Vancouver told to take a more jaundiced view of foreign property buying

(image courtesy Business Vancouver)

Sandy Garossino says other major global cities are grappling with the issue of foreign real estate investment and its effect on the community, and it’s time Vancouver stops hinting at racism and begins to tackle the same problem.

“We are seeing something new, and people in other cities are watching it closely and are very anxious about it, and all governments are struggling to deal with it,” says Garossino.

 In the financial section of The New Yorker, writer James Surowiecki writes that Vancouver -- not New York City or Orange County -- is the most expensive housing market in North America.

“By all accounts, it is a wonderful place to live,” writes Surowiecki. “But nothing about its economy explains why—in a city where the median income is only around seventy grand—single-family houses now sell for close to a million dollars apiece and ordinary condos go for five or six hundred thousand dollars.” 

The article quotes Bing Thom Architects urban planner Andy Yan, who says Vancouver has become a ‘hedge city” where wealthy foreigners park their cash in a politically stable and comfortable city where they feel safe to invest in homes they may use only sporadically. As word spreads about the city, more of the global super-rich move in and gobble up properties from real estate developers who are more than willing to sell at highly inflated prices.

But this rush to invest billions in “super cities” like Vancouver, New York, London and Hong Kong carries with it a lingering problem for those who do not have millions or billions of dollars in the bank but do need to live, work and raise families in these cities. For some families and businesses in Vancouver, it’s becoming a fight for survival in a city touted in poll after poll as the most liveable, the safest, the cleanest and one of the best in the world.

More @ Vancouver Observer