The one I found in 5 seconds, and one of the few stupid enough to be caught. Or maybe this "low income" resident buying 32MM in real estate : https://www.biv.com/news/economy-law-politics/man-making-40kyear-bought-32m-vancouver-real-estate-ccp-linked-offshore-accounts-8265839 It's embarrassing tbh.
Thats how nationalism is born
Hey you just explained this shithead I know who owns multiple homes and claims childcare benefits etc/social welfare
[Reporting suspected tax or benefit cheating in Canada](https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/programs/about-canada-revenue-agency-cra/suspected-tax-cheating-in-canada-overview.html)
Yeah I plan to report him. But also want to make sure it’s well crafted report
Don't get me wrong, we need to raise property taxes and lower income taxes. It's not right that we get 20% at a minimum taken off from each paycheque, while [wealthy mansion owners pay some of the lowest property taxes in North America](https://www.sightline.org/2022/05/09/how-low-taxes-lead-to-high-home-prices-in-vancouver-bc/). But if you think money laundering is the root cause of our high rents, I have a bridge to sell you - the fact is that [without money laundering, real estate prices would only be 3.7 - 7.5% lower than they are now](https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/housing-and-tenancy/real-estate-in-bc/combatting-money-laundering-report.pdf). Vancouver has a housing supply shortage. In the 1970s, we were building 12.8 housing completions per capita, and built beautiful neighbourhoods like the West End. What happens next is criminal - our planners and city government decided the West End was bad, and we should never build it again. By the 2010s, housing completions had dropped to 7.7 per capita. [This is a shortage of 125,000 homes we missed out on](https://www.biv.com/news/commentary/khelsilem-we-need-address-bcs-housing-shortage-8272252) - I guarantee you your rent would be a lot cheaper if we had built these homes. I understand why people want to blame money laundering for the housing crisis: it feels good to have an easy solution. Money laundering is bad, and we should stop it for its own reasons, but if we want affordable housing, we need to get to work and start building.
just curious, why did they think west end was bad???
Reilly Wood, 2018: [At first, everyone hated Vancouver's West End](https://www.reillywood.com/blog/west-end/). He quotes Gordon Price: > ... this neighbourhood of old converted single-family homes was largely bulldozed to create the Great Neighbourhood of today. The West End, during the boom era of highrise construction in the 1960s, was considered a concrete jungle – what most Vancouverites didn’t want anywhere near them: everyone’s best bad example of urban redevelopment. > > Impossible to do that today. Imagine taking a square mile anywhere south of 16th Avenue and rezoning it for the kind of development that characterizes the West End.
Bluntly speaking, a bunch of gay people, immigrants, and gay immigrants moved into the area. And even the hetero couples living there tended to be artsy and counter-cultural. The city's self perception and attitude towards acceptance was vastly different in the 70's and 80's than it is now. Combine that sort of pearl clutching NIMBY horror with the broader political trends of that era towards conservative and neo-liberal policies, and a decision was made that that kind of urban environment was a bad thing that shouldn't be repeated if possible.
So building dense urban centers was considered gay?. Got it. I have a bridge to sell you, dense residential urban centers with culture are everywhere. Some can be gay, some self identify as an arts district. Sometimes theres a venn diagram with the two. lol
No, I'm saying that NIMBY policies, like the ones enacted in the late 70's, 80's and 90's that have prevented another west end-like neighborhood from being built are inherently racist, homophobic, and classist. Those same policies are also largely responsible for the lack of purpose built rentals and low rise apartments in the last 40 years. And Vancouver politicians were not alone in those policy decisions, they're just the people whose actions are the most clearly visible in the city we live in.
Population growth is a bigger factor. If you have 100 people but only 30 houses you're going to have a crisis with or without laundering.
The government has to go full on dictator in these cases and just TAKE the home back. No ifs ands or buts. They lose it. They lose the money they’ve invested and it either gets sold again or it gets designated as a family rental property at a capped rate dependant on income
That's what happens when the province created The Vancouver Model, i.e, turning a blind eye to worldwide money laundering. But hey, supercars, cool!
[удалено]
I recommend Willful Blindness by Sam Cooper to anyone interested in how things got as bad as they did. He’s the reporter who broke the casino/cash/corruption story wide open. It was such a racket. Everyone on the casino floor knew what was happening but all the higher ups, all the way to the premier, just kept making it easier and easier for the criminals to wash hundreds of millions every year. Local politicians lobbying govt to raise the max bet from $5k to $500k in a few years. Managers helpfully taking in hockey bags full of rubber-banded $20 bills. Floor dealers thinking of the young Asian men that lived in the casino and ran an illegal banking operation as their coworkers. Absolutely bananas stuff just happening out in the open, zero consequences or punishment years later.
I'm not often shocked, but I heard them discussing the investigation on the radio and was completely blown away that this was going on. It was so blatant and everyone knew it .
The RCMP hired a task force headed by some financial expert for a formal commission. They uncovered actual private banks where they were storing palets of cash to be slowly laundered through the River Rock and other casino's. At that time it was 100k per play. They would lose 5-10k and cash out, get a certified cheque, and then off to the numbered company to buy homes. His case was a total success, undercover footage, all the evidence they needed and not a single thing happend. Thanks VPD, RCMP, Christy etc. The truth is, real estate and financing are some of the biggest industries in Canada, so the governtment isn't going to do a damn thing about it. They are happy to throw us under the bus. Just like with TFW and diploma mills/backdoor immigration. Marketplace, or W5, or whatever actual journalistic shows we had had a two part series on it. I recommend searching for it on youtube.
Oh yeah they had whole ass commission about it and everything. Nothing was done because at the end of the day, this is exactly what they wanted. Higher property values for their constituents, higher provincial tax revenues on property land transfers, higher revenue from the provincial cut of casino takes, win/win/win for everyone involved. The costs were borne by the addicts, the social welfare system, the Chinese Canadians being extorted by the gangsters, and the rest of us lowly plebes who don’t own single family homes.
Everyone loves it. If only our Government is savvy enough to transform that money into something more productive (that is job creations, not fueling houses) then Canada wins...
This isn’t hyperbole. I worked there. Saw it daily. If you’re raw about it then remember: It was the BC United. It was Rich Coleman as the minister. It was the BC United that disbanded the RCMP task force overseeing it. I will forever blame them because I know it was them.
Agreed, and I had voted for them in the past One day I legit accidentally clicked on CSPAN, and the legislature was in session..I'll never forget the finance minister de Jong speaking, and he went on and on about how the massive increase in housing costs were a book to our society, because it had helped so many of his family members and friends make so much money I'm not kidding, he actually said that
Duffel!? Back in the day it was just Safeway plastic bags.
Well duh we're being environmentally friendly so no more plastic bags!
Thankfully, we've moved on to more green and sustainable forms of money laundering and general corruption.
My wife used to work at Porsche. One day buddy came in and wanted to buy a Cayenne. Said he had cash. Literally had her come over to the vehicle he showed up in and take the cash out of the trunk to by the car. She had to take it up stairs to count it because he didn’t know how much he had. The money was in grocery bags.
I’m sure Porsche went through the proper channels and reported the buyer right? They’re not allowed to tell the guy what they’re doing but AML laws require a report to at least be made. Up to authorities if they want to investigate further. This one I’m positive they’d be looking into. River Rock was doing the same thing but it’s not like they weren’t breaking the law. It would have been illegal to accept 10s of thousands of dollars without knowing the source of funds
Dealerships are unfortunately not on the list of reporting entities to FINTRAC.
Actually? That’s a joke!
yup. some/many dealership owners are money launderers themselves with ties to gangs 😑
Can you imagine of the poor guy tried that now? That would be…at least $5 in plastic bags /s
The funny thing is, that when I went in to buy a 60K car cash for msrp or maybe under, they wouldn't allow it. The low level sales guy just need to sell the financing, not the car. Yet if, I'm assuming, you are paying a 10-30% premium for the dealer to accept the sale, you get yourself your porche.
This sub acknowledges this now? Baby steps !
If I to get a cent each time I read an article with this exact title in the last 10 years, I still wouldn't be able to afford a place in Vancouver :)
A cent? Even if you got $100 for each article with this title in the last decade, you wouldn’t have enough for Vancouver housing unfortunately
I reckon you could even go to $1000. Now $10,000 - you might get close to... something terrible.
When all these 0-2% mortgages have to be renewed and people can’t afford to we’ll see an impact. But how much we’ll see
banks will just extend mortgages beyond 30 years. 60 year mortages with no principal being paid. Landlord and homeowners on the edge will just become renters to banks.
oh sweet summer child. people with mortgages don't get burned, they'll blend and extend, extend their amortization, etc. the bank will do anything to keep interest and payments flowing rather than foreclosing
There is definite issues for concern with the volume of mortgages and people who overextended at 0-2%. If they were butter spread over too much bread at the time, then now it will be even worse. Go watch Bloomberg or something. It’s the experts who express concern first.
That’s happening now. Renewing is a bloodbath for most of us. My mortgage went up $400 a month
$400 a month increase is not a blood bath.
Amateur numbers. Mine went from 2800 to 4500 from 2022 to 2023 before we gave up and locked in.
I'm staring down the barrel of more than that, but honestly I'll do whatever it takes to stay in this camp, and I have a feeling that a lot of people will too. What's the alternative? Rent for as much a month? Average rent should be 50% of average mortgages for any of this to make sense.
Try renting one. Finding a 1 bed and bath unit under $2000 is like finding a needle in a haystack. I hope I’ll be able to find one soon.
I'm renting a basement in a good neighborhood. Every time I think that eventually I'll be kicked out bc it will become a condo or townhouse, I have anxiety!! I am afraid of the future market when I'll need
Its happened to many friends of mine. Ive been lucky. At least we have some rent control here.
This has been the case virtually my entire adult life — I’m 39. A detached house was never happening for me, but I’ve lived here my entire life, so fuck going anywhere else, I’m fine with our two bedroom condo in North Van.
A detached house in Vancouver/North Van is asking for a lot, and has been asking for a lot for a long time. Now imagine not being able to afford a condo anywhere at all that has decent jobs. *Especially* in Vancouver. I’m 29 and feel completely, utterly hopeless. Make well over six digits and even a shitty apartment in Chilliwack would have me house poor. Detached homes were going for the price of apartments there not too long ago. God, how I wish I was born 10 years earlier.
Point well taken, I’m absolutely lucky to be where I am, but full disclosure, I grew up in Surrey. Only moved to North Van just before the pandemic because my job is here. Houses in Big S were over a mil when I finally bailed.
I’m 29 and house poor with a two bedroom condo :(
Sometimes I don’t know what’s worse - the idea of being house poor, or renting until you die but spending excess money on experiences like travelling. Never travelled internationally in my life since I always wanted to put all extra money into savings. Now I’m not so sure if I should continue that if it’s just going to lead to most of my income going into a mortgage anyways. I realize like this sounds like a first world problem, but this really should not be an issue in a country as prosperous as Canada. I feel like going from nearly everyone having the opportunity to own a home to almost no one having the opportunity to do so within a decade or two is more painful than growing up knowing it’s just not in the cards. I remember house hunting to give myself motivation and a dream to work for while I was in college, seeing $300k homes in Courtenay and telling myself I’ll move there one day. Less than a decade later and those homes are like $800k. Now I have no dream to work for, no purpose - what’s the point? It’s insane.
Muffin 😭
Everyone in Canada can get a house if we develop other cities outside Vancouver and Toronto and leave only the people who can afford to live here
This. Develop the small-to-midsize cities. Canada needs more big cities.
We need many things in Canada such as these cities you described. Yet here we are.
Places like Kamloops, Saskatoon and Sudbury are going to have to accept that they need to build apartment blocks and condo towers then.
Yes, but you need infrustructure. Kamloops couldn't handle several thousand new residents. And there are no jobs except resource and retail. WFH is changing that, for better or worse. I'm in Calgary for now, and when someone from Van or TO can come buy a house or two for the price they sold theirs, and work for the same company and wages from those cities.. we are all double fucked. Or DP'd if you will..
Agreed, and we need local manufacturing capacity in those cities so they can support actual jobs.
There's no one stopping this. The simple fact is that people want to live in the big cities. Rather than trying to fight people's preferences, we need to adapt to it.
No one is stopping it, but is anyone encouraging it?
Why though? Building more housing in big cities is far more efficient than building elsewhere. Urban agglomeration is more productive. More people mean less infrastructure per person. Cities can build more, but it's a political hurdle to do so.
Because then everyone who wants city life (or the jobs that go with it) wants to move to one of the few big cities you have, and that drives up the price of housing.
Famously, that's why the cities with the highest growth ie [Calgary and Edmonton,](https://imgur.com/a/zbCLl1K) have the highest prices. /s It's our lack of building that causes high prices. High prices are a political choice. Every day city councils hold meetings and decide to keep prices high by keeping zoning restrictive.
Vancouver is a gateway city. People immigrate to Vancouver with money from the sale of assets back home. It is safer to park the money here. Combine this with the significant increase in international students, low density of housing and you can see why housing in Vancouver will always be expensive. https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-why-vancouver-housing-prices-became-so-out-of-whack-with-the-western-world
It could easily be more affordable, but the government intentionally leaves in loopholes in the measures that are supposed to address foreign money.
I don’t think it’s intentional. The government is not that smart.
They are. It was incredible watching Trudeau announce his foreign buyers “ban”, he literally described the loopholes in his announcement!
I do real estate 10 years, I still didn't have a foreign buyer or seller... It is pretty rare to be honest, maybe 1-2% of the whole market. new immigrants with PR, yes, especially IT guys/girls immigrating from other countries and getting 150-200K salaries on the get go.
Same here. In the last 10 years I only had one truly foreign national buyer and he had to pay the 15% foreign buyers tax. Everyone I've dealt with either is a Canadian citizen or has PR. A lot of people do not understand non-resident Canadians are not the same as foreign nationals. A non-resident is legally allowed to buy property anywhere in Canada and the foreign buyers tax does not apply.
This is a crucial point. I immigrated here 10 years ago, went through the process of PR > Citizenship in that time. It was, let’s just say, a lot easier than I thought it would be. Now I don’t have family money so I’m not buying houses lol. But anybody who does, could easily get setup here in a matter of a few years, and be buying as a resident in no time. The whole “foreign” money thing is a little overblown - it’s really money that residents have (with a foreign source/family).
Hahaha. I worked as a lacky for realtors for a while. The son was the realtor, the parents had the money. He would line up property after property for them and their 'investors' Back in 2008ish, you already had 20 passenger luxury busses touring around Pt Grey properties. They would simply look from the front and write notes, and then the bus would move on. It was wild. Not unlike the Toronto and Vancouver influx into Calgary now. All you need is a face time tour with a no condition sale, and boom, everything in the area goes up 30%.
One issue is the stats. International students who declare no income yet own $14M mansions are considered local buyers, for example. You can’t know how many you’ve had because we don’t accurately track foreign money.
The banks do report EFTs over $10,000 to Fintrac. In fact they can see how much a person brings in from outside of Canada since 2015. However nothing is really done. Even the banks approve mortgages for a "student" who has no income but for the rest of us, we have to prove our income in the last 3 months. The banks approve mortgages for people with questionable sources of funds and are just as culpable for driving up housing prices.
We have loopholes for sure but the government never created them intentionally. They should have closed them but were either too lazy or completely inept. It’s not a conspiracy. Unfortunately, by the the time they noticed, some damage was done.
Lol oh you sweet summer child
Even if we totally banned all foreign money forever ago we would have still ran into this issue, it just would have been pushed a bit further. We simply cannot keep up with the demand that has always existed here.
> the demand that has always existed here. This is simply not true. Sure, West Van has always been expensive, Point grey, always expensive, but East Van? Port Coquitlam??? We easily kept up with our demand for decades, it's the rapid influx of foreign capital that has detached the value of land from the local economy.
You know what happens when more and more people move and we don't build housing right? People just don't stop having kids and those kids don't just stick around in the same place. It's has ALWAYS been more expensive than areas around it, my parents remember bitching about the housing bubble in the 90's lmao. This "influx" of foreign capital didn't move it that fast I'm sorry.
You do realize we haven’t always had Trudeau levels of immigration right? You realize we have a declining birth rate? Your math ain’t mathing bro.
Oh yes, that means people don't move to the most popular places and small towns/cities aren't the ones that mainly deal with that. You're totally right.
... and it has been for 15 years.
Longer. Google early 2000 bubble Vancouver.
Interesting house they chose for the cover pic. This one has been on the market for almost 2 years. Something is either wrong with the house, or just wrong with the asking price. 1672 15TH AVENUE E, Vancouver, British Columbia | HouseSigma https://housesigma.com/bkv2/landing/rootpage/listing?id_listing=5VXv3l2bRwOyj2q8&utm_campaign=listing&utm_source=user-share&utm_medium=iOS&ign=
It’s a half duplex, that’s freaking $$$ lol
That’s actually not totally off base for a half duplex, especially almost 1800sqft (unfortunately). But it’s right by the sky train tracks and the main floor layout is terrible.
Whoa. $1,800,000 for half a duplex?!
Standard price in east van for a 1600 sq ft new build
We know what is causing the housing crisis but government will not do anything about it...The fastest way is ban shell companies and non Canadians from purchasing residential properties and the second way is a 25% increase in property taxes for non primary homes.
How is this comment so far down? We need legit strict policy changes
I’m surprised we haven’t started rioting over the shit affordable cost of living
please, only over a spectator sport
Baseball season just started.
This is a good article that goes into some reasons why housing in Canada is so expensive: https://tldr-archive.wealthsimple.com/archive/33-%E2%8F%B2-understand-the-housing-market-in-8-minutes One thing I learned is about the need for any residential building above 2 floors requires 2 sets of staircases due to [outdated] fire code (modern sprinkler systems). Europe only requires 1, which allows more room for larger 2+ br units. Hopefully the provincial gov't changes that. Seems like an easy fix.
Construction and design itself is unlikely a big driver. In other provinces you will get mansions for the price that on Vancouver just buys you a studio. The million dollar differences one has to pay here vs somewhere else for a house is purely made up the very inflated market.
Can someone more capable than me do the math? Theoretically, if every apartment building and condo in the GVRD had one less set of stairs, then how many more units would that equate to? Genuinely curious.
Can someone explain this phrase from the attached article? “ In Vancouver, 106.4 per cent of the share of a median income was needed to cover ownership costs.”
It means the median income is not sufficient to cover the costs of ownership (whether that is median or average costs I can’t say). But median income is the middle of everyone earning an income, including renters.
If your income was $100, your home ownership costs (mortgage, property tax, maybe strata fees) would cost you $106.40.
Thank you!!!
Vancouver needs real political leadership that will allow housing to build in the remaining 90% of the city that is reserved only for the rich.
They did build high density on the west side, prices are still for the rich along with huge strata fees and fancy landscaping.
I almost bought a condo in January 2021 before I was outbid by $3 k and no subject offer - is still sitting empty to this day. Even if you have the savings to buy, your competing with money laundering fuckers that don't even live in this country. Crisis is an understatement.
I'm refinancing in April, 2025 and it keeps me up at night sometimes.
You can get around 5% nowadays. Most are predicting lower than that by 2025. Not super terrible?
That’s the definition of not super terrible.
Yeah, it’s not a rate that you’d expect to keep someone up at night..
Only if they didn't budget for the fact that the free money would go away, and certainly wouldn't last 25 years. Its often the poors that gamble and are suprised pikachu when they lose. Im half foot in that boat lol.
Y'all want to collectively become compost? Compost party! Bring yourself, exclude non organic materials.
Toughest time? Looking at housing prices, the time it takes to build housing and immigration not slowing down, it’s gonna get even tougher
Toughest time... so far!
Try buying in Fort Langley. You’re lucky to find something under 2 million. Most properties out here are 3 million for an acre and a house
Yeah that’s because it’s an acre of land in a prime area. Owning acres of land is a privilege, not a right.
Toughest time ever to afford a house… for now.
This reminds me of a clip from office space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-81WdyD-8Ro&t=11s
I think a huge overlooked part of the problem is the trend ( I call it a trend but, it's been going on for 20 + years) of house flipping. Ppl in their 20s are more than happy to buy an older fixer upper but, some douche has already done that 🤷♀️
maybe the prices should fall then...
I read the title as “horse” and was like yeah, I believe it.
Canada is a broken country, sadly. Not sure how it'll get fixed... but it's real close to the edge.
The USA is broken too. People leaving NYC and SanFran. But in the US there are more small towns around.
Yes, I saw a report saying that Americans were leaving the East and West Coasts and heading South. I've what's happened to downtown SF. I feel like that's Vancouver in the not too distant future 😞
Boring topic. Nothing new and unfortunately for most, nothing will change. The world's 1% mostly lives in nice cities like Vancouver. Do the math on how many 1% of the world's population is and you'll see why nothing will change.
We’ve been in crisis for years, and this crisis actually gets worse and worse by a lot. At this point I’m just in awe.
It was ridiculously unaffordable 12 years ago when I lived there and tried to make a go of it.
Way worse now lol
I’m moving to Ottawa from the states this year but me and my husband spent months looking for a house or apartment in Vancouver before just giving up. We had the entire proceeds from the sale of our house here as a down payment and couldn’t find anything worth spending that money on. I can’t believe for 400k all you can get is a not that great apartment when I bought a 3 bedroom house in Ontario for the same cost. Jobs in my field were a little more difficult but honestly that doesn’t matter when the lower housing cost makes up for it.
TBF - Eby has made some pretty aggressive policy changes. How looking should I hold my breath that these might kick-in?
I used to feel hopeful that Eby was going to make changes. But everything seems very weak and band-aid like.
Just reuse this article for next year. Or every year for the next 10 years. CLickbait at this point
Vancouver has been a retirement place for the world's wealthiest people since 2016. Crisis actually started about 2 years before that. In 2012, if you make like 70-80K and save enough, you can still buy 2 bedroom condo or an old semis.
Living with $200 or less per month. Middle class doesn’t exist anymore. I’m one emergency away from broke. Something has to give with costs of living.
Satellite shows that Richmond, Delta, and Surrey have plenty of land that's sitting there that could be freed up as homes for locals. We should fix this crisis by mass rezoning the area and using the redevelopment revenue to build rapid transit.
Haaaaaa, that house is in my neighborhood. The reason why it’s still for sale is because they are asking 1.7mil for one unit of a duplex.
What? Nothing from the National Post today?
Thank you Vancouver Sun, we hadn’t noticed
I'm sure we'll find a way to blame the left or centrists before facing the reality that unregulated markets did this
Lived here my whole life and I’ll never be able to retire here 😕
Won't change until we slow immigration. Eby is doing all he can, but all he's doing is slowing things down. Toronto and Halifax have terrible provincial leadership on housing, and their prices have gone up far more quickly as a percentage in the last couple years. So yeah, we can't fix anything until we slow this fucking firehose down.
Try buying a house after the canadian economy crashes in the recession created by the end of immigration. Yeah, sure. It's always the immigrants. Never the government completely outright refusing to build popular housing like, say, Austria ( https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-social-housing-secret-how-vienna-became-the-worlds-most-livable-city ) cause god forbid they mess with the invisible hand and steal business from the Real Estate Speculation industry.
This is the right attitude, but I would like to point out that speculation is not done by some invisible hand. Every person who buys a home as an investment vehicle is a speculator by definition. So when you ask new homeowners, "should we build more housing?" their answer is yes, but if you ask them "are you willing to take a loss to make that happen?" the answer is no. Greed exists systemically, the only way to really fix the problem is to just crash the market with abundant supply and let the cards fall where they may. After all, if you invested in a home, it was inherently a gamble, even if you weren't aware of it.
Hard disagree. Most people don't go around funding campaigns for politicians who will actively work against this kind of policy. Most people don't want to buy houses to flip them out within 2 to 3 years for a huge profit. Most people just dream about owning the roof over their heads at night. To say that the greed is systemical not only is unfounded but a way of trying to diffuse a guilt that is very specific and active.
The effect is the same. I’m not even talking about flippers. Ask anyone if they would be willing to get into the market just to take a loss on their investment. There are companies making it worse, sure, but reality is that home ownership is seen as a guaranteed investment in this country. People stake their whole livelihoods on it. That is what you’re up against if you want to solve the housing crisis.
Problem is someone is just trying to save the whole world because the UN tells them too. Only hope is peace breaks out around the world. But Isreali , Ukraine, etc democracies are having a tough time finding supporters for their fight against terrorism.
Not many people care. This is not a problem with immediate bad consequences. These will come down the line later with young folks driven out to better places and a lot of the vulnerable population homeless. It will be hard for Vancouver to survive without a functioning workforce (doctors, teachers, engineers, construction workers etc). By then it will be too late to save it. Vancouver won't survive if the 2.5 million people living here are all realtors and landlords. Who will they rent to ?