[Editorial Note: This post appeared on my other blog on 11/30/11. I'm just moving it over here to put all posts that are a good fit for this blog in one place.]
Imagine this: It's the mid-1980s, and (for better or worse) you're Canadian. You buy a house in Vancouver for $280,000. Which, it might be noted, was probably equivalent at the time to somewhat under $200K in US dollars. Fast forward 26 years later to 2011, and you're house is worth... wait for it... 6 MILLION dollars???
Well, that's actually a true story - one of several like it that I heard on my trip to Vancouver, BC earlier this week. One chap with a very nice three story house says that his place is worth about 4.5 million dollars. But it would be worth a little more without the house on it, because the house is just in the way of a bigger house. Then he showed me a place down the street where a 6,200 square foot house built in 1992 with all the decorations and trimmings, was torn down and replaced with a bigger house because it wasn't big enough.
And we thought real estate values (at least up till a few years ago) had gotten ridiculous in the USA.
So what's going on? Apparently our neighbors to the north have encouraged foreign investment in real estate with some remarkable results. If you're a wealthy Chinese or Taiwanese or Indian businessman, Vancouver is THE place to be. They also have their fare share of Iranians and other nationalities. Numerous different cultures are taking over the city and not being required to integrate very well, while folks of European descent are rapidly becoming the minority - and not just that, but a financially disadvantaged minority. Basically no one who is actually from BC can afford to get into the Vancouver area housing market, if they missed their chance 25 years ago.
It is interesting to note that the huge sums being paid for these houses is largely "our" money from here in the US. We have accommodated so much Chinese business and they have gotten rich by trading with us. Meanwhile our jobs have been severely devalued in the worldwide market: it's increasingly difficult to find a "regular job" that pays enough for a good living, and forget about trying to find many types of products made in the USA.
One wonders what the end result of all this will be. If so many cultures come together with this kind of financial inequity, is it realistic to expect they will ever integrate? Of course, one could say they don't need to. But then what happens? Does the country fragment into a bunch of little factions after Quebec finally succeeds in seceding? Do the Chinese attempt some sort of more serious, determined political takeover of the city? I guess we shall see.
Vancouver, therefore, is quite an odd place: great to visit, but I really wouldn't want to live there. I'm not saying that because I have anything against Chinese people, but there were clearly (to me) problems with the policies that allowed this to happen, and the whole situation is just odd. I just hope that Vancouver public works and related departments are capitalizing on all this investment and putting money back into the city. It looks like they are: I drove through about 25 km of major freeway construction on Hwy 1 as I was trying to get out of town.
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