Quote:
Originally Posted by squiggs96
Because if it wasn't for the incomeless students buying those properties, they would totally be affordable for the rest of Vancouver.
The $57M by nine students included one house at $31M. If you take that house out, there is $26M bought by eight people, for an average of $3.25M. I know of many Vancouverites that have bought houses with a value greater than this. They are all Canadian citizens. That's not a large number, especially in that area. Eby asks how they acquired the mortgages, when about 15 seconds worth of research will tell you. Basically get 35% down, the property transfer taxes, and the first twelve months of payments into an account, and you can get a mortgage.
I get the outrage, but the data is presented with extreme bias. The article is click bait. If the debate could be structured around affordable housing, which I believe is a huge problem in Vancouver, instead of looking at the houses 99.99% of people will never afford, no matter the relative prices, it would go over much better. I think Vancouver needs to increase the density with more condos, and more transit infrastructure to move the people around. Marine and Cambie is a great start to this. There are several towers going in, with a Canada Line right there. Many of the houses in the surrounding 10 blocks are being bought up and built as townhomes and condos. Further up Cambie on 59th there are two huge projects soon to be started. Continue downtown on Cambie and you will see more of these, plus more Canada Line stops. These are good things. The city needs to continue to green light these projects, as well as look at ways to dissuade foreign buyers.
What the media, and the NDP shouldn't be doing is comparing the $31M house to someone on a Starbucks salary. Vancouver is unique to other cities as there is water on three sides and a mountain on the other. It can't sprawl like Calgary or Edmonton. It can only go up. Because of this, land continues to diminish when being bought to build condos. As land disappears, the supply has gone down and the demand goes up. That's where a lot of the price increases have come from. Some of this is from foreign buyers. Some of it is from local buyers. I feel putting the blame on the Chinese is inherently racist.
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I'm with you, but in this case, the supply isn't going down, it's going up because of your sentence before. Building up should be lowering the cost because you can fit more people into a smaller space of land.
The market is way overinflated. I pay $100 more per month to rent a 1 room basement suite that's just barely inside Vancouver city limits than I do for the mortgage on my 3 story townhouse in Dalhousie a stones throw from the train station.
I don't see how any start up young person could live in this city.