Analyst who exposed Vancouver's real estate disaster | Hacker News Reader

Analyst who exposed Vancouver's real estate disaster

macleans.ca

97 pointssurfallday45 comments

There are a handful of vibrant cities in the world that haven't been given over to freeways and parking, and they're so rare and desirable that they've become luxury goods that are speculated on, like they're paintings by Vincent van Gogh. How sad is it that so far it's been impossible to simply make more nice places for people instead of for cars?

It's not sad at all. It's what people want.

If society just thought paying interest on your house was another form of feudalism and refused to play along, I expect you'd see more of your type of city and less of what we currently have.

Not just paying interest, actually paying whole mortgages for other people. Since the financial crisis of 2007 it's unrealistic for most young people to save to pay a deposit on their own mortgage. Where I live they want about 5 years of gross minimum wage just to take out a mortgage.

The difference in price tells you what people want. Dense urban environments are vastly more desired than freeway sprawl. The group participating in local politics and writing the policies that entrench freeway sprawl are not representative of housing seekers as a whole.

Not just Sad but also self-imposed. If outside investors and outside countries were buying up all our jeans, cars, tvs and junk foods, we'd be celebrating it all day long. in fact, we even blame other countries for not buying enough of our stuff (balance of trade debate).

And yet, when it comes to real estate we act like we can't make more of it. The vast majority of land out there is still unbuilt. Simply start another city, say 50 miles away or more if need be and then create incentives for companies to move there. We'll have more jobs, much cheaper housing, an opportunity to build a brand new city with the latest technologies, parks, outdoor gyms, libraries, etc, not to mention it'll bring housing costs down in prior city too.

A city is so much more than the built environment. A city is also made up of its people, and expensive, purpose-built cities seem to lack that human vibrancy.

I’ve been to some of the top-tier “master planned” towns, transit villages and town centers.

At face value they all seem nice, walkable and urban. But they’re also generally extremely bland. They have the same chain retail and restaurant concepts, private security who will chase away anyone who seems undesirable (that is everyone from unsheltered folks, to rowdy teens, to street vendors) and they usually are not well integrated with the surrounding areas.

One of Toronto's nicest neighborhoods (High Park / Roncesvalles) was designed and built by a scam artists.

Though Joseph Phillips wound up in jail for running a Ponzi scheme, he knew what people wanted; a walkable community (small blocks), mixed use residential/commercial, a large central park.

A somewhat popular place in Vancouver for restaurants/night life is yaletown. It's somewhat scuzzy and expensive, but it has brick buildings I guess?

Plenty of fantastic places in Vancouver with character, but I don't understand that one. (And I work there.)

But I know the kind of blandness you're talking about. Richmond somehow is a metropolis that feels like a desert.

Part of what makes cities nice is people actually living in housing. If a neighborhood is significantly underoccupied by residents it kills local businesses that need foot traffic, increases social isolation, and decreases perceived safety.

In practice new planned cities work out badly, because location is everything and cities need an underlying reason to exist. Residents don’t want to move to a place with no jobs, and jobs don’t want to be in a place where it’s hard to attract workers. An interesting article on how Songdo, South Korea is failing even though its location next to the country’s biggest airport should’ve helped it: https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/06/sleepy-in-songdo-koreas...

You just need jobs. Companies respond to incentives, so just make the initial incentives really really advantageous and i'm sure those jobs will show up. Just look at all the trouble a company like Amazon goes through to eek out every last bit of tax advantage, going so far as to have every city in the country bid on it! Once the jobs show up, people will move there.

Employees will not relocate to undesirable places. UBS had to relocate its headquarters back to New York City from Stamford because it could not recruit people willing to live, or schlep to the Connecticut suburbs. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/nyregion/ubs-may-move-bac...

I have to be contrarian in spite of aesthetically preferring the classical city.

Nothing about the suburbs made sense to me until I had kids. Now everything makes sense.

Young kids require a lot of gear. Hauling all that without a car is hard. Walking and transit take time and kids have schedules or else you get meltdowns. Kids also get bored.

Density helps transit time but kids need safe space to play and that is at a premium in dense cities.

Unpacking and packing young kids into cars is painful. You have to get them in, belted, etc., which for <5yos can be an ordeal each time. Enter the drive through.

I could go all day.

Not saying you can't do kids in a city, just that the burbs make total sense now.

Counter-example from the 90s: my mom operated a home daycare business. She’d take all us kids (usually 6 or 7) on the bus and we’d take a trip to the pool, or park or whatever. It’s possible to do fun things with your children without a car.

I live in a downtown area atm specifically for my toddler. We go to the grocery store everyday, we go to the nearby park, he doesn’t mind the transit times. Ever since we changed his seat to face forward, he does love it when we actually use the car, and sometimes demands it (kai che, kai che!), but it isn’t really necessary unless we are going to the doctor or pool. We did choose downtown Bellevue rather than downtown Seattle, however, which has a huge park and not so many of the negatives of Seattle (homeless, drug needles, etc...).

> Yan says there may be some solution—a mix of remedies, new laws, purpose-built rental housing, tax adjustments and so on—that does not mean a collapse in Metro Vancouver’s real estate prices.

There never will be a solution because no one will vote for a government that will bring down the value of their home.

Well, unless you exclude most voters from home ownership...

Never thought of it this way

I never understood the point of having a 'high-value' home that you can't sell anyway because you need a place to live.

Sure, you can say you can move somewhere cheaper and pocket the difference. The problem is that until you actually do that, the cost of living will likely follow the property price increase and hurt your wallet.

Unless most of the homeowners own more than one property.

home prices have appreciated far faster than the cost of living during most of people's lives.

don't expect this to continue. In the very very long term, price appreciation of housing will always match inflation.

In the long run, and in the aggregate (planet earth), but in a globalized world with capital from external economies (China) flowing into specific, highly desirable local economies, this old rule of thumb doesn't rule hold up anymore.

In aggregate you might be right, but the issue is that people want to live in specific places and are willing to spend their disposable income to get what they want. As more and more people cross the threshold of absolute poverty more and more money is chasing the same physical assets. Housing is not a commodity asset.

I know a few people who have bought condos here recently; they just want to live here.

While I'm sure most of the market is investment based, there is also a decent chunk of people who just want to live here, even if a lot of them are priced out of the market at the moment.

I'm curious what the %s are.

Home equity line of credit (HELOC) rates are cheaper than credit cards so can finance large purchases w/ the equity in your home.

The Vancouver voters elected the NDP government in the last election who have brought in a Vacant Home Tax, a Foreign Speculator Tax and a School Tax on homes over $3 million. And hopefully they will investigate the money laundering through the casinos.

Finally, Vancouver home prices are down over 15% in the over $2 million category. There are several buyers who have lost money on properties purchased in 2016 which was the peak of the market.

I’m guessing most folks in Vancouver aren’t millionaires though, so as long as the policy only impacts millionaires it may not be as politically unpalatable as deliberately crashing home values for everyone.

Surprisingly a large percentage of families in Vancouver are millionaires.

But it’s all from real estate appreciating.

It is frustrating as there are straightforward, cost-effective approaches the government could take to better understand the problem and they have chosen not to pursue in an expedited fashion either because of lack of effort or an active desire to stay ignorant (due to upcoming election, impact on big donors, etc...). Instead they just keep telling Canadians they will "allocate funds to better research the issue", i.e. kick the can.

For example, a simple, 80/20 analysis they could perform: list at all real estate held by holding companies in GVA and GTA and generate a list of their corporate directors. Find people who are directors on a large number of those holding companies, and check if they are related somehow to law firms, banks/wealth managers, Real estate agents or immigration businesses. If so, you now have a short list of potential properties being used for money laundering that maybe merit further investigation.

Calling the top 25 people on that list should reveal some interesting findings... Re-organize by property value if you want to catch bigger fish first.

This was not a surprise exposure to anyone. Vancouver is a peculiar place, where mobsters haul around duffel bags full of cash and various authorities pretend everything is fine.

Lately gossip has mostly focused on the motivations of the various auditors and authorities, who refuse to do their jobs. Leading theories include fear of racism accusations, corruption, laziness, and of course gross incompetence.

I suspect fear of winding up in one of those mobster duffle bags plays a part too.

The mess has spread from Vancouver to Toronto and is now hitting Montreal hard as well.

Article is from February 2018.

its been getting CRAZY in toronto the past couple years

https://globalnews.ca/video/5091538/ontario-police-search-fo... just the past week

international students/people have been involved in some very frightening crimes, this sort of stuff rarely happens much less to students.. i mean its toronto/golden horseshoe for the most part its very safe

??? uhhh why am i getting downvoted?

You can now buy a private island in the Bahamas for about the same price as a 2 bedroom condo in the Toronto core and housing prices here just keep going up.

How’s Edmonton?

Real estate remains one of last few asset classes where ownership can be obfuscated reliably. This makes it ideal to park money of dubious provenance. If you bring transparency to the system - much like know-your-customer did to banking - this phenomenon will largely disappear. The local residents have reached a point I think for this to happen in Vancouver - and it could spread to other similar cities.

What I find most interesting about the influx of Chinese money is that many Chinese communities across North America were built by people who fled China and its communist regime. One can argue that the beginning of the current Vancouver housing boom was the Hong Kong transfer in 1997. And they built tight-knit communities in Vancouver/Richmond area (not mention some of the best Chinese restaurants in the world).

Now just one or two generations removed, these communities are facing the consequences of the same communist regime they thought they left behind.

(2018) - this does not provide a complete picture of the current state of the market.

I wish they just did not sell to foreign investors. And yes I would be fine if other countries did the same, why do I need to own a place in 'x' country? This is, again, capitalism at the expense of the people who actually live in the region. I am not against immigration and owning property but a person or organization who are simply buying up property just to make a profit and have no intention of ever living there should be stopped. Or at the least heavily taxed to discourage the practice.

Foreign investors buy US property because (a) they get a lot of dollars in exchange for all the TVs, cellphones and underpants we somehow cannot manufacture ourselves and (b) US doesn't have much else to offer. US cars? They're "okay" at best. US electronics? Come on, when have you seen a piece of electronic made in the USA last time?

We should fight the cause, not the effect.

Chinese people invest in property because they don’t have good experiences with their home financial markets, know-your-customer is a burden, and because it is hard to invest internationally. Everyone else is fine with stocks and bonds and funds and such.

The rest of the world has been asking China to free capital markets for a long time, but there’s not much we can do if the Party doesn’t want to.

Also in Canada there is 0% capital gains tax on your primary residence.

I don't understand, why can't we simply build more cities? If people are so willing to pay for it, I'm sure there's people who want the jobs. It just seems like such a waste of opportunity

We have other stores of value that don't take up as much space and permanently destroy a finite resource.

People don’t want a house, they want a specific property within a specific location. It would be as if you responded to a shortage of iPhones by flooding the market with Motorola Razrs.

We don’t even need to build more cities: we can build more density in existing cities. Vancouver has lots of Neighbourhoods with nothing but single family homes. Add more townhouses and low-rise apartment buildings and the population of Vancouver could double. But people cling enviously to their driveway & backyard close to downtown.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com