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Comment by SnowProblem | Hacker News Reader

Not so cheap anymore! They go for $2M each today which seems insane to me.

The Vancouver housing market is really insane when you compare it to average salaries. New-grad software developer at a non-big-tech can expect the equivalent of $45k USD

NAFTA (or whatever succeeded it) allows many of those Canadian SWEs to go south for better pay (e.g. Seattle), and a lot of them do. It isn't great situation all around (Vancouver loses talent because they don't want to pay for it).

Vancouver has NEVER paid that well. 50-60K is high end for SWE in Vancouver.

That's not been my experience at all. Amazon has really pushed compensation up over the last 10 years and 50-60K (CAD or USD!) would be low for even a junior position in the companies I'm familiar with.

FWIW the local market is fairly bimodal; there are the FAANG companies and those who keep up with them, and there are some local companies that still pay peanuts. The gap between those two is large.

This matches what i see in the past 5 years or so as well.

I left Vancouver over this.

Average salary : Canadian normal. (median $33K, 90% of people under 90K - Stats Canada and Canada Revenue Agency for sources circa 2015-ish). Need at least $300K/year to afford rent, and if you're not a multimillionaire, owning a home is out of reach. Well, except condos... then $200K+/year is ideal.

The rents are too damned high!

And yeah, there's a whole pile of homelessness and safety issues over that. That Vancouver has (on the whole) nicer climate than Seattle, let alone anywhere else in Canada - makes it "easier". I worry a lot about the people I know still stuck there.

Oh and if anyone's looking for causes, I recommend this podcast : https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/191-sold

The main cause is that Vancouver bans apartments on the vast majority of its residential land, and has done so for nearly a century.

Not the house itself! A typical property tax assessment on a Vancouver Special is $2M of land and $50k of building.

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