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Comment by brailsafe | Hacker News Reader

I'm in Vancouver working remotely for an EU/US company because I couldn't get anything here. At $100k CAD, my partner and I wouldn't be able to afford a modest upgrade to a 1 bedroom condo... anywhere in the city (from a tiny basement studio) without significantly increasing our take home. The place I just visited would require $4000/m after a 20% down payment (which I don't have). If I double my savings in the next year, assuming I don't get laid off next week and go broke again, I'd have enough for a 5-10% down payment and hypothetically require mortgage insurance, plus still not be able to afford the mortgage.

But hey, at least the cops won't arrest me for openly smoking crack on the sidewalk, so that'll help me deal with the stress of trying to be a high performer.

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Let me ask you, you live in one of the most beautiful regions on the planet, you work remote, why don't you get a place 2 hours away from the city or something like that? Nice quiet life, the beauty of the pacific northwest not even a bike ride away, cheaper to live, and you don't have to deal with the crackheads. What keeps you in the city?

It's an incredibly beautiful region, and that's definitely one of the options I'd consider if I was genuinely forced out, which I didn't mean to suggest I am, it's just that renting is the only viable option. 2 hours away though doesn't really solve that problem if I was trying to unfortunately; things don't get as more affordable as you'd hope.

But costs aside, the answer is that the people and things I do in the city are what bring my life substance, and being from the suburbs, it's a deeply isolating sort of existence that relies pretty heavily on having a car. I've personally never aligned with the idea of working remotely and isolating myself further; it would seem to me a recipe for depression.

I love being in nature, isolated and away from the city, at times, but not most of the time. I like leaving my place to walk to the grocery store, the cafe, and along the way being able to bump into people I know by name and ask them how things are going. I like walking to the gym, especially when it's raining (a lot), and having my small community of people there. Incredible food is nearby as well, concert venues, easy access to the airport, none if which I'm indulging in all the time but enough that it really brings flavour into my life.

I also like biking around, and for that there's actually quite a lot better infrastructure for in the city vs out, and it's easier to just get on a bus and go into the wilderness.

The crackhead comment was a bit flippant. I don't have a problem with anyone experiencing addiction, it's just a deep irony I find a little sad, akin to "instead of making it easier to build a life here, we'll just make it easier to fall out the bottom", though I know things are wildly more complex than that.

Lastly, aside from all those reasons, there are theoretically more job opportunities in the city, and that's good for my partner who doesn't work remotely and for me during the periods where there is no programming work.

To me, a good city is the culmination of social systems including capitalism that benefit from having more people around. A greater social circle of people available, more market, more jobs, more culture, better transit systems, art, etc..

Edit: I'd add the the only aspect of living in a city that's busy or particularly loud are automobiles, and to an extent the train. Very little of any generalized chaos is the result of many people ambiently being around, depending I guess on your individual tolerance for that and where specifically you might be. It's never once occurred to me that there are too many people around.

Back in the mid/late 90s Vancouver was affordable and a lot of flats being built. It was still more expensive that the suburbs, etc. but still cheaper than metros across the border. Sometime in the 2000s money started flowing in and those flats I was seeing in place like Kits for $150-$200k were suddenly going up a lot. Rents were also escalating. A lot seemed to be fueled by foreign money.

I was looking at relocating at the time and wish I had followed through.

Ya that seems to be part of consensus, and consistent with what I'm seeing in terms of when some places were built.

The suburbs around Vancouver gradually decrease in price a bit, but for obvious reasons and not enough to make much of a difference. It's like going from $750k for a 1 bedroom to $550k for a 1 bedroom and that's sort of the spread within reason; an absurd gap to be sure I don't mind them, but I'm just thinking about it terms of being able to stay in my community for once.

This is wrong. Vancouver was never “affordable”. My family moved to Vancouver in the mid-80s and it was by far the most expensive place in Canada. Prices had already climbed rapidly by the time we got there and prices never crashed for 40 years. At worst, it was flat for a few years.

Our 1000 sqft house in the West End was almost 300k in the mid-80s and our family was struggling financially but we were in the best school district so my parents made the sacrifice. It was almost double the price of a much larger house in suburbs of Toronto.

East Van was cheaper but still expensive relative to other cities. Vancouver house prices has always been a mystery because there is no inherent industry to pay for it. Locals blamed Asians but Germans were larger demographic in terms of immigrants but you couldn’t identify them as easily.

Vancouver is not a mystery.

Geographically constrained in 3 directions.

Only decent-weather locale for Canadians (US has hundreds of release valves for people that get sick of prices in SF / NYC / etc.)

Large rich Chinese immigration.

For Vancouver's geography to be a legitimate concern, we would have needed to maximize what we could do with the existing land, and it's very, very far from that.

I would argue the latter 2 arguments have some bearing, but imo it's more about cheap capital coming in from many directions including locally for so long in combination with artificially choked and inflated development processes for decades. For example, there's a parking lot with an old grocery store sitting there at the busiest transit hub in the U.S and Canada. The proposal to redevelop the site has been repeatedly stalled every year for what is now 6-7 years, meanwhile only the most meager development projects have gone forward in the same neighborhood. That said, because of the other reasons, as soon as it hypothetically went up, all of the units would be purchased by speculators because they'd be wildly out of reach for any regular person anyway, due to decades of the other crap.

I went to an open house yesterday for a modest one bedroom with no interesting view or extravagant features, listed at $750k. When I remarked that the cost of the mortgage alone would be a multiple of 2.5 - 3x our current all-in expenses, he simply suggested that in 5 years I can just move out and hang on to it, renting it out to someone and keeping another unit off the market.

The geography wouldn't be a problem if maximizing use of the land was done. You point out the choked development processes, but other open geography locales would still have those bureaucratic problems in cases and yet just sprawl out elsewhere, reducing prices. Take a look at Houston, Dallas Fort-Worth, Calgary, Edmonton metros. There is a reason those metros have retained low housing prices while they have grown so much. They are able to grow out. Vancouver and SF are much more limited in their ability to grow out Single Family Homes when high-rise development is choked. That's why the geography issue does have bearing.

Meh, the greater Vancouver area including the adjacent cities have sprawled as far as they can and continue to do so; there's actually quite a lot of development happening in some of those suburbs, and they can be just lovely. The other cities you mention—if they've kept prices low—they're embracing an obviously horrible development pattern that only works because they have oil money and it hasn't collapsed yet. Smaller, less-resource-rich cities like Winnipeg have tried the same thing and literally couldn't afford to maintain their own infrastructure if all they had to pay for was road maintenance. Yes, you can buy a $400k condo there, but as they come to terms with the rate they're reaching insolvency, they'll need to find a way to very quickly turn what are already near the highest property taxes in the country, into 2-3x that number.

The geography is a constraint, the problem is failure to embrace the constraint in any sensible way. Prairie cities would be more economically productive and less horrible in my opinion if they halted outward expansion decades ago and just figured out how to adapt correctly.

That's more or less true, it just wasn't so severe I think at a point. It was out of reach for my poor prairie single parent family, but that was for a giant single family house. If the circumstances prevailed in 2015 when I moved here, I definitely could have afforded even a pretty nice 1 bedroom condo outside of downtown.

Regarding east van where I live now, I went to an open house yesterday on commercial drive that was 1 bedroom for $750k facing west and looking at buildings that have been there at 1 story since maybe the 50s.

The gap is just so enormous, considering we rent a studio basement down the street for $1500 total.

Affordable from a west coast US salary. Vancouver has always made me shake my head re: tech salaries. It has capable engineers but pays a fraction from across the border. Back in the 90s/early 2000s, there was a lot of tech but it seemed more like a media center.

I felt your pain. I live in Victoria and also make $100k but can't afford much more than a 1 bed without destroying our savings goals. Unfortunately my current job is hybrid and they won't let me go full remote. We plan to leave as soon as I find a new opportunity - despite loving living here by every other metric.

Victoria has an even more scarce rental market from what I understand too. It's one of those things that I hope will make it harder to keep people around if salaries don't go higher at an average company. $100k is great for a huge portion of everyday niceties and even some larger things—I didn't need to worry to much that a decent coffee grinder would damage me too much, or a trip—but not that one thing.

I'd also not necessarily describe it as pain, as much as like some hypothetical existential crisis. I'm not looking to buy a place at this moment, but when I consider the prospect of what happens if our landlords sell (giant house in east van), there aren't too mamy viable options.

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