Quote:
Originally Posted by Changing City
Those few examples really don't make anything clear. It's well known that San Francisco has had a restricted housing market, which is why their home prices make ours look cheap. The same is true for London.
It also depends on the year you look at - the 2016 numbers (source) show Dallas Fort Worth with 55,618 housing starts. Seattle, with a population of 3.7mil had 25,516. Austin, with a population of 2.0 mil had 22,242 starts - so more starts and a smaller population base than Vancouver.
Are some Vancouver units being bought as investments, either to hold and sell when (if) prices rise, or for Air B&B rental potential, or for flipping on completion? Yes, of course some are. But can that explain why prices have risen like they have? Not as the only explanation, no.
You also can't say if the construction we have seen has moderated prices in older stock, because there isn't a parallel universe to access to see what would have happened to house prices if the new stock hadn't been built. The evidence out of San Francisco, where they didn't build much new stock, suggests the prices could have risen even more. |
San Francisco actually has an economy that pays wages helping to explain the housing costs. While Vancouver's median household income is
$77,662 CAD, San Francsisco's median household income is $103,237 USD. This is why Vancouver always comes out as the most
unaffordable housing market in North America.
You quote Dallas, whose starts were driven by a
push in affordable home construction, that is under $300k! Good luck finding anything in Vancouver near that let alone newbuilds. And though Dallas does have lower median income of $61,644 USD, that converts to the almost equal CAD amount of Vancouver.
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