[cornholio]

Nothing lasts for ever and at some point things will collapse.
The only thing propping up Vancouver prices is foreign money, you have nearly 4 billion people in the world who live in countries where their economy is expanding double to quadruple the rate of ours, this in turn spews out literally millions of extremely wealthy people who where lucky enough to capitalize on the massive opportunities available in rapidly growing economies. Lots of these people then take their money and kids and move them to Vancouver where they have the safety and stability provided by a mature and slow growth economy. This in turn raises house prices above what they should be in a growing region such as Vancouver. There is money flowing like this in to Vancouver from all over the world, there are rich Russians, Brazilians, Mexicans, Indians, Iranians, and obviously Chinese, Taiwanese, etc. so on and so on living in this city or their kids living in their city or just owning empty properties in this city to work as a safe haven.

Personally I think the country and city is missing a really huge opportunity and needs to better milk these people out of more of their money, moving here should not be a right for the rich but a bought privilege. There should be a sliding investment dollar scale that is related to the wealth of people immigrating here, not a pitiful $250,000 investment or even cheaper a international school and a lawyer. There is lots of people who get their citizenship and buy their property but dont actually invest any real money in the economy, they buy their way in but their money is actually used outside of the country and Canada doesnt benefit at all while the locals get inflated housing prices.

Gotta milk these people more efficiently, not to discourage them from coming but to set the price to come at a more realistic level. And this has nothing to do with educated middle class immigrants. Really there should be a set amount each year of the number of educated workers with zero investment dollars who come in, and a separate amount of rich investors regardless of their education etc. to come in and pay(if you have money you fall in to category B and if you dont you fall in category A and try to keep everything a bit more balanced)

Another option that im not the bigest fan off is to take the American model and tax income outside of Canada, boy would that change things for the middle class out here, might even be able to halve the tax rate and still take in double the tax revenue. Our economy would surge instantly and lots of money would flow in, if you set a different and flexible tax rate for overseas income then you can keep the benefits going in to the long term.