Excellent, long read. Worth it on a Sunday;
http://thewalrus.ca/the-highest-bidder/
Few choice quotes:
Manning moved in just before Halloween and immediately stocked up on candy, but only one child came to the door. In February, the city distributed new recycling bins. Many went untouched for days. I feel like were in that movie The Andromeda Strain?, he says, where everybody has died from a mystery virus, and were the only survivors.
City hall estimates that 40 percent of all buildings will be rebuilt by 2050. And the new houseswhich may end up being inhabited for only a few months out of the yearwill be outside the financial reach of almost everyone who works and lives in Vancouver.
But the issue is one of money, not race. Global money is boosting Vancouvers prices, and local dollars cant compete. Most troubling is that many homeowners are now selling directly to buyers in China, listing their homes in real-estate exhibitions in Beijing and Shanghai.
The annual analysis, now in its twelfth year, includes all of the Vancouver regions housing typeseven the 290-square-foot micro-condos. The surveys founder, Wendell Cox, says the citys detached-house prices are on another plane. Theyre more expensive than anywhere else, by a good margin, says Cox. I dont know how you get out of this situation.
And what happens twenty or thirty years from now, when the last boomer cashes out? When huge pockets of the city and the region are controlled by wealth generated in another country? When there is no financial district, there is little manufacturing, and there are no industries other than those that cater to rich people?
The downtown has been overtaken by multi-million-dollar condos in skyscrapers, high-end chain stores, and luxury car dealerships. With so few mom-and-pop businesses, pubs, or cafés, the core is dead at nightthe streets, empty wind tunnels.
These is the future we are all allowing to happen. Were all complicit in this, and I think its a travesty.
Everyone with their smug attitudes about leaving Vancouver will too be punished by the mass exodus one day. When this equity wave is done rolling over BC, this province will be unrecognizable.