171–180 of 629 posts
Hope they can read a little of Jane Jacobs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And how much do your 'Occupancy Police' cost to administer such a system ? If it relies on a property owner filling in a form, they're just going to lie to avoid the cost and without someone going round to every single house and monitoring it for weeks and months of the year, you have no way to detect people avoiding the tax. Super high property tax when I'm not there? Simple, employ a cleaner on some minimal wage an…
I used to live in Florida and amazingly enough the homestead exemption works pretty well. I'm sure there are some people abusing it, but it's effective overall. You can only have it on one home and it doesn't apply to businesses so the only real fraud angle would be to live out of state and take the exemption on a single Florida property. You have to be a citizen or permanent alien resident which weeds out foreign bu…
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 comm…
The problem in Vancouver is the house prices are not driven by economic activity in the city itself. Bay area and Manhattan prices are a product of the local economies. Vancouver prices are a product of speculation and wealthy people who live/have property there but don't work there.
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 d…
It's easy to complain about zoning, tax policies, NIMBY-ism, lack of investment in public transit, etc. etc. But the reality is that you could turn all sorts of dials to increase the supply of available housing over the course of years and decades and you'd still have a situation where not everyone could live in an affordable condo/apartment in whatever $TRENDY_CITY. I suspect that the current concentration of certai…
I don't think building more is a panacea that would suddenly mean two-bedrooms in Cow Hollow rent for $1,000 in 2017. That said, restricting market rate construction certainly only makes things worse. And building more would help at least a little.
What every company in Vancouver seems to want is an employee who is desperate for work but also independently wealthy. That might seem a conflict but in Vancouver it is normal. There are thousands of young people here who are supported by parents who have enjoyed the rise in house prices. They are desperate for work, but don't much care about the pay because they have support. Hootsuite's problem is that many of those kids are now in their thirties, mom and dad have moved, and they want to have an actual life of their own. That cannot happen at 30k in a city like Vancouver.
(Lets see how long it takes for this comment to hit a nerve. Hoot is a social media company with eyes everywhere.)
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem in Vancouver is the house prices are not driven by economic activity in the city itself. Bay area and Manhattan prices are a product of the local economies. Vancouver prices are a product of speculation and wealthy people who live/have property there but don't work there.
So why do speculators choose Vancouver of all places to speculate in?
Vancouver's problem isn't the house prices. The problem is to a large extent caused by the author of this piece, the Hootsuite CEO. The few tech companies in vancouver don't pay. They expect the city to provide them a steady flow of over-educated 20-somethings willing to work long hours for only slightly more than rent. For the last 15 years the city has provided just that. The complaints now are that those 20-someth…
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But if you had read the article you would already know that....