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As an established middle-aged software developer with a family living in Burnaby who cannot move now because of custody issues, I'm going to give you the same advice I give to all of the engineering co-ops I work with. You should move out of the Vancouver area as soon as you get your degree.

I don't think that you're ever going to have a problem finding 1 bedroom accommodations in Vancouver because that's what developers predominantly build. Eventually you'll probably want to get married and have kids, and then you'll realize that the GVRD has nothing for you.

The detached home market now largely belongs to rich Chinese immigrants who made their millions outside the country; you'll never be able to compete with these folks working in the Canadian economy and paying Canadian taxes. That will largely rule out Vancouver, Burnaby, and by the time you graduate, New West, Coquitlam, Poco, and Port Moody. This isn't even a matter of stretching anymore - this market is completely isolated from CHMC policy now because the prices are beyond what Canadian home buyers could ever leverage.

Developers have little incentive to build 3 bedroom family-friendly condos, so you'll have a hard time finding those, too. I wanted to buy one recently and it was going to cost about $700000. My current 2 bedroom would sell for about $400k, but I don't think that I want to stretch that far on a single income, even though it would mean I could get my kids their own rooms.

And really, is Vancouver so great? The mountains are nice, and the downtown is nice if you're young. But it's a trap for the young - through well-intentioned tolerance and bad public policy we've created a city that is hostile to young families. Live anywhere else in North America and you'll enjoy a more favourable cost of living and/or a better lifestyle.

I'd leave in a minute if I could.

Why does / did the Canadian government let so many Chinese come in and buy property like that?

1. http://www.cic.gc.ca/ENGLISH/immigrate/business/investors/in...

2. Proxy companies that maintain RE portfolios for overseas clients

3. Complete unwillingness of the government to do anything about this. That's the root of the problem.

I'm not sure that the problem has ever been how many Chinese have immigrated, but how many rich people who happen to be Chinese have immigrated. For starters, we have an entirely misguided and wrong-headed 'immigrant investor program' that allows rich people to jump the immigration queue.

I think the problem is deeper than this, though. Most people in Vancouver actually want prices to stay high; there are a whole lot of home owners in Vancouver who are counting on that $3M cheque for their house to pay for their retirement. Its the provincial government that wields the legislative cudgel here, and they're going to listen to those home-owners waiting for their Chinese-exit. Worse, much of the BC economy is now based on real-estate; selling it, buying it, rebuilding it, and renovating it. We've built our economy on selling rich Chinese people our homes. If the provincial government intervenes and fixes house prices, it would probably harm the construction and real estate business; it would be political suicide.

Money

Solid advice.

I moved to Vancouver shortly before the .com crash. Worked for a number of companies, primarily doing low-level system programming, climbing from 50K to 120K in 5 or so years and periodically trying to do my own thing. One of the attempts worked, got a good exit, at which point started looking at upgrading from our pretty decent Burnaby condo to a house.

Being a true nouveau riche, we scouted everything, including most expensive areas like UBC, Point Gray and West Vancouver, talked to the agents, looked at the building lots, spoke with architects - the whole shebang. It became absolutely crystal clear that the Vancouver real estate is just one big parking lot for Chinese money. And they don't just park them there, they also bring their gambling habits with them, constantly flipping what they have and perpetually warming up the prices. It is in-your-face obvious once you take a close look at what's going on. You don't even have to prompt agents to relay the stories of how they guide groups of Chinese government suits through dozens of properties, all of which they end up buying above asking. It is absolutely INSANE. As it is ultimately disgusting.

In any case, we looked around once again, said "fuck it" and moved elsewhere. Mountains and good restaurants can't offset the fact that you feel like a lower middle class even when you don't have to work ever again in your life.

It's a nice place when you are young, renting and have no attachments, but I would strongly discourage from trying to settle there on a more permanent basis.

Despite your persuasive argument, I like it here.

The US is broken, politically and socioeconomically. The Senate will block any bills for a constitutional amendment to get money out of politics, and a Constitutional Convention will mean all amendments will be on the line, including the 1st Amendment (libertarians will cry "freeze speech") and 2A (gun owners will cry "the gubmint is taking our guns away"). I really don't see a bright side to America's future. Canada has been a well-run country, even under Harper, and I am optimistic about what Trudeau Jr. will be able to accomplish.

Calgary represents everything that I think is wrong with Canada--sorry, Nenshi, I like you, but the people of your city are holding Canada back. (the CPC, putting the economic eggs into the oil basket, and so on.) Plus, Calgary has less dev opportunities than Vancouver since everything is dependent on oil and gas.

I don't like the weather in eastern Canada. The winters are too cold, the summers are too hot and humid. By the way, it's much more common to have sleet, ice storms and hard-packed dirty slush/ice than freshly fallen snow. The rain keeps everything green and the temperatures in summer rarely gets above 25 degrees. So much better than 30 degrees (with 40 humidex).

Toronto too sprawling of a city, and amalgamation (just like it did in Ottawa and Halifax) has pitted suburbanites against urban dwellers, as manifested in Rob Ford and John Tory. Also, the 905 belt carried Mike Harris (Ontario PCs) in the 90s, and his "Common Sense Revolution" permanently sabotaged Toronto's public transportation infrastructure.

Quebec is a beacon of corruption. Remember that SQ officer who wasn't charged for a fatal hit-and-run with his cruiser? Montreal is owned by the Mob. Mr. Sidewalk, the Big Owe, etc. The infrastructure is literally crumbling (like the Highway 19 overpass collapse in Laval in 2006) because of how corrupt the city of Montreal is.

I'm young and I don't want kids. I do not believe that yellow peril is the driving factor in housing costs. Certainly it's a factor, but no one can say how much of a factor it is without solid data. I'm staying, and you can't stop me!

:-)

Fair enough; its a nice city if you're young and you don't have kids. I think a lot of your criticism of other places has to do with things that don't affect you on a day to day basis; America's lax gun laws aren't going to have nearly the same impact on your life as the much better software dev work you'll find there, the higher pay your work will garner, and better housing opportunities you'd have in the US.

I just hope you don't wind up like me; 20 years of C/C++ dev experience in desktop and embedded, and I have no idea what I would do if my current company here in Vancouver went under. There just aren't a lot of job opportunities here, and moving would mean giving up custody of my kids.

> I think a lot of your criticism of other places has to do with things that don't affect you on a day to day basis;

When Obama was running for president in 2008, his stump speech included this line (paraphrased): "If a child can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If a senior citizen can't afford his prescription drugs, that makes my life poorer, even if he's not my grandparent."

I would be be living in a city (SF, Portland, Seattle, SD, Austin, Boston, NYC, Chicago, take your pick) with massive social, racial, and economic disparities that make Vancouver look like one of those Nordic wundercountries. I would be living in a city, and a state, and a country, with levels of political dysfunction and gridlock only seen in countries like Korea or Chile. That dysfunction is holding the country back in overall quality-of-life. The rich have magnificent lives, but for the poor, it's hell to live in America. That makes my life poorer, even if I'm making $100K and drive a Tesla P90D with Ludicrous Mode. (That is if I live in a state that hasn't banned Tesla sales!)

As a person who moved from Victoria to Seattle and then SF, that kind of stuff doesn't actually matter in practice.

What the gods of Mt.Olympus do does not matter to the common folk. Macro policy decisions to do things like go to war in Afghanistan only indirectly effect your tax bill, and if the news didn't report it and if refugees didn't immigrate, would you even know it was happening. That is real effect of what your worrying about.

Go live & work in Seattle for a year and you'll quickly come to learn there is no real difference between there and Vancouver. If you change the street signs and some brands, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. If you really don't like it, you can always move back. But as a learning experience, you'll find it valuable for your world view, your career back in Vancouver and your wallet. If you have student loans, that exchange rate will be amazing to pay them off, and you could collect a down payment for a Vancouver 1 bedroom condo far faster. I used charles schwab debit cards and I paid no exchange fees paying off my canadian student loans.

Bread and Circus crap like guns and such are an entertainment sideshow and policy makers will do whatever they actually care about without much fanfare. In practice you will never see a gun on a civilian in NYC, SF or Seattle and people speak whatever is on their mind. The weather is also amazing in SF.

I lived in Vancouver (proper) for many years and as a developer $70k is a joke. Even moreso now that the Canadian dollar is hovering around 70 cents.

I now live in a city where the cost of living is substantially lower, and I make substantially more (about 100k). I could make more, but I don't have to. I spend about half my time traveling, something every Vancouver person aspires to do and yet never does. Leaving that city was the best choice I ever made.

Certainly I will visit in the future but I will never move back.

May I ask where you live?

1BR inventory is not really an issue. Most of the new builds consist of small 1BRs so that developers can maximize their $ per square foot. rents on 2 or 3BR places have shot through the roof because there's very little supply being added.

The real problem is that prices have become decoupled from incomes. The median home price is 10x more than the median household income (this includes condos and townhomes).

The only reason for this is outside capital driving up prices.

> The only reason for this is outside capital driving up prices.

Also known as inflation OR debt issued by your govt returning home.

This is an insufficient explanation. Canada's debt to GDP ratio is in the 60-70% range where that of the US is in the 90% range. Yet the situation in Vancouver is significantly more acute than those of New York and San Francisco.

I live as a developer in Seattle. Right now I live 45 min from downtown on a bus route with a roommate and I pay more rent for half an apartment than you do for your full one.

Also in the Seattle metro area; rent here is just massively out of balance. There is a total lack of regional urban planning and competition in the form of sufficiently available housing to keep prices low.

All of that development went to the improperly supported suburban exodus movement of the 80s and 90s.

I hear that even in the more conservative suburbs, support for rail is increasing, just because the traffic in Seattle is so bad. Is this true?

I think Washington state's regressive tax pyramid and dependence on plebecites will still stymie progress, though; in Canada, provincial and federal governments have much more centralized power to levy taxes and spend.

I think that is a more nuanced neighborhood by neighborhood issue. NIMBY is always a thing, and no one wants to live right next to any sort of transit.

There are various reasons for this, part of those reasons is that, disproportionately, the poor tend to be relegated to mass transit. Part of that is that transit doesn't make sense if you get on/off work outside of peek hours; most of the Seattle metro system is biased around serving /Seattle/. Transit systems in the counties to the north and south serve even less, have much tighter budgets, and therefore also have much less service. This is one of those self-re-enforcing loops.

With the HOV Toll Lane revealing just how horrid traffic on I-405 is (again absolute lack of urban planning), I think that you'd find many would agree about doing /something/, /anything/, except for taxing them in any way. Little do they realize that you pay 'taxes' in other ways, like having daily commutes of hell and a poor environment for their children to enter the workforce within. I know that my own career development is still severely hampered by having grown up in a suburb, without a car, and thus also with less access to the scarce jobs in the area that many (but not all) of my peers took up. I suspect that there probably weren't enough 'after school' jobs to go around though, so those who did get experience early got a head start on learning how to handle interacting with employers.

>There are various reasons for this, part of those reasons is that, disproportionately, the poor tend to be relegated to mass transit.

I agree with that in most cases, especially in low density wealthy cities, where people would avoid using transit even if it were more convenient, just to avoid the general population.

But in the case of several Bay Area neighborhoods the opposite is true. All else equal, in the urban core people pay a premium to live near a major mass transit station.

I guess you need a critical mass of upper middle class working people, good enough transit, and terrible traffic for this to happen. I certainly never saw transit access marketed as a selling point before moving here from flyover country in the dot-com days.

Yes, support for light rail is increasing. Construction is now starting on a new rail line from Seattle to Bellevue/Redmond, although it won't open for many years.

I attended many government planning meetings in the 1990's, and people were definitely anticipating the steadily increasing road congestion we've been experiencing since then. One of the big issues is that the topography in this region drives up costs. The densest urban areas are wedged between Puget Sound, Lake Washington, and Lake Sammamish, and in between there are steep hillsides and environmentally sensitive areas. Transit expansion therefore involves building bridges, purchasing land in areas with expensive view homes, and tunneling. We could raise taxes to pay for more rail expansions, but higher taxes combined with the rapidly increasing housing costs would price out many people, especially families.

Whenever I return to Seattle on visits, I find the traffic to be quite reasonable. Also, the housing market seems much more sane than where I live now (Bejing).

Washington state is the worst state for taxes and governance, except when compared to all the other states. It works out well.

Sorry, to be clear, I'm not renting. It was just an example.

I'm a developer in Seattle that moved here from Vancouver. While rent isn't much cheaper here, the cost of living is lower and my net income is 50% higher now than it was in Vancouver, not taking the exchange rate into account at all.

After 3 years here I've now purchased a townhouse in Cap Hill. I could have never afforded the house I just purchased in a comparable Vancouver neighborhood.

I want to ask you, do you think that there are wider class divides in Seattle than in Vancouver? I hear all the time about BLM marches, May Day riots, anti-gentrification/anti-Amazon vandalism, no-whites-allowed yoga, SPD brutality, etc. in Seattle. Whereas in Vancouver, our local Occupy Vancouver movement dissipated quickly. Someone once told me that in Seattle (and SF), there are a lot of desperate people because class is divided in a way that I (as a Canadian) am not used to.

> assuming you max out your RRSPs

As a side note, this shouldn't really factor into your calculations. Either way you're paying the tax

Are these amounts expensive for a developer there? I pay $1150 monthly rent ($1600 CAD) for a so-so house outside of Houston.

You can live downtown or close to it without spending half your (dev) salary on rent. And you don't have to worry about gas, being stuck in traffic, etc.

I'd say $750-1000 CAD is per month is on the low end. In general I find that renting near the train system is about $1200-1300 CAD for 1 bedroom, but that's on eastmost side of the city which is about 15-20 mins out of downtown (by train). Average dev salaries are maybe 60k CAD?

If you extend your search to Burnaby/New West, you can easily find 1 bedrooms for $700-1000 that are close to a frequent bus route (e.g. 106, 123). You're not paying a premium to live close to Skytrain, but commuting to downtown doesn't take an hour by transit either.

There's actually not a lot of data on Vancouver dev salaries out there. I've heard ranges from $50K to 70K depending on the source.

glassdoor is accurate and actually under shoots reality.

also https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18UwaThgGikSXzinnLNHx...

tldr lol if you only start out at 70k