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Comment by pkaler | Hacker News Reader

I'm standing at my desk in my apartment that I pay $1589/month for. An equivalent apartment in SF or NYC would be $3500 or higher.

The problems are two-fold.

1) Vancouver hasn't created a single-family detached home lot since the 1970s. There is an ocean to the west, the US border to the south, Burrard Inlet and mountains to the north. There just isn't any land. The only way to expand is east into the Fraser Valley.

The single-family detached home is dead. Live in a condo. Everyone gets a view. Everyone gets sunshine. Everyone gets services. Everyone gets a park a block away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouverism

2) Vancouver companies pay dick-all for salaries because Vancouver companies make dick-all for revenue. Everyone that lives here and can afford works or consults for a company that is not from Vancouver. A tech company that can't afford to pay an employee to rent a $1589/month apartment is not a tech company.

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If property values were tied directly to incomes, as they are in any normal market, and what you are saying is true about salaries being low, the Vancouver market would not be as hot as it is right now.

The market is being artificially inflated by foreign buyers. Don't forget that Vancouver is a very attractive destination for wealthy Chinese multi-nationals. This is the same phenomenon that has wealthy Chinese buying $5 million luxury apartments in Manhattan through shell companies to hide their identity.

"If property values were tied directly to incomes..."

They are not because there is no land left.

It is impossible to buy a single-family detached home because there is no land left. Renting a condo is still very economical compared to other large cities.

I saw an answer on Jeopardy! recently that described Vancouver for one of the daily doubles. Oglethorpe math professor Philip Tiu apparently had a long enough brain fart before responding correctly that I had time to yell at the television, "How do you not know Vancouver?! You're Chinese!"

My spouse immediately informed me, "That's racist."

We then had a short discussion about the ways in which the Chinese nouveaux riches expatriate their assets.

It's not racist, but it is prejudiced. Racism is basically "prejudice + power". You don't have any power over the person on the screen, so your comment is just prejudiced. If, on the other hand, you were using your hypothetical sway on social media to besmirch him in some way, that would be racism.

I'm American but I've never read "To Kill a Mocking Bird". "How could you have never read an iconic piece of American literature that literally every public school child between the 70s and 90s was forced to read in highschool?!" Easy: I didn't go to public school, and I wasn't in highschool until the new millennium.

It was a stereotypes-based joke. It's like pushing a boulder rolling downhill as it passes by. You're not so much using your own power as adding just a little to the destructive power that is already there. In this case, the stereotype is "all Chinese people own a house/condo in Vancouver", which is an abuse of the conditional probability that a property is owned by a Chinese person given that it is in Vancouver (and also clearly impossible, due to there being somewhat fewer than a billion residences in Vancouver). Imputed property ownership is not a derogatory stereotype, so I don't feel particularly bad about perpetuating it.

I was forced to read _To Kill a Mockingbird_. As a result of the forced consumption and interminable in-class literary dissection, I don't have a very high opinion of it, and only a vague recollection of the plot. Nothing could make me hate a book quite like English class.

But that's actual fact of having a national literary canon shoved down our throats, and we're looking at non-factual stereotypes here. As an American, you would have had no chance at all at answering the question, because Americans don't know where anything is outside the borders of the U.S., unless there is a war happening there, and then we can correctly identify the continent it is on about 80% of the time. To the stereotypical American, Vancouver might be barely recognizable as a city somewhere in Washington state, just as Montreal is in Vermont, Toronto is in Ohio, Windsor is a suburb of Detroit, and Ottawa is an illusion maintained by the Canadian military to distract its enemies from the real capital in Toronto.

The movie Canadian Bacon is based almost entirely on this national stereotype, and the Canadian national stereotype.

Yeah, let's see some sources on how foreign buyers are propping up the Vancouver market. Last time I looked (around 2010) all the studies were claiming that immigrants that were buying homes had borrowed money from their Chinese parents, and thus this was foreign money. But almost everyone under the age of 40 borrows to buy.

I think the real problem lies in interest rates. They show a clear correlation between sustained low interest rates and asset inflation.

> The market is being artificially inflated by foreign buyers.

Citation + data needed?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/business/international/chi...

"...In Canada, they are paying $1 million for modest Vancouver bungalows..."

A New York Times article with a single mention of Vancouver with zero hard data on the real estate sales in Vancouver does not constitute data.

The British Columbia Real Estate Association points out that, as of mid-2015:

> the available data and analysis on the housing stock and flow of residential transactions in the region suggest that foreign ownership of housing is considerably less than 5 per cent of the housing stock and not more than 5 per cent of sales activity.

http://www.bcrea.bc.ca/docs/economics-publications-archive/2...

Less than 5 percent of sales activity and ownership hardly constitutes a major factor for inflation of prices; sure, there might be some impact, but remember that the other 95% of transactions are performed by Canadian citizens.

Canadians need to stop blaming foreign investment as the reason for absurd home valuations, and start looking at the fact that the debt-to-income ratio is 165%, where most people have leveraged themselves at dangerously high ratios (I personally know of a few couples that have household incomes of ~$120,000/year and have $650,000 mortgages in Toronto), mostly due to the incredibly low interest rate environment that has been present since the 2008 financial crisis, and worsened by the lowering of rates last year.

The reason homes are expensive is due to rampant, unfounded speculation on the housing market, fueled by the lowest interest rate environment making cheap money readily available to people who would most likely not be able to afford their mortgage if interest rates rise a percent or two in the next few years.

> "A tech company that can't afford to pay an employee to rent a $1589/month apartment is not a tech company."

Tech companies don't have to be in Vancouver. The fundamental component that a tech company requires is talent. There's relatively little distinguishing talent in Vancouver that can't be found in several other comparable jurisdictions within Canada. A tech company that pays higher wages simply because the employee lives in a high-cost jurisdiction is a tech company that is less competitive.

That's the from the company view, now to address to your personal view:

> "I'm standing at my desk in my apartment that I pay $1589/month for."

and:

> "The single-family detached home is dead. Live in a condo. Everyone gets a view. Everyone gets sunshine. Everyone gets services. Everyone gets a park a block away. "

Yikes! That rent adds up to $381,000 over 20 years. You can easily find single-family detached homes for that price in places like Waterloo, Ottawa, or Montreal suburbs and in 20 years have it paid off and own an asset while Vancouver renter will have no asset and more rent to pay. Those 3 locations have comparable tech job prospects as Vancouver with a whole lot more sunshine in the winter.

> Tech companies don't have to be in Vancouver.

Agree with you 100%, but they are. And a good portion of those are in downtown or in the city proper. Why? I can see if your an Amazon or Microsoft and need to hire 100+ developers but the majority of Vancouver startups need nowhere near that many people. Why would you locate your startup in Vancouver?

apparently those corporations can find the people willing to work at those salaries. It's up to the tech workers to decide whether the location is worth the lower bank account.

Vancouver has lower tax rates for businesses compared to the surrounding suburbs.

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