Without affordable housing, Vancouver risks becoming an economic ghost town

As a person who moved from Victoria to Seattle and then SF, that kind of stuff doesn't actually matter in practice.

What the gods of Mt.Olympus do does not matter to the common folk. Macro policy decisions to do things like go to war in Afghanistan only indirectly effect your tax bill, and if the news didn't report it and if refugees didn't immigrate, would you even know it was happening. That is real effect of what your worrying about.

Go live & work in Seattle for a year and you'll quickly come to learn there is no real difference between there and Vancouver. If you change the street signs and some brands, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. If you really don't like it, you can always move back. But as a learning experience, you'll find it valuable for your world view, your career back in Vancouver and your wallet. If you have student loans, that exchange rate will be amazing to pay them off, and you could collect a down payment for a Vancouver 1 bedroom condo far faster. I used charles schwab debit cards and I paid no exchange fees paying off my canadian student loans.

Bread and Circus crap like guns and such are an entertainment sideshow and policy makers will do whatever they actually care about without much fanfare. In practice you will never see a gun on a civilian in NYC, SF or Seattle and people speak whatever is on their mind. The weather is also amazing in SF.

I lived in London for 10½ years, from when I started university.

Most incomers are young people, but not all are graduates — many come from Eastern and Southern Europe and work low-skill jobs. I put "British", but probably meant someone one would expect to live in London for a long time. I got to know a few construction workers from Poland and Romania, and none of them had any intention to stay — they were in London to make money, and several had wives/children 'at home'.

This can make a functioning city, but it's a change from London of 20 years ago, when it would be artists and musicians taking some of these cheap houses and I think fewer people were there to make some money and leave.

A good part of why I left is because it wasn't as interesting as it used to be. I wondered if I was getting old, but then, "of the 430 music venues that traded in London between 2007 and 2015, only 245 are still open" [1]. I certainly noticed that there were fewer gigs I wanted to see, and they'd moved from Friday/Saturday to weekdays.

The other part: I was working for a scientific charity, with charitable pay. I wasn't saving much money, even with living in a shared house, so decided I needed a new job. I wanted to continue writing software for science, so there weren't all that many jobs that interested me in London.

I now live in Copenhagen.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/sep/09/the-slow-death...

The situation is very similar in Norway's capital city Oslo. Single family homes all a round a small downtown. Crammed between the fjord on side and the great woods protected by politicians, it's runninh out of free space.

Not sure how that would work for an owner occupier? Can a company provide free accomodation to it's director?

> Most incomers are young people, but not all are graduates — many come from Eastern and Southern Europe and work low-skill jobs. I put "British", but probably meant someone one would expect to live in London for a long time. I got to know a few construction workers from Poland and Romania, and none of them had any intention to stay — they were in London to make money, and several had wives/children 'at home'.

There's always been people coming to London for a few years to make money. Ten years ago maybe it was the Australians coming over here to work in bars and restaurants. I think construction workers would always have been moving around (certainly my dad did); there are probably more of them now than ten years ago but more construction is hardly a bad thing. I certainly don't think there are fewer skilled jobs for graduates than there were: the City has been adding more and more jobs and sprawling down to London Bridge, tech has boomed in Shoreditch, Bloomsbury and elsewhere, there's that huge new medical campus effort around King's Cross. The BBC has sadly been driven away for political reasons, but I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a graduate moving to London.

Where is cheap has changed. Music, indie theatre and groundbreaking art have been pushed further out, to Camden and Highbury and Shoreditch and Hackney and Brixton and Clapham. Soho is halfway to being Knightsbridge. But that's always been the way of these things.

> "of the 430 music venues that traded in London between 2007 and 2015, only 245 are still open"

I have no idea what the real numbers are, but I can tell that's a line designed to mislead, to make you think there has been a decline in the number of music venues without actually giving any evidence for it. How long did those 430 last, on average? What proportion of the music venues that traded between 1999 and 2007 were open in 2007? Indeed, how many music venues were open in 2007? What's the betting it was less than 245?

> The other part: I was working for a scientific charity, with charitable pay. I wasn't saving much money, even with living in a shared house, so decided I needed a new job. I wanted to continue writing software for science, so there weren't all that many jobs that interested me in London.

You pays your money, you takes your choice. Some jobs and some people are surely getting priced out of London. But the city as a whole is doing very well thank you.