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The decline of Vancouver

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Re: The decline of Vancouver

#141

Post by cuddlybacon »

na85 wrote: post #139
dennispi wrote: post #69

I live in Vancouver, and have for many years.. as such, I hope I can try and help inform an otherwise misinformed set of posts. I suspect they're off-base largely because a lot has changed since some of the authors of other posts have lived here. First, there are many technology companies in Vancouver. Hootsuite, Bench, A Thinking Ape, Clio, Slack, Amazon.. these are just the ones that came to mind. I know authoritat…

>Finally, commutes range from 5-30 minutes (and that's going to cover people who walk, bike and take transit). Ha, ha, ha, a 30-minute commute would be luxurious. Richmond to VGH for 9:00 takes 45 minutes by car. Coming in from Surrey, Langley, or Maple Ridge I'm sure is worse, and good luck getting to UBC or downtown in less than an hour from these places. Transit in Vancouver is a joke, and that 45-minute drive tak…

>Ha, ha, ha, a 30-minute commute would be luxurious.

I have to agree. My commute is 45 minutes, 65 if you follow the speed limit, and significantly better than many of my coworkers. I would really love a sub 30 commute, but not sure I want to pay an extra $300-450 a month for it. It also takes 1.5 hours by bus+skytrain+bus.

I would really love for the 5-30 minute commute to be true, but it just isn't.

Re: The decline of Vancouver

#142

Post by LiweiZ »

narrator wrote: post #50

All the money flooding into Vancouver is the results of billions and billions of dollars flooding out the U.S trade deficit, hitting China, and boomeranging back into hard assets all over the world.

Insightful comment buried again. +1

Re: The decline of Vancouver

#143

Post by kazinator »

jmspring wrote: post #70
kazinator wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vancouver and BC have a close knit, vibrant tech community with a long history. I've never been short of a great work in Vancouver since 1990. Price Waterhouse Cooper has a "BC Techmap" project: http://www.pwc.com/ca/en/technology-industry/bc-techmap.jhtm... This is a big poster you can order. Unfortunately, the preview site for it is defunct. The map traces the linage of tech companies in BC back to the 1940's. Here…

My take on vibrant is visibly growing. I don't mean in an SF or Palo Alto sense - but more startups and other companies opening shop, employing locals and attracting talent. Meet ups, conferences, the like. I don't rule out Vancouver has companies and a tech scene, but it has potential (and has had) for more. I think of Austin, Raliegh-Durham or Berlin as examples of comparison than SF or Palo Alto.

I don't think that the locals in Vancouver have problems getting jobs; they do get absorbed into the industry. (I'm thinking of, say, new graduates from programs at from UBC, SFU, Capilano University, BCIT, ...).

Almost every company I've worked for in a quarter century has participated in the co-op program; we've had bright interns every year, and they all went on to work either for the same company or elsewhere.

Many people are satisfied with that, and have other hobbies outside of work other than going to meets with other programmers. Or those who have programming as a hobby would rather be actually doing that.

Also, people have significant others and families. Geek get-togethers are mostly for single people who don't have a significant other that isn't also a geek.

Re: The decline of Vancouver

#144

Post by pekk »

thecambie wrote: post #133
hiyou102 wrote: post #12

As a student in Vancouver this worries me. It think it's about time either the city or metro Vancouver started putting forward some absentee homeowner legislation. We have a lot of talented young people that are leaving to places like Calgary and Seattle because the Vancouver doesn't have the opportunities to support them.

When I was finishing school, there was also lot of fear post tech bubble, and we were probably mid housing runup (although I didn't know it yet). I guess my only advice is, don't count on other people to fix problems. If you focus on your own skills - always be coding, always be learning - I think you'll do fine here or elsewhere. We are not Seattle, nor SF, nor NY, nor London. Each city offers their own mix of good,…

> If you focus on your own skills - always be coding, always be learning - I think you'll do fine here or elsewhere.

People who just code and learn don't automatically get work. You need a network to get work. Some places make that much harder to acquire. It's good if you're doing well, but we are talking about people potentially wasting years of life in places which make it fundamentally harder for them because they were poorly advised that learning will somehow get you constant work no matter where you are.

Re: The decline of Vancouver

#145

Post by seanmcdirmid »

njloof wrote: post #132
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens in Beijing a lot: many chinese see property as a store of value like gold or something like stock that appreciates and don't even bothering renting it out. I live in a nice beijing complex that is only around 60% full, all apartments are sold of course.

A good real estate crash should clear out the speculators.

In China the middle class would get screwed too much. They might just inflate to spread the pain around making everyone losers.

Re: The decline of Vancouver

#146

Post by [deleted] »

lewisl9029 wrote: post #105
dennispi wrote: post #69

I live in Vancouver, and have for many years.. as such, I hope I can try and help inform an otherwise misinformed set of posts. I suspect they're off-base largely because a lot has changed since some of the authors of other posts have lived here. First, there are many technology companies in Vancouver. Hootsuite, Bench, A Thinking Ape, Clio, Slack, Amazon.. these are just the ones that came to mind. I know authoritat…

I was living in Vancouver until I moved to Waterloo for University, and will be graduating in a few months. It seems like everyone here is comparing Vancouver with US tech hubs like Seattle and SF, when there's a much more comparable target: Toronto. Of course, this is anecdotal, but for every one of my 6 co-op terms in Waterloo, I always made finding a job in Vancouver one of my highest priorities, but in the end I…

[deleted]

Re: The decline of Vancouver

#147

Post by eigenvector »

msie wrote: post #84
eigenvector wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between Vancouver and SF/London/NYC is that it has no accompanying income boom to make the real estate prices affordable for working people. There's no significant financial or tech industry. Nobody gets rich from working in Vancouver. In fact, Vancouver tech jobs generally pay _less_ than other Canadian cities despite the greatly higher cost of living.

Vancouver firms can offer less pay because there aren't many alternatives when it comes to Canadian cities for a tech worker. Let's see...Toronto, Montreal, Waterloo and Calgary. And the winter weather east of the Rockies is horrible.

I agree, as the only Canadian city west of the Rockies Vancouver employers seem to think they don't need to compete with Toronto/Montreal/Calgary pay. And to a certain extent they're right. But with more and more US firms hiring Canadians on TN visas, the new competition is Seattle/SF.

Re: The decline of Vancouver

#148

Post by canekong »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #125
canekong wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i stand to be corrected on the subsidies part! Did some more research this morning. It seems that the reports are generally focused more on how other cities are providing more subsidies than Vancouver, rather than Vancouver stopped providing subsidies. Definitely agree Vancouver is awesome to live in. To be perfectly honest, I'd love to move back to Vancouver. It's a very nice city, nice enough that I'd want to visit…

Vancouver's transportation is really good. Just the other day this article came out comparing all the cities in the west and Vancouver came out on top in terms of percentage of commuters who take transit. 20% vs SF's 15%. http://www.biv.com/article/2015/3/who-takes-transit-work-met...

Thanks for the article, read through it. True that Vancouver may have higher public transit ridership, but what they neglect to mention is that different cities may have solved the public transit problem in a different way.

First off, many major tech companies SF (and to some extent in Seattle) offer private buses. Automatically, these people are no longer counted by the study. In a city like SF where there is a huge Google/Facebook/Adobe/Company XYZ population, they all offer buses or shuttles from urban areas to Palo Alto, Cupertino, and even within other places in SF. Nonetheless, almost 100% of the people I talk to that lives in SF either doesn't own a car or owns a car but almost never drives it because their companies offer alternative transportations. They also don't ride the BART or Muni or CalTrain much because of Uber/Lyft.

Secondly, places like NYC, SF and Seattle have a big ride sharing culture. Obvious Uber and Lyft are prevalent around the city with their staches' and U's. Recent stats in NYC indicates that there are now more Uber drivers than taxi drivers. These ride sharing economy definitely takes the ridership out of public transit. In fact, on my recent trip to SF I decided to take Uber to my door instead of the normal BART because they cost similar except I don't have to get off at a BART station and transfer somehow. Compare that to Vancouver, where Uber and Lyft are outlawed, with the city even going to extra step to make sure they don't even get a start over existing taxi services, it's definitely going to push more people to public transit.

Also, I don't think this article or study is even non-partisan at all because of the upcoming city-wide transit referendum. Honestly, I am taking this with a grain of salt.

Re: The decline of Vancouver

#149

Post by pimlottc »

cpncrunch wrote: post #114
krrrh wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> due to the large number of homes which are owned by foreigners and are vacant. I'm not aware of a concrete way of measuring this.. but anecdotally, I suspect it's close to 30-40% of the downtown residential core. There have been studies out of UBC that estimate 30%+ van can't condos in the downtown area by using anonymize do BCHydro electricity usage data. As far as I know this number has been increasing. This has…

Your comment "30%+ van can't condos in the downtown area" doesn't make any grammatical sense. Are you saying that 30% are vacant, or 30% are occupied? Anyway, here is the study I think you were talking about, which says that 42% of Vancouver condos are vacant, compared to 3-6% in other areas of Metro Vancouver: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/03/22/vancouver-housing-va... ?

I assume "vac can't" is a mobile miscorrection for "vacant".

Re: The decline of Vancouver

#150

Post by nzp »

narrator wrote: post #50

All the money flooding into Vancouver is the results of billions and billions of dollars flooding out the U.S trade deficit, hitting China, and boomeranging back into hard assets all over the world.

Funny how the globalization stick has two ends, isn't it? Who'd a thunk it!
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