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Millennials Flee Vancouver for More Affordable Cities

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Re: Millennials Flee Vancouver for More Affordable Cities

#251

Post by tempestn »

monkeywork wrote: post #52
tempestn wrote: post #30

The USD median house price in Vancouver is misleading too, because it wasn't long ago that the dollar was at parity, and incomes certainly haven't changed much as the dollar has dropped by a third. Anyway, so far the effect on Victoria seems to be our own mini (compared to Vancouver; still nuts for most of the world) housing boom. I have three couples of close friends all house-hunting right now, and it's not a fun t…

dropped a quarter not a third... don't make it even worse than reality.

I was thinking of the peak to trough drop of 1.05 -> 0.70 (exactly 1/3). But you're right, currently we're at 1/4 off of parity.

Re: Millennials Flee Vancouver for More Affordable Cities

#252

Post by tempestn »

ameen wrote: post #69
tempestn wrote: post #30

The USD median house price in Vancouver is misleading too, because it wasn't long ago that the dollar was at parity, and incomes certainly haven't changed much as the dollar has dropped by a third. Anyway, so far the effect on Victoria seems to be our own mini (compared to Vancouver; still nuts for most of the world) housing boom. I have three couples of close friends all house-hunting right now, and it's not a fun t…

> pay the better part of a million dollars for something with less than a day's deliberation > the effect on Victoria seems to be our own mini housing boom. Sounds a bit confusing. Are houses in Victoria priced at a Million dollars?

"The better part of" a million dollars. I believe the SFH median in Victoria is around $600,000 CAD. (Which of course means half of them cost more than that.) My point is that it's a lot of money to spend with no time to think it over or do due diligence.

Re: Millennials Flee Vancouver for More Affordable Cities

#253

Post by [deleted] »

sospep wrote: post #242
ido wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an outsider, respectfully - what is "culturally American" compared to "culturally Canadian"? I've been to both countries several times and I would not be able to tell if a person is American or Canadian unless they told me.

American: huh, guns are great, healthcare IF you can afford it, language #2 = spanish, hockey is a sport they play in Canada, worlds most powerful military, Trump, avg. American knows little about Canada, metric system - who needs that, good universities Canadian: eh, no guns allowed, healthcare FREE for all, language #2 = french, hockey is the 2nd most popular religion, neighbors with country with worlds most powerf…

[deleted]

Re: Millennials Flee Vancouver for More Affordable Cities

#254

Post by jperras »

illumin8 wrote: post #231
jperras wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The market is being artificially inflated by foreign buyers. Citation + data needed?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/business/international/chi... "...In Canada, they are paying $1 million for modest Vancouver bungalows..."

A New York Times article with a single mention of Vancouver with zero hard data on the real estate sales in Vancouver does not constitute data.

The British Columbia Real Estate Association points out that, as of mid-2015:

> the available data and analysis on the housing stock and flow of residential transactions in the region suggest that foreign ownership of housing is considerably less than 5 per cent of the housing stock and not more than 5 per cent of sales activity.

http://www.bcrea.bc.ca/docs/economics-publications-archive/2...

Less than 5 percent of sales activity and ownership hardly constitutes a major factor for inflation of prices; sure, there might be some impact, but remember that the other 95% of transactions are performed by Canadian citizens.

Canadians need to stop blaming foreign investment as the reason for absurd home valuations, and start looking at the fact that the debt-to-income ratio is 165%, where most people have leveraged themselves at dangerously high ratios (I personally know of a few couples that have household incomes of ~$120,000/year and have $650,000 mortgages in Toronto), mostly due to the incredibly low interest rate environment that has been present since the 2008 financial crisis, and worsened by the lowering of rates last year.

The reason homes are expensive is due to rampant, unfounded speculation on the housing market, fueled by the lowest interest rate environment making cheap money readily available to people who would most likely not be able to afford their mortgage if interest rates rise a percent or two in the next few years.

Re: Millennials Flee Vancouver for More Affordable Cities

#255

Post by JPKab »

J-dawg wrote: post #207
JPKab wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a suspicion how this works: As an American, when I was early in my career, and had a baby and wife to support, being underpaid was super painful. Medical care, for instance, was expensive. Being able to be easily and quickly fired without a typical European justification process is another factor. You can find yourself unemployed at any time, with any justification. It all lit a fire under me to demand better…

I think you're overestimating European social support systems a bit. Here in the UK, you can be fired quite easily until you've been in a job for 2 years. After that, you can still be made redundant. IBM are currently laying off a lot of people and only paying them the legal minimum settlement (1 week's pay for every year worked). Our unemployment benefits are very low. Most professional people wouldn't even bother c…

Yes, perhaps I was overestimating, especially for the UK. We Americans tend to jealously view the EU as a bit of a utopia when it comes to these things, as you correctly pointed out.

However, don't underestimate the NHS. My biggest fear when I was early in my career was not having health insurance for my baby boy and wife. Getting ill between jobs (this was before Obama's new health care expansion) could result in bankruptcy. In fact, perhaps the biggest driver for me was the fact that my wife was not insured by her job when she became pregnant with my son. My job charged unaffordably high premiums to cover her (they don't scale to your salary, and I was being paid $11/hour, so it was literally a third of my monthly pay to cover her). The awful medical care she was able to get was Medicaid, which is the government subsidized health plan for the poor in the United States. Good doctors don't take it at all, so you end up getting terrible health care from the doctors nobody wants to see. She received horrible pre-natal care, typical screening procedures were never done, including simply looking at her cervix to check for warning signs of pre-term labor. Had these warning signs been even checked for, we could have avoided my son being born 3 months premature. But they weren't, and we didn't. The doctors at the hospital were appalled when they found out that my wife had gone to a checkup and been cleared a few days before the labor started, and one of them began crying when she found out from us that the doctor hadn't looked at my wife's cervix. My son was given a 70% chance of survival at his birth, because my wife didn't have fucking insurance.

Just be thankful you have the NHS. Healthcare here is a fucking horror show.

I had to accept that I live in a country where not having a GOOD job means that you and your family are going to get inferior medical care in tangible, life-threatening ways.

Re: Millennials Flee Vancouver for More Affordable Cities

#256

Post by ConfuciusSay02 »

illumin8 wrote: post #180

This seems to be a direct result of capital flight from China. Wealthy chinese who are able to get their money out (through corruption, money laundering, or otherwise) are looking for somewhere safe to park their money for the inevitable decline in value of the yuan. China can only artificially peg their money to the dollar for so long, until they run out of dollars, and they are drawing down their reserves at a reco…

You're right, but the implication of your post is that there's nothing Canada could do about the problem.

The correct response is that Canada should implement Australian-style restrictions on foreign ownership of real estate. This problem has been solved before, it's not that hard.

It would suck for those who bought into the game late, those in the high-end RE business, but the benefits of having a real estate market that has actual price discovery based on the population who could actually live in the properties is definitely worth it, because housing would become more affordable, disposable income would increase, and consumer debt would decrease.

Re: Millennials Flee Vancouver for More Affordable Cities

#257

Post by lazyant »

ido wrote: post #232
mabbo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some do leave, yes. Many come back home later. Amazon opened the Toronto office back in 2011 because there was demand- Canadians who didn't want to live in America anymore- often because of family, friends back home or because they wanted to have kids and not raise them as Americans, culturally. It started with less than 10 people, plus the hiring they were able to do locally. It's now an office of over 300 people, m…

As an outsider, respectfully - what is "culturally American" compared to "culturally Canadian"? I've been to both countries several times and I would not be able to tell if a person is American or Canadian unless they told me.

I moved from the US to Canada (European originally), Canada on the outside looks like the US but inside it's closer to Europe from my point of view (not everybody agrees and think we're very similar).

In terms of politics and religion, US is an outlier compared to western countries, many US Democratic politicians (say "liberal" Hillary Clinton) would be considered "conservative" in Canada, we're way more "progressive" than the US. Donald Trump for example would have a big chance of being prosecuted for hate speech in Canada or taken to the Human Rights Tribunal if he was a local politician.

I know quite a few tech people in Canada who had the chance to move to the US and they wouldn't even consider it for cultural reasons, perceived violence or whatever. I know a lot of people that moved as well.

Re: Millennials Flee Vancouver for More Affordable Cities

#258

Post by eru »

daemin wrote: post #63
eru wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Negative gearing, and the low density allowed. My own suburb, Glebe, is just ten minutes by bike from the central business district. Yet, single family dwellings prevail at low density. (At the light rail, some NIMBYs were rallying against an eight storey building to be put up. Ha! Twenty to forty would be better.)

Yeah, funnily enough that's where I used to live, although in an old block of apartments, and I believe I know which place you are talking about. Granted the single family houses around those streets are not exactly 'low density' as they are packed in quite a bit.

Oh, low density compared to what a place so close to the city centre should look like. Even eg by German standards. Not even comparing to Singapore.

(Or in market terms, if you can raise a plot and build up higher and make a tidy profit, it was not dense enough before.)

Re: Millennials Flee Vancouver for More Affordable Cities

#259

Post by eru »

mistermann wrote: post #130
wycx wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prices are set at the margin. A single digit percentage of actors in the market with the objective of not losing 100% of their capital by turning it into a hard asset in another country is sufficient to move the market. In Australia it is the combination of negative gearing AND the 50% capital gains tax concession on investment properties. Average rental losses per negative gearer were reasonably constant and small u…

> Prices are set at the margin. Do you happen to know if there is any well written economics paper on this topic?

You could start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginalism and follow leads from there.

Re: Millennials Flee Vancouver for More Affordable Cities

#260

Post by bryanbuckley »

mhkhung wrote: post #143
lewisl9029 wrote: post #12

As someone who's lived in Vancouver for more than 10 years, then went to Waterloo for school (and lived in Toronto for most of my co-ops/internships), I think we Canadians should be more worried about highly educated millennials fleeing Canada entirely. Everybody I know from school who were offered the option to work in the US have picked up their Canadian degrees and left. To the Canadian tech industry: How are you…

There is always (your) life cycles. Both myself and my brother Waterloo grads in the 90s. He is in the sv and I stayed in Toronto. My company sent me down to the valley to "help" for a few months (ie living and food all expensed) when I was still fresh. Hated it.. there is nothing at night. So I never have the urge to move there afterwards. Then once you have multiple kids, single income doesn't take you far in the v…

well, that's why so many people commute from SF to the valley, if they want a certain culture. Toronto suburbs seem to go on forever, so not fair to compare Toronto to SV (and not SF or OAK)
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