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Comment by harryVic | Hacker News Reader

You make an assumption that foreign money is entirely funding those two industries which is untrue. Vancouver is the most desirable city in a country with 36 Million people, so it makes sense for real estate to be expensive there. And new immigrants want to live in lower BC because it is warm here. I am an immigrant and I live in Victoria. It doesn't matter how much more I could make in Calgary, I don't want to spend 9 months of a year shoveling snow.

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So Vancouver is a nice place to live, but so is nearby Seattle. Does Vancouver deserve to be more expensive than Seattle rent wise? No, at least as a tech worker, the salaries just aren't there.

Moving to Vancouver from another country is much easier than moving to Seattle. And Seattle is considered to be a city with a bad weather in the US. That bad weather is actually considered good here in Canada.

A lot of techies from Vancouver are working in Seattle under NAFTA TN visas, which are pretty easy to get.

It is not surprising considering how similar Vancouver and Seattle are and considering that the Vancouver mayor openly brags about how low tech salaries are [0]

[0]: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/city-of-vancouver-criti...

Your argument holds no water I'm afraid. The same thing is going on elsewhere in the country - Toronto has reached the same expensive real estate levels because it's warm there too?

Most new immigrants don't have a budget to buy a $1M+ home, neither do locals with a $80K median gross household income, so the demand must come from somewhere else.

Pretty much this. Yes absolutely 'everyone wants to be here' but the land valuations are so beyond typical local incomes that it's a weak af explanation.

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