111–120 of 629 posts
http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/11/global-hou...
Detroit probably experienced a R.E. bubble in the day...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would be careful here. Laws like this are close to demonstrating a lack of respect for property rights and that is not a good direction for any democracy. We have always had areas where the cost of housing was too high but the reactionary idea of taxing it to death is in effect the idea of that some property rights are important but others are not. If any such idea was pushed then be sure that protection is applied…
You have things upside down. Property rights only exist because of law. Also, when did property rights become vital to democracy?
If you take the net the fisherman wants to use and string it up as a hammock, you're going to eat fewer fish later. If you take the blacksmith's tongs and use them to crack walnuts, you're not going to get that handful of nails that you wanted to build your house.
Property rights alleviate the tragedy of the commons, by taking resources with multiple possible uses out of the commons and dedicating them to uses other than just the one with the highest immediate value.
It should be obvious that you can't plant a field on the same land footprint as the foundation of your house. You can't build a road over it at the same time that it's under an apartment building. Property rights are part of our system for resolving the conflicts behind multiple competing exclusive uses for any particular thing.
They are not absolutely essential to democracy, but they are the best solution we have yet tried for resource allocation in a specialized economy, and democracies tend to fare better when there is enough prosperity to spread around to everyone.
Come to Montreal! It's great here. No way would I want to pledge the rest of my life to a bank in exchange for the right to exist. Rent controls here. It's odd: it's like the state understands that banks are bastards. Montreal has some issues with organised crime but nothing compared to the organised crime of banking / money laundering through land. I don't have to pay some gangster $1MM for a shack. Leave the boomer…
- It has some ridiculous language issues. We have the OQLF which goes from business to business to fine anyone not adhering to the French language laws. We once got fined for having the accent the wrong way in our signage, and again for having the wrong verb conjugation in our tagline. - Dumbfounding Bureaucratic issues. Once when I went to University, I was able to prove to the Provincial Gov, that I lived in Quebec…
Where does the youth diaspora in Vancouver lead to? The suburbs? Other cities in Canada or the US?
The suburbs? There's a lot of this, yes. And the suburbs aren't necessarily very suburban: I live in a 30 floor condo tower in Burnaby, and within 2 block radius there's a dozen similar towers and twenty more 30-60 floor towers in various stages of zoning hearings (8) / building approval (7) / digging big holes (2) / towers going up (3). There are two major phenomena at play in Vancouver: 1. Across Metro Vancouver, t…
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…
THIS!
I know it's considered bad form to chime in to just to agree, but upvoting didn't seem enough in this case
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…
The BC Provincial Government is working very hard to ignore it as a problem, where they won't even commission studies to generate data on how bad the problem is (or isn't). The federal government has also signaled their distancing from the Vancouver housing issue.
Also, the real problem is foreign ownership. Canada has some of the loosest foreign ownership laws in the world, and provincial/federal governments do not punish foreign ownership with taxes or anything of the like. That means if you are making a lot of money in a corrupt country (China/Saudi Arabia), the Vancouver housing market is a great insurance policy.
The result is you have entire neighbourhoods with no available properties, but are virtually empty (Coal Harbour), and new buildings are built small and shoddy (meant for investment, not livability).
My wife and I make over 100k per year combined, and we will absolutely be leaving the city when we start a family. It all stems from the fact that the local government is willfully ignoring what can be compared to a cancer. It'll only get worse.
For all these 'bubble' cities (Vancouver, S.F., Seattle, London, ...), I wonder if the bubble ever pops? Are there examples of the prices/avg. income getting so far out of whack that things collapse? http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/11/global-hou... Detroit probably experienced a R.E. bubble in the day...
That said, I'm not predicting that outcome myself -- at this point, I would not want to place any sort of bet on that market.
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…
This! The tech salaries are absurdly low. The tech CEOs who pay poor wages and are complaining about their inability to retain talent are the same ones blaming real estate.
Select BC and enter in the typical income for an experienced developer in Vancouver which is 75k. Your take home salary is $59,000 plus you aren't offered any options usually just straight pay. This doesn't include all the other deductions such as EI and CPP.
Now convert CAD to USD and you're a professional experienced developer making $42,000 USD per year, in one of the highest cost cities on earth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
- It has some ridiculous language issues. We have the OQLF which goes from business to business to fine anyone not adhering to the French language laws. We once got fined for having the accent the wrong way in our signage, and again for having the wrong verb conjugation in our tagline. - Dumbfounding Bureaucratic issues. Once when I went to University, I was able to prove to the Provincial Gov, that I lived in Quebec…
I'm pretty sure that the OQLF works on a complaint basis.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/burgundy-lion-oqlf-1....
Also, as soon as my friend's company who does most of her business to the States got to a certain amount of employees, they had their agents come in to switch out all of the keyboards and software into French, and advised to make internal emails communications in French as well.
Come to Montreal! It's great here. No way would I want to pledge the rest of my life to a bank in exchange for the right to exist. Rent controls here. It's odd: it's like the state understands that banks are bastards. Montreal has some issues with organised crime but nothing compared to the organised crime of banking / money laundering through land. I don't have to pay some gangster $1MM for a shack. Leave the boomer…
The industry in Vancouver has since recovered, but with long-term stressor's like the housing issue; another jerk of the economic chain might catalyze another exodus.