Quote:
Originally Posted by BIMBAM
In my experience, the high prices in Vancouver are less driven by foreign investors and more by development rules which mean not enough supply comes online for the amount of demand that exists. Too much of the available land is taken up by single family home neighbourhoods which can't be developed into anything else because they are communities, and the sites that can be redeveloped are zoned for lower heights than would be built without the zoning. This is because Vancouverites like their city the way it is and want to maintain the look and feel. What they don't realize is that by not allowing anything but gorgeous, short condos to be approved, they're the ones responsible for driving up the prices, not the mythical hordes of Chinese investors who are in reality only a small and not very imporant piece of the equation. NIMBY's don't actually want affordable housing in anything but theory, which leads to a city of nothing but nice neighbourhoods and nowhere for low income people to live. Do you think if someone wanted to erect apartment slabs in say Marpole on single family homes that anyone would allow that? No, and as gorgeous a city as the bylaws will create, no party can realistically aid a neighbourhood in going from upper middle class to lower income, no matter how badly the region needs an area like that.
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Hogwash. Despite the American economic slowdown there are still many US cities that are growing, yet you don't see the outrageous price increases we're getting in Vancouver and Toronto. There is absolutely nothing going on in either city economically underpinning these increases.
Anyone who considers Chinese buyers in Vancouver "mythical" obviously hasn't been to a new project opening or to an single family open house here.