Quote:
Originally Posted by rofina
The answer to all your musings is balance.
Sure - were capitalist. But when a household making well into the 6 figures is forced into 500 sq/ft one bedrooms because of prices, it starts to damage the fabric of society and more importantly pushes people out of the region.
We do a great job attracting people and educating them. But a poor job retaining the talent.
The prices for houses and condos today are simply a net negative to the City and region.
- Business are having problems attracting and retaining talent.
- Commute times are going off the charts
- Commute directions are scattered as town centres sprout up across region
- First responders are forced to live away
- Even the construction industry is starving itself - we cant attract labour to build our fancy condos because they cant afford to live here.
This may have been a boon to the economy 10 years ago. Its a net negative now.
We have tourism, we have film, we have tech, we have resource, if there is a time to get off Real Estate its now.
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Last year I rented a place in South Van that was a 1 bedroom 800sqft for $1050. I was considering moving into a studio that was 550sqft downtown for $1100. I was making $50k gross that year so I think the 6 figures into 500sqft isn't happening unless they are bad with money. I know Yaletown gets up to $2000 a month for a 700sqft 1 bedroom place so if they are living there maybe? But Vancouver itself has quite a few 1 bedrooms for $1000-$1200 still.
We are having trouble with talent....but partially that's because we have strong anti-immigration policies. We need a lot of cheap immigrant labor to fill in the labor-intensive jobs to free up skilled labor. We also have focused on social housing which has killed commercial development.
Actually commute times are there to push people to not drive. The city council's plan is to increase commutes further to push people into not driving. We are currently decreasing road infrastructure in Vancouver to do this (bike lanes, closing roads, expanding sidewalks, etc. Rather than commutes being a symptom there actually a result. They keep it a bit hush hush but if you talk to a member of Council and ask them they'll explain that if they decreased commute times more people will drive, so they decided to increase it instead. It would be pretty easy for the city to decrease commute times if they wanted to such as encouraging more 2nd-3rd shift business (4pm-12am, 12am-8am), a unified traffic control system, conversion of side streets to major roads, increased lanes and eliminating street parking on major roads, conversion of bike lanes to lanes, etc. However, the city is very green so they want to discourage automobile use and push for people to take transit. They also feel that decreasing commutes is not a long term solution as they will just encourage more people to drive.
As for the construction industry...yeah we are building alot and the high cost of labor is because of that. You literally cannot hire a good contractor without connections now. This is another reason I push for a more open immigration and work permit policy. For some reason we couldn't take all the Syrian immigrants in the construction industry and instead got all the ones with non-transferable job skills
A large chunk of the increased build times and construction costs also comes from regulation and inefficient building codes. One example is we now have to build balcony's separate from buildings to maintain a fire barrier (much more expensive and painful to do). Not an expert regarding construction and I'm going by stories.
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