Quote:
Originally Posted by MountainSkyline
Canadian cities are on steroids. Vancouver CSA is almost identical in size to SLC and its out building all us cities except NYC!
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Vancouver and Canada, in general, are in a different category because of 4 reasons:
1) Wealthy Chinese nationalists park their money into empty condo towers, to avoid taxation from the Chinese government. It's been called "whitewashing". I've heard that Vancouver is trying to put controls on it, but it's made Vancouver to be the most expensive and the most unaffordable city to live in in North America.
2) Condos, condos, condos...because of their socialist/strong government controls, there is less litigation from sue happy lawyers and nimbyists. Therefore, Canada builds tons of condo towers.
3) Similar to point #2 above, because their socialist/strong government, they have much more control on development. In other words, they have much more ability to control sprawl, and to allow massive densification next to mass-transit, despite that some of it might be directly adjacent to single family homes.
4) There are way less big cities in Canada than the U.S. So, population happens to concentrate into the 5 or 6 big cities: Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Winnipeg, & Edmonton. Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, & Winnipeg don't have large CSA/Metro populations compared to US Cities, and Toronto's CSA population is under 6 million, despite it's skyline looking bigger than Chicago's.