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Originally Posted by blankall
Vancouver is also a city where not everyone is invited to the party. If you have parents that can gift you a massive down payment or got in at a good time, you are laughing. For everyone else it's a hamster wheel of constantly trying to keep up with living expenses with no gain to show for it.
The economy is strangled with Nimbyism and socialist thought, but nobody ever seems to benefit from this but the people who already have lots.
Vancouver has some big problems.
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Yep. It's a hot mess culturally. Take away the mountains and the ocean and you're left with a pretty lame city.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RobotTalk
This is very, very true.
My friends and I would always laugh at the Lambos and Ferraris parked at UBC with 'N' stickers on the back. What a first car to be gifted...
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My wife's work is mostly dealing with UHNWIs here in Vancouver. I'm also pretty familiar with being around that kind of wealth from my own career/education too. One of my friends from Shanghai actually attended UBC as a child in a billionaire family and could easily have been a driver of one of those cars you saw depending on when you attended. I have nothing against people with mad money like that, but it must be said that it's undeniably not great for a place when that money is largely being parked here after being made elsewhere or just dropped into the city with kids who don't really care about doing much productive or have anything motivating them to contribute or build anything. A lot of the money that is here isn't really productive. It's just passively accumulating here while the productive investments and businesses are all overseas. The result is you get a lot of wealth disparity locally without anything really taking place to stimulate the local environment, and you get a culture of bored entitlement with little ambition to do the kinds of things that make a place dynamic and exciting. Culturally, it's awful
Also, it's fairly well understood that there are many ways to get around taxes and to benefit from the social support systems without true need because the enforcement environment is very slack/dopey. That's all just part of Vancouver’s value proposition to the world, and it's part of why real estate will keep going up here and why the most money to be made here will largely go to middlemen roles charging service fees as percentages of transactions for those with huge piles of mostly passive cash.
The large majority of working people here seem to be on hamster wheels trying to keep up while doing their best to enjoy the mountains and beach on weekends, but not having great opportunities to get ahead or benefiting much from the wealth that surrounds them.