Something is grotesquely wrong with Vancouver’s housing market, and the time for denialism is over | South China Morning Post: "If Vancouver (price/income ratio 10.6) could achieve the affordability of New York (6.1), or Singapore (5.0) I’m betting that Eveline Xia would be dancing down Main Street.
Surely Vancouver has always been unaffordable? A quick check of the stats will show that as recently at 10 years ago, Vancouver’s price/income ratio was in dancing territory, at 5.3.
As for the perennial low-rates argument, pretty much everywhere has low rates. It tells us nothing about what makes Vancouver’s market special.
An exceptional cause must be found for an exceptional situation, and for Vancouver, that can be found quite easily in wealth migration, which exploded in the past decade.
Vancouverites still struggle to grasp the scale of this influx to their modestly-sized city. From 2005-2012, about 45,000 millionaire migrants arrived in Vancouver under just two wealth-determined schemes, the now-defunct Immigrant Investor Programme and the still-running Quebec Immigrant Investor Programme. Let’s put that in perspective. The entire United States only accepted 9,450 wealth migration applications in the same period under its famous EB-5 scheme, likely representing fewer than 30,000 individuals.
So, Vancouver has recently received more wealth-determined migration than any other city in the world, by a long stretch. This, in a city with some of the lowest incomes in Canada.
The flipside to these various misunderstandings is the current focus on Australian-style restrictions on foreign ownership (Canada doesn’t even bother to track foreign ownership, let alone restrict it). Such restrictions might be an admirable goal, but I very much doubt they would have much impact on Vancouver."
'via Blog this'
Surely Vancouver has always been unaffordable? A quick check of the stats will show that as recently at 10 years ago, Vancouver’s price/income ratio was in dancing territory, at 5.3.
As for the perennial low-rates argument, pretty much everywhere has low rates. It tells us nothing about what makes Vancouver’s market special.
An exceptional cause must be found for an exceptional situation, and for Vancouver, that can be found quite easily in wealth migration, which exploded in the past decade.
Vancouverites still struggle to grasp the scale of this influx to their modestly-sized city. From 2005-2012, about 45,000 millionaire migrants arrived in Vancouver under just two wealth-determined schemes, the now-defunct Immigrant Investor Programme and the still-running Quebec Immigrant Investor Programme. Let’s put that in perspective. The entire United States only accepted 9,450 wealth migration applications in the same period under its famous EB-5 scheme, likely representing fewer than 30,000 individuals.
So, Vancouver has recently received more wealth-determined migration than any other city in the world, by a long stretch. This, in a city with some of the lowest incomes in Canada.
The flipside to these various misunderstandings is the current focus on Australian-style restrictions on foreign ownership (Canada doesn’t even bother to track foreign ownership, let alone restrict it). Such restrictions might be an admirable goal, but I very much doubt they would have much impact on Vancouver."
'via Blog this'
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