Housing Bubble II: The Quest To Build Enough Homes Where People Actually Need Them

[casper]

I think the factor that was missed in the CBC reporting was the airbnd market. Many of those ultra-small condos are not designed for people to permanently live in them. They are about the same size of what you get in an all-suites hotel. They are ok for a week or so. If your a student or even single with modest income they are probably better than having roommate.

In BC they have cracked down on airbnb and many of those units are being put up for sale. Have not been following Ontario, but I though they were going down the same route.

Vancouver and Victoria has a major shortage of hotel rooms. Toronto as well. My preference would be to see more purpose built hotels instead more of these airbnb oriented condos.

[jonny24]

Originally Posted by YOWetal

I think this is very under appreciated. I was a bit surprised how mild the correction was when rates adjusted but there seems to be a delayed reaction as people realize the math doesn't make sense. I am in the reduce immigration camp but we have to admit how bad it would be if we didn't have 1 million plus fake students supporting the rental market and keeping landlords afloat. Even with them rents are falling. Inflation helps disguise it somewhat. Some 2018 pre-con buyers are able to sell for what they bougth for which seems like breaking even but most of my investments, income, and costs have nearly doubled since then so even breaking even is a big loss. The vaunted leverage that let;s you turn a $150,000 downpayment into $450,000 when a Condo goes up 30% all the sudden turns into a 100% loss when it goes down by 20% vaporizing your down payment.

Following relative to when, is a very important detail.

[YOWetal]

Originally Posted by jonny24

Following relative to when, is a very important detail.

Sure rents aren't dramtically affordable all the sudden but it indicates equilblrium. Removing a million temporary residents could cause a Covid like crash in rents. It's worth the risk in my opinion but it's not 100% clear.

[whatnext]

Originally Posted by casper

I think the factor that was missed in the CBC reporting was the airbnd market. Many of those ultra-small condos are not designed for people to permanently live in them. They are about the same size of what you get in an all-suites hotel. They are ok for a week or so. If your a student or even single with modest income they are probably better than having roommate.

In BC they have cracked down on airbnb and many of those units are being put up for sale. Have not been following Ontario, but I though they were going down the same route.

Vancouver and Victoria has a major shortage of hotel rooms. Toronto as well. My preference would be to see more purpose built hotels instead more of these airbnb oriented condos.

Great so investors are selling their badly laid out, unlivable units.

For our gentle forumers from outside Vancouver behold starchitect Kengo Kuma's building commissioned by Westbank.
https://www.dezeen.com/2023/06/20/ke...per-vancouver/

A posterchild for the type of building casper mentions. Check out the listings for some truly horrendous floorplates like this one (yours for just $1.5 million)

[IMG]kengo by bcborn, on Flickr[/IMG]
Credit: rew.ca

[YOWetal]

Originally Posted by whatnext

Great so investors are selling their badly laid out, unlivable units.

For our gentle forumers from outside Vancouver behold starchitect Kengo Kuma's building commissioned by Westbank.
https://www.dezeen.com/2023/06/20/ke...per-vancouver/

A posterchild for the type of building casper mentions. Check out the listings for some truly horrendous floorplates like this one (yours for just $1.5 million)

[IMG]kengo by bcborn, on Flickr[/IMG]
Credit: rew.ca

WTF? Is this a joke? I thought that curved part was a window at first and was thinking they just reveresed the living room and bedroom. Except of course there is only one window and put the bedroom where it needs to be and there is no natural light in the rest of the apartment. Just wow!

[whatnext]

Originally Posted by YOWetal

WTF? Is this a joke? I thought that curved part was a window at first and was thinking they just reveresed the living room and bedroom. Except of course there is only one window and put the bedroom where it needs to be and there is no natural light in the rest of the apartment. Just wow!

But it's starchitect designed, living there is a privilege!

It is literally the poster child for what happens when your housing market gets driven by offshore buyers looking for a crashpad not a home. Sucks for them AirBnB'ing this nightmare isn't allowed any more. Probably why there are so many for sale.

The worst thing is that the site is literally a few minutes walk to all the office jobs downtown and some of Vancouver's busiest shopping streets. It could have been hundreds of rental homes instead of this pretentious mess.

[someone123]

To me the high-end starchitect condos make sense. If you are a billionaire you can afford a nice condo that is contorted into a sculptural shape with expensive decorations and the fees that come with that. The lower-end unappealing $1-2M ones only seem to make sense if marketed as bitcoins or maybe to very pretentious people or modernist architecture fanatics with semi-modest budgets.

These buildings don't really bother me because if Vancouver were zoned properly and new supply were healthy and competitive they wouldn't be in competition with affordable housing. The BC government could say they are rezoning 2x2 km of East Van for 40 storey rental towers and will be flooding the market with them for the next 20 years for example. But instead Vancouver is still full of underused land, like around False Creek, even in the middle of a housing crisis.

Rezoning a large swath of the city for apartments also fits with the federal program of low productivity and poor infrastructure. Maybe it will be better for everyone if we accept that the future here is to be a miniature lower crime Sao Paulo.

[Changing City]

Originally Posted by someone123

To me the high-end starchitect condos make sense. If you are a billionaire you can afford a nice condo that is contorted into a sculptural shape with expensive decorations and the fees that come with that. The lower-end unappealing $1-2M ones only seem to make sense if marketed as bitcoins or maybe to very pretentious people or modernist architecture fanatics with semi-modest budgets.

These buildings don't really bother me because if Vancouver were zoned properly and new supply were healthy and competitive they wouldn't be in competition with affordable housing. The BC government could say they are rezoning 2x2 km of East Van for 40 storey rental towers and will be flooding the market with them for the next 20 years for example. But instead Vancouver is still full of underused land, like around False Creek, even in the middle of a housing crisis.

Rezoning a large swath of the city for apartments also fits with the federal program of low productivity and poor infrastructure. Maybe it will be better for everyone if we accept that the future here is to be a miniature lower crime Sao Paulo.

The BC government has told all the municipalities that they have to allow up to 20 storeys (rental or condo) with no parking requirements around every transit station, and 12 storeys in another ring beyond that, as well as 12 storeys at bus exchanges. (There's a third ring out to 800m, where 8 storeys have to be permitted, although they'll probably be built as 6-storey woodframe projects - 400m around bus exchanges). Municipalities have until next week to adopt the changes.

The City of Vancouver already had a plan from two years ago that encouraged rental redevelopments to up to 40 storeys at the stations, and 20 storeys for rental developments across the entire Broadway Corridor where the new Broadway extension of SkyTrain is being built. There's a greater density allowance for rental buildings, but 20% of them have to be leased at specified below-market rents. Generally the City's plan exceeeded the province's requirements, but there are a couple of tweaks as a result of the provincial legislation that allow slightly more development. That area is over 6 sq km in total - around 500 blocks, spanning both the west and the east side.

In the past year, since the plan was approved, there have been 36 applications for 41 towers and 7,500 rental units, and 238 strata units. There are at least 20 more proposals with around 5,000 more rental units that are in preliminary review, and over 10,000 more associated with sites acquired by developers.

It's a huge change, and there are similar policies coming to other under-developed station locations. Other municipalities have had to make similar changes to their plans, where necessary. (Not all of them were happy to have to do that, but so far the province has said 'no exceptions'.)

[GenWhy?]

Originally Posted by YOWetal

WTF? Is this a joke? I thought that curved part was a window at first and was thinking they just reveresed the living room and bedroom. Except of course there is only one window and put the bedroom where it needs to be and there is no natural light in the rest of the apartment. Just wow!

It's a studio / bachelor apartment. New units typically have one window depending on the width of the unit, orientation of the building. Older ones were typically wider, rather than deeper and most ones I've seen from the 60s and 70s had 2 windows on the same wall.