There is nobody looking to buy a condo under $1MM mark competing to purchase the 8 digit figure homes in West Vancouver. The rich people selling and buying them aren't hurting at all.
Local Canadians are competing to expand their real estate portfolios and they aren't looking at homes in Langley because they sold their mansion in West Vancouver.
a west vancouver home easily costs above $10 million, you think they are going to move into a penthouse in Yaletown as their primary residence and thus driving condo prices up?
this makes no sense, people aren't selling their west vancouver home to downsize they are in a position to get even more leverage from the bank and expand their portfolio and likely own homes in North Vancouver and/or abroad already.
the people selling their homes for ~$1MM are downsizing because they can't buy a home at that price range anymore
If you expropriated all of the unoccupied mansions and replaced them with normal-priced, mixed housing, the cost of housing in the city would broadly go down, as supply would massively increase. Pricing being bid up amongst specific classes of housing and people is a second order problem - the first order problem is that unoccupied mansions are a criminal misuse of land which must be remedied by taxation.
and then the masses turn around to blame that group. its straight up xenophobia one that has been in Vancouver for a very long time, anti-asian xenophobia in Vancouver is not new. 80s, it was the japanese, 90s, hong kong & koreans, 2000s, taiwanese and mainlanders.
I’m not from Vancouver, so their xenophobia doesn’t apply to me. Vancouverites burned down their own city after losing the Stanley Cup Finals - I’m definitely not here to defend their character. You can stop going to that well, I only see this as land use issue.
Very much so and it probably stings even more for that have-not group, that its people from what they perceive to be of "third world origin". There's just no helping such people, instead of seeking ways to better themselves, they choose to live in a state of angst and anger and expect the government to somehow fix it.
Again you don't live here and you don't fall in the category so you won't understand how sensitive this issue is here.
how?
That competition is driving the anxiety, and the anxiety is driving the reaction. Wealthy foreign buyers are the easiest target. Wealthy Asian businesspeople have been stashing their money in Canada for a long time, so it's not surprising they've been targeted for as long as you claim. It may be xenophobic, but inherent xenophobia isn't what is driving the behavior, it's a reaction to the class and land use issues, and it gets more intense as the divide grows more obvious.
The reason it's worth 8 figures is because of demand. If there was rich people to buy it they'd have to sell it for a reasonable price that locals can afford.
Also, "only" 20%? That's a massive number for housing.
If nobody is around to buy that mansion, it would eventually be sold to a developer who either turns it into apartments, or tears it down and builds an apartment building there. I've seen this happen numerous times in my neighborhood.
Also 20% is huge.
zoning makes each class of property non fungible between other classes , it is like price gold doesn’t much have impact on say price of diamonds.
Rezoning benefits the economy and improves the wealth of everyone, even if NIMBYs don’t see it, however it will affect the quality of life of people who don’t want to live in “cities” proper but want the sweet spot where enough density enables them to have niceties of civilization like say neighborhood coffee shops , good schools , hospitals, art /culture/social activists without all the negativities of large cities like homelessness/high crime / poor noise /environment/pollution etc.
There is a racist angle too typically people of color, immigrants and any economically disadvantaged groups will not be able to afford to live in these neighborhoods .
[1] not strictly true for commercial as it can impact demand even if supply is not impacted , i.e. a new big office building is going to draw a lot of workers want to live near by competing for the same housing .