Quote:
Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse
Btw, what did you think of this?
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Unfortunately I don't think the plan will make much of a difference. I think it is too timid. Andy Yan, who spoke near the end, is one of the best commentators about Vancouver real estate and keeps it real with his discussion of incomes and prices. Hilariously he's been accused of being anti-Asian since he sounded the alarm bells on real estate speculation back when the previous mayor didn't even admit it was a problem (it's not a race issue anyway, it's a money issue; doesn't matter if buyers are coming from Hong Kong or Shanghai or Kinshasa or Manchester, all Canadians and Vancouverites of all ethnic backgrounds need to be able to afford a place to live).
You can see how much airtime is given to "quality of life" concerns for the incredibly entitled multimillionaire windfall folks who live in inner city parts of Vancouver like Kitsilano, areas that would be far more densely built up if they were allowed to grow naturally. In Vancouver, you can find major transit hubs surrounded by strip malls and single family housing and you can walk from wall-to-wall 30-40 storey highrises to low density neighbourhoods. This is all because of zoning, not demand. The 50-somethings with a net worth in the millions of dollars are worried about changes on their street. Meanwhile even young professionals are living in precarious rentals in a lot of cases, and there is nothing on the horizon to enable them to even remotely have the same kind of life in the future even if they work much harder than the previous generation.
The lowrise apartments on sidestreets will do almost nothing for affordability because the math does not work out on cost. These will still be $700,000+ units, and they need to be $300,000 or $400,000 units, or $200,000 units in the cheap part of town. For that to happen we need to look at either highrise in the inner city or large midrises (which can be wood frame) in the outer areas.