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Originally Posted by JohnnyB
Yep. It's a hot mess culturally. Take away the mountains and the ocean and you're left with a pretty lame city.
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.
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There is a lady who has a kid in the same daycare as my kid who is part of this racket. She was pretty open about how her uncle bought her a house when she was a student. They were actually in the process of moving out of their current house where they lived upstairs and rented out the bottom. They were going to rent out the top level, then move into their new house, payed for by a relative, then rinse and repeat. Their whole purpose for being here is real estate. The only catch this time is that they are getting a teenager to board with them who is some cousin they don't know, who is eventually going to take over that house. The lady's husband was pretty candid about the whole thing because although I am sure he loves being in a family with wealth, he was really irritated about having to suddenly be the ward of another kid. He was born and raised in Canada, so it was weird for him to find out it was part of the bargain. Apparently, when his wife came to Canada, it was the same thing. She was sent here to live with relatives she didn't know and then got into the real estate thing.
We were actually talking to the daycare provider before and she mentioned that they were late again to pick up their kid. I mentioned that I was surprised they even need daycare because they don't actually work. The daycare provider said that they were late because they had to go to the car dealership to get their "his and hers" matching Land Rovers. The kicker was that the daycare provider also said that somehow, they also qualified for a daycare subsidy so didn't actually pay the full price.
I know it is kind of ####ty to be gossiping like that, especially for the daycare provider to reveal that.