Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

As an established middle-aged software developer with a family living in Burnaby who cannot move now because of custody issues, I'm going to give you the same advice I give to all of the engineering co-ops I work with. You should move out of the Vancouver area as soon as you get your degree.

I don't think that you're ever going to have a problem finding 1 bedroom accommodations in Vancouver because that's what developers predominantly build. Eventually you'll probably want to get married and have kids, and then you'll realize that the GVRD has nothing for you.

The detached home market now largely belongs to rich Chinese immigrants who made their millions outside the country; you'll never be able to compete with these folks working in the Canadian economy and paying Canadian taxes. That will largely rule out Vancouver, Burnaby, and by the time you graduate, New West, Coquitlam, Poco, and Port Moody. This isn't even a matter of stretching anymore - this market is completely isolated from CHMC policy now because the prices are beyond what Canadian home buyers could ever leverage.

Developers have little incentive to build 3 bedroom family-friendly condos, so you'll have a hard time finding those, too. I wanted to buy one recently and it was going to cost about $700000. My current 2 bedroom would sell for about $400k, but I don't think that I want to stretch that far on a single income, even though it would mean I could get my kids their own rooms.

And really, is Vancouver so great? The mountains are nice, and the downtown is nice if you're young. But it's a trap for the young - through well-intentioned tolerance and bad public policy we've created a city that is hostile to young families. Live anywhere else in North America and you'll enjoy a more favourable cost of living and/or a better lifestyle.

I'd leave in a minute if I could.

Indiana also put a 2% cap on property tax into the constitution. Indy has some really nice Gilded Age mansions under $2 mil.

Yes, Amazon and Microsoft HQ are both in the Seattle area. Google has 2 locations here in Fremont and Kirkland. $200K+ for senior engineers sounds about right from people I've known who went to those companies.

Housing is getting expensive, but you can still buy a small 3br for about $400K in my neighborhood just south of Bellevue, so saving $100K does sound plausible.

It's even worse in Australia, which most properties do not have a yearly property tax. So you pay a 'stamp duty' when you purchase the property, based on a % of the sale price.

This means you have people living in Sydney with multi-million dollar properties - which are just modest houses in now-desirable suburbs - who haven't paid any property tax since the 60's, and who can't move anywhere because they'd be up for so much stamp duty in one hit (easily 50-100k).

Furthermore, the state government has unpredictable revenue streams based on the ups and downs of the property market (you can have high prices but low volume) and the labor market is more calcified because people are unlikely to sell and move to access a new job.

The result is tightly held real estate, variable state government revenue and ever-higher prices. Adding fuel to the mess is a universal belief by local governments that housing development is evil and must be curtailed, so they concentrate on high density and infill development, which drives the prices of stand alone property ever higher.

Unsurprisingly, Australia just about outpaces Canada for the most severely unaffordable housing market.

And yet if you ask the average person in the street, they will blame 'interest rates' or 'Chinese buyers', and not once look at the ridiculous blockage on supply.

I think that is a more nuanced neighborhood by neighborhood issue. NIMBY is always a thing, and no one wants to live right next to any sort of transit.

There are various reasons for this, part of those reasons is that, disproportionately, the poor tend to be relegated to mass transit. Part of that is that transit doesn't make sense if you get on/off work outside of peek hours; most of the Seattle metro system is biased around serving /Seattle/. Transit systems in the counties to the north and south serve even less, have much tighter budgets, and therefore also have much less service. This is one of those self-re-enforcing loops.

With the HOV Toll Lane revealing just how horrid traffic on I-405 is (again absolute lack of urban planning), I think that you'd find many would agree about doing /something/, /anything/, except for taxing them in any way. Little do they realize that you pay 'taxes' in other ways, like having daily commutes of hell and a poor environment for their children to enter the workforce within. I know that my own career development is still severely hampered by having grown up in a suburb, without a car, and thus also with less access to the scarce jobs in the area that many (but not all) of my peers took up. I suspect that there probably weren't enough 'after school' jobs to go around though, so those who did get experience early got a head start on learning how to handle interacting with employers.