Why Isn't Vancouver (CN) a Megacity?

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Wigs

You have this weird fantasy of USA invading Canada. We've been friends for 208 years since the War of 1812 ended

I don't think US and Canada relations thawed out until after the US Civil War. Lansing was established as the capital of Michigan in the late 1830s because of the perceived risk of Canada invading Detroit.

[Nite]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

I don't think US and Canada relations thawed out until after the US Civil War. Lansing was established as the capital of Michigan in the late 1830s because of the perceived risk of Canada invading Detroit.

and Ottawa was chosen of the capital of the Province of Canada in 1841 because Kingston was to close to the US border

[Obadno]

Kind of a nonsencical question... cause it isnt?

Why isn't St. Luis the biggest city in the US? Crossroads of river, road and rail transportation networks for the entire USA and literally no geographic barriers to development.

There are a lot of reasons beyond mere physical conditions that go into why cites are the way they are.

[SnowFire]

Originally Posted by Obadno

Kind of a nonsencical question... cause it isnt?

Why isn't St. Luis the biggest city in the US? Crossroads of river, road and rail transportation networks for the entire USA and literally no geographic barriers to development.

There are a lot of reasons beyond mere physical conditions that go into why cites are the way they are.

because chicago won.

[Wigs]

Originally Posted by SnowFire

because chicago won.

Yeah St. Louis and Chicago were neck and neck until the forum historians can tell ya what happened and Chicagoland grew into the 3rd largest metropolis by far and St. Louis is now at number 21
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metr...20the%20region.

[Wigs]

Back to the thread topic, Vancouver will never be a megacity. Even Toronto is decades away from 10 million plus

Vancouver is
- prohibitively expensive with average rent now exceeding $3000 CAD/month for a 1 bedroom or median price of $2,800 CAD/month.
It costs roughly $5,000/yr more to rent an apartment in Vancouver than Toronto

- doesn't have a diverse enough economy. Wages/salaries are lower than the other largest Western Canadian city/Metro, Calgary

- is a place for foreign nationals to park money in real estate and buy their way into Canadian citizenship

- hemmed in geographically

[homebucket]

Originally Posted by Wigs

Back to the thread topic, Vancouver will never be a megacity. Even Toronto is decades away from 10 million plus

Vancouver is
- prohibitively expensive with average rent now exceeding $3000 CAD/month for a 1 bedroom or median price of $2,800 CAD/month.
It costs roughly $5,000/yr more to rent an apartment in Vancouver than Toronto

- doesn't have a diverse enough economy. Wages/salaries are lower than the other largest Western Canadian city/Metro, Calgary

- is a place for foreign nationals to park money in real estate and buy their wavy into Canadian citizenship

- hemmed in geographically

Are there any plans to eliminate or at least regulate/limit the amount of real estate foreigners can buy? Seems like it'd be an easy way to make housing more affordable for actual citizens, if there are less people that aren't even living there out-competing them with all cash offers.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Right. Vancouver's big global appeal is as a foreign investment/tax hedge. If it were in U.S., there would be no major advantage for Chinese nationals, so prices would likely drop. And the climate/location/scenery would no longer stand alone. I'd imagine it would be a smaller, less important city.

I think Vancouver's status as the primary Pacific port for Canada is bigger than the investment or tax hedge role. Another major factor is that it's the primate city for British Columbia and happens to be the largest city in Western Canada.

The weather aspect is kind of overrated even within Canada. If Vancouver didn't have an economic base it wouldn't be a large city regardless of the winters; Edmonton has very cold winters and is a large city. I think the advantage has gone down a bit in the era of remote work as well although Canadians don't have a lot of great legal remote work options in the winter.

[isaidso]

Originally Posted by someone123

I think Vancouver's status as the primary Pacific port for Canada is bigger than the investment or tax hedge role. Another major factor is that it's the primate city for British Columbia and happens to be the largest city in Western Canada.

The weather aspect is kind of overrated even within Canada. If Vancouver didn't have an economic base it wouldn't be a large city regardless of the winters; Edmonton has very cold winters and is a large city. I think the advantage has gone down a bit in the era of remote work as well although Canadians don't have a lot of great legal remote work options in the winter.

+1

People surmising that it's a tax haven for rich Chinese makes for a good headline but is absurdly simplistic and dismissive. It's a draw for Canadians and foreigners for its climate, topography, geography, life style, economy, etc. So bascially for the exact same laundry list of reasons why Americans flocked to California 1950-2000.

Housing affordability is the biggest brake on Vancouver population growth. If it were affordable, we'd see huge numbers of Canadians moving there each year. Most would have to live in a condo but a ton of people would go any way. So to answer the thread question, Vancouver isn't bigger than it is because of extremely expensive housing.

[Wigs]

From a 2019 NPR article

Over the past decade, money from mainland China has been flooding into Vancouver, says Andy Yan, an urban studies adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Wealthy people in mainland China are worried about the future, he says, and Vancouver is seen as a good place to park money, often anonymously.

Yan says for more than a decade, wealthy Chinese buyers have been on a spending spree, scooping up houses, condos and apartment blocks throughout the greater Vancouver area. This has driven up prices and added to a run on the city's housing stock.

Chinese buyers accounted for one-third of the CA$38 billion ($28.1 billion) of residential home sales in Vancouver in 2015, according to the National Bank of Canada.

https://www.npr.org/2019/06/05/72653...ese-immigrants

No one is doubting Chinese and Chinese Canadians don't contribute to the Canadian economy, but in Vancouver they also contribute to the city and Metro being prohibitively expensive and getting more expensive than ever. I don't blame Chinese nationals or Chinese Canadians from wanting to secure their investments, but that's no saving grace for the Canadian that would like to live in Vancouver. It's become a city and Metro for the wealthy, and those lucky souls fortunate enough to have purchased property decades ago.

[Wigs]

Originally Posted by homebucket

Are there any plans to eliminate or at least regulate/limit the amount of real estate foreigners can buy? Seems like it'd be an easy way to make housing more affordable for actual citizens, if there are less people that aren't even living there out-competing them with all cash offers.

British Columbia forumers would know the answer to that.

[someone123]

There have been a bunch of attempted policy interventions both at the provincial and federal level but I am not sure any government's heart has been in it as most of them and a lot of their constituents have done well from rising real estate prices and rents.

Another thing to note is that in recent years it's been unusually easy to get a work or study permit to stay in Canada or even get permanent residency and citizenship. It is not like the USA. Circa 2016 there were investor immigration "cash for passport" type schemes and today there are mass foreign student and worker programs. It's fairly easy not to count as a foreign buyer on paper if you're from another country or in some cases even if you were born in and live some other country. I'd guess there are nontrivial of people living in China who were born in China, never spent all that much time in Canada, and own multimillion dollar Vancouver real estate portfolios.

BTW Canada also pays out benefits to households that live in multimillion dollar properties and declare ~$0 income, they don't have to pay capital gains on their primary residence, they get free healthcare (such as it is) if they arrange things correctly, and they can defer their property taxes indefinitely with subsidized interest if they're 55 or over here in BC. Meanwhile if you work full time at the minimum wage here, $12 USD or so an hour, congrats, you're paying income taxes.

[SFBruin]

Originally Posted by Obadno

Why isn't St. Luis the biggest city in the US?

Took the next thread topic right from my brain.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by isaidso

+1

People surmising that it's a tax haven for rich Chinese makes for a good headline but is absurdly simplistic and dismissive. It's a draw for Canadians and foreigners for its climate, topography, geography, life style, economy, etc. So bascially for the exact same laundry list of reasons why Americans flocked to California 1950-2000.

I don't think they're particularly similar. CA boomed bc of massive federal postwar economic interventions. People weren't mass-moving from Nebraska or wherever bc they thought Big Sur was pretty. There were huge Cold War-related job opportunities, in aerospace, research, military, etc. This is what really fueled the CA boom. CA had some of the highest wages and greatest economic opportunities from the 1940's onward. Institutions like Stanford, Caltech, JPL, Scripps were gamechangers. In contrast BC has relatively low wages and doesn't really have anything like CA's gigantic postwar top-down military-industrial base.

And some of the least scenic parts of CA had some of the strongest booms. Meanwhile, gorgeous areas like the Lost Coast were basically unsettled.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Wigs

Yeah St. Louis and Chicago were neck and neck until the forum historians can tell ya what happened and Chicagoland grew into the 3rd largest metropolis by far and St. Louis is now at number 21
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metr...20the%20region.

Slight correction... Chicago was the second largest metropolis in the country for nearly a century until Los Angeles bumped it into third.

[Wigs]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Slight correction... Chicago was the second largest metropolis in the country for nearly a century until Los Angeles bumped it into third.

True, but that overtaking by LA happened like 40 years ago or almost my entire lifetime ago

[Fabricio JF]

Vancouver, in my view, is well established in the status of world city along with Montreal and Toronto-Mississauga, with population not being a constant in defining this current status.

The question is, would Calgary already be the 4th Canadian world city, or are there others with greater potential to occupy this position? Cities like Edmonton, Ottawa-Gatineau and Winnipeg come to mind.

Regarding population, I see a huge potential in Toronto to reach the level of 10 million inhabitants and become the first Canadian megacity, with Montreal with a 10% chance of coming first depending on factors such as preference for internal migration and external immigration. Fertility rates are stable and similar in the main cities and the exception seems to be Nunavut which has only very small cities but this seems to be the province where having more babies seems to be a population preference.

[bilbao58]

Deleted

[Wigs]

Fabricio, just call it Toronto. No one says Toronto-Mississauga.
Toronto is both the city and the name of the CMA -Census metropolitan area.

And Vancouver is not at the same status as Toronto and Montréal. Maybe in another 20-25 years.

[Fabricio JF]

Okay. But here it goes: Mississauga sounded something like Yokohama is to Tokyo.

It seems to have a soul of its own and it's great for Toronto to have a city like that dividing urban boundaries.

There are beautiful buildings there and an air of novelty, as if they were receiving more demographic and investment flow.

Hamilton is not far behind, but Mississauga benefits from being closer. Another factor that benefits all of them is being part of the Golden Horseshoe, which, if they were united, is already a megacity in today's terms.

It's really impressive that you can find things like this so close to Toronto where you would normally expect to find more suburban housing.