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Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

business.financialpost.com

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Re: Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

#141

Post by lmm »

p4wnc6 wrote: post #62

I can't help but to quote the full song Modern Man from Arcade Fire's album The Suburbs -- which basically was an entire album chronicling this sort of issue in San Francisco. So I wait my turn, I'm a modern man And the people behind me, they can't understand Makes me feel like Makes me feel like So I wait in line, I'm a modern man And the people behind me, they can't understand Makes me feel like Something don't fee…

Those "consumer variation bullshit startups" are providing a lot of value to people. It's easy to forget how much less fun day-to-day life was even ten years ago.

I think the main reasons people want to park their money in property in expensive cities are some combination of 1. uncertainty/flight to safety 2. thinking prices will go up, perhaps due to undersupply, perhaps due to genuine value to be produced in the cities 3. for some wealthy foreign investors, an asset that's not at risk of being seized by a corrupt government.

The wealthy are certainly revealing their uncertainty. I'm not at all convinced this is worse than the time when the wealthy had absolute confidence in their grand plans for improving the lot of the unwashed masses.

Re: Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

#142

Post by skewart »

It blows my mind that the internety tech industry, of all industries, is so heavily concentrated in a handful of physical locations around the world. There's this vicious cycle where companies think they need to be in one of these places to attract the best talent, and employees think they need to live in one of these places to have the best career options.

Sometimes when I'm at Red Door in SOMA, overhearing twenty different conversations about startups, I want to scream "We have this thing, it's called the internet, it makes it super easy to communicate from anywhere! Let's go! Let's disperse across the globe!"

I mean, I get it. Face-to-face in-person communication is powerful for building trust, and the valley runs on trust, but still.

Re: Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

#143

Post by msvan »

skewart wrote: post #136
msvan wrote: post #82

It seems like many major cities of the world are experiencing this problem, and no city has been able to come up with a good solution. It always leads to displacement and newspaper articles about displacement, but no real solutions. Here are a couple of solutions: 1. Build really tall. Hasn't worked out all that great in Hong Kong, though. 2. Rent control. This is often unfair and inflates price of non-rent controlle…

"1. Build really tall. Hasn't worked out all that great in Hong Kong, though." What do you mean when you say it hasn't worked out great in Hong Kong? Is it because prices are still high in a lot of neighborhoods there? I'd say the build-really-tall strategy has worked out quite well in HK. There is a range of affordability in close proximity with good transit, and lots of parks and open space. It's a remarkably livab…

I'm basing my judgment on hearsay. I was under the impression that HK property prices were through the roof, so I stand corrected.

Re: Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

#144

Post by edwinnathaniel »

bonesmoses wrote: post #65
api_or_ipa wrote: post #55

As someone who just moved from Vancouver to the Bay Area, it's obvious the issue isn't housing. It's income. My apartment in trendy yaletown was $2350/month for a very nice 2 bed, 2 bath place within 10 mins of anything in downtown. Try finding something even remotely as nice around Silicon Valley. The issue we should be tackling is the low wages seen in the area. The same developer who could make $100k USD in the va…

Isn't that a housing issue, though? Paying for a $2350/mo place on $60k is... pretty ridiculous.

That's a lifestyle issue.

No fresh grad ($60k) should live in "trendy" Yaletown district with 2 BR + 2 Bath.

Re: Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

#145

Post by edwinnathaniel »

rubiquity wrote: post #68
api_or_ipa wrote: post #55

As someone who just moved from Vancouver to the Bay Area, it's obvious the issue isn't housing. It's income. My apartment in trendy yaletown was $2350/month for a very nice 2 bed, 2 bath place within 10 mins of anything in downtown. Try finding something even remotely as nice around Silicon Valley. The issue we should be tackling is the low wages seen in the area. The same developer who could make $100k USD in the va…

Ding ding ding. We have a winner. While I've never ever considered moving to Vancouver, I get recruiter emails several times a month for companies in Vancouver looking for Senior programmers to move there and only offering 80k to 110k CAD at the most. That is not nearly enough money to live in Vancouver. Enough to exist but not enough to live. The problem as I understand it is that a ton of Vancouver's housing is occ…

I know a company that pays fresh-grad $70k-$75k base salary with 10-15% bonus almost guaranteed base on company performance (there's a calculation behind it but the bonus amount is part of your package).

Microsoft, Amazon, starting salary was 85-90k to 100k+ 2-3 years ago for 2 years - 5/7 years of experience.

Salesforce Intermediate/borderline Senior SDET (SDET typically make less than SDE) starts from 100k base with a bunch of plus plus that can boost their income to 120k-140k.

OpenDNS lurking well above $100k as well for intermediate developer.

Mogo.ca pays their front-end dev $100k base and this is a small-medium size company.

It's not the norm but thanks to US-based companies, salary is moving up and up.

Re: Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

#146

Post by p4wnc6 »

lmm wrote: post #141
p4wnc6 wrote: post #62

I can't help but to quote the full song Modern Man from Arcade Fire's album The Suburbs -- which basically was an entire album chronicling this sort of issue in San Francisco. So I wait my turn, I'm a modern man And the people behind me, they can't understand Makes me feel like Makes me feel like So I wait in line, I'm a modern man And the people behind me, they can't understand Makes me feel like Something don't fee…

Those "consumer variation bullshit startups" are providing a lot of value to people. It's easy to forget how much less fun day-to-day life was even ten years ago. I think the main reasons people want to park their money in property in expensive cities are some combination of 1. uncertainty/flight to safety 2. thinking prices will go up, perhaps due to undersupply, perhaps due to genuine value to be produced in the ci…

> Those "consumer variation bullshit startups" are providing a lot of value to people. It's easy to forget how much less fun day-to-day life was even ten years ago.

I think this is highly questionable.

Re: Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

#147

Post by Zach_the_Lizard »

munificent wrote: post #140
Zach_the_Lizard wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>To me, there seems to be a pretty obvious public policy response. Institute a very high property tax, which is abated on some kind of curve according to the amount of time the owner or tenants spend living in a property, with no tax being due if the property is legitimately occupied for more than, say, ten months. This punishes newcomers and rewards staying in the same property, just like California Prop 13. Have a…

> This punishes newcomers and rewards staying in the same property, just like California Prop 13. Have a kid and need a new place with more space? Prepare to pay punishing property taxes for that luxury. You grew up in the area and it's time to move out? Enjoy your tax! Moving from the countryside for better employment opportunities? Tax please! Can you explain why this would be a moving tax? Obvious, property taxes…

>Can you explain why this would be a moving tax?

>Obvious, property taxes only apply to the fraction of the year that you own a place. Are you worried about the overlapping period where you have the house on the market but haven't sold it yet?

The proposal was to create a property tax that phases out once the owner has lived there for X period of time. Naturally, every time you sell and move you then reset this clock, so you'd pay the property tax only if you keep moving. The most monetarily rational strategy is to buy and hold forever if at all possible.

In short, the only way to trigger this tax is to move.

Re: Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

#149

Post by hardcandy »

Vancouver and cities like it became popular because of the critical mass of fun, interesting, creative, hard working young people who moved there and created communities. Once priced out, they will just go elsewhere. Other young people will follow and recreate the same communities with a lower price tag. Depending on local land use restrictions, some amount of gentrification then follows. In other words, this is a problem that takes care of itself, to some extent. Visit Austin or Nashville today and you will see this in action.

San Francisco is an outlier given the extremely dense concentration of high paying jobs which drove housing into orbit. This makes it much ''stickier''. However, this entire model is dependent upon the public markets giving tech companies sky high valuations, which could change. Already I see many of the more proactive venture firms scouring outside of SF for deal flow, particularly in these gentrifying second tier cities like Austin, Nashville, Minneapolis, Kansas City, etc.

Re: Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

#150

Post by lazzlazzlazz »

If having essentially no affordable housing rendered a city an economic ghost town, then much of the Bay area and Manhattan would be "ghost towns" - which, in turn, would lower housing prices radically.

What might happen to Vancouver is probably similar to other major cities with housing crunches but an otherwise desirable economic climate: lower wage workers will be displaced further from the city and forced to commute, housing prices will remain astronomical and suck much of the gains from the area.

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