Quote:
Originally Posted by scryer
You are 5-10 years too early on this comparison and I'm going to tell you why: AB has a very different economy from BC. They hedged their bets in oil (and they weren't wrong for doing that at the time) and they are really suffering from not diversifying their economy way back when. They were hit hard before the pandemic, and they were hit worse than BC during the pandemic despite having a significantly smaller population. A depleted economy is going to be reflected in the real world in many ways. Calgary, alone, does not represent the office demand nationwide. Especially in the COV, where our vacancy rates are 4.6%.
And you know what Calgary, and AB, has that BC doesn't? Flat land to develop many Googleplexes on and no PST as of yet. Wait 5-10 years because AB is really pushing a start-up culture and they absolutely have the potential to catch up to Vancouver in 5-10 years from now.
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I wanted to comment on your AB / Calgary vs BC / Metro Van comparisons. I have a friend living in Calgary and she bemoans AB not diversifying their economy. What you wrote is the reality she's been living for years - their dependence on oil to the exclusion of pretty much everything else is biting them in the ass. There are so many small things AB could have done that would have made a big difference in the long run but instead they believed the gravy train of being an oil producer would last forever. It hasn't and now they're hoping that tech and hydrogen will magically save them.
The sprawl in Calgary is crazy and sadly I don't see it stopping anytime soon. Here in Metro Van we have a limited amount of land for building / sprawl. The only option we have is to build bigger - which areas outside of CoV seem to be much keener to do. Yes they tend to also be lower density areas, but CoV was at one time and honestly a lot of it still is outside of downtown. How we do it is open to interpretation but I think it's safe to say that we can't keep building SoF neighbourhoods.
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