‘UBC home seeker’ at vancouvercondo.ca November 2nd, 2010 at 8:24 pm – “I recently went to a few open houses on UBC campus. The dwellings were staged Asian style. The Realtor was also Asian style. It seemed clear that none of these dwellings were intended for faculty/staff/students who, by the way, do not make enough money to afford them.”
The University is developing a ‘city’ at the end of the Westside peninsula. The promotional material on their website, www.ubcproperties.com, is at odds with ‘UBC home seeker’s assessment of the affordability of properties there. -
“By establishing broad land use objectives, policies and other criteria, the Official Community Plan (OCP) provides a guide for approximately nine million square feet of non-institutional development.”
“Half of all households at UBC will be ‘work/study’ – meaning that at least one member of the household works or studies at UBC, thus reducing the number of vehicles coming to the campus.”
“The residential neighbourhoods emerging on campus will be a source of affordable housing for UBC’s faculty, staff and students.”
This is absolutely correct. I will be starting as a prof at UBC next fall. I cannot afford a condo on campus or a house anywhere near campus. (I have a family with kids, so a 1 bedroom won’t cut it.) UBC also has faculty housing for rent, but pets are not allowed and they are only intended as temporary accommodation anyways. So I will live >30 minutes drive away and commute by car.
Educators have become RE Developers.
Just one of many examples of misallocation of resources in the Vancouver RE Bubble.
They say half of all housing will be “affordable”, not all of it. When I was working on campus, they had a program in place where staff could buy certain units at about a 15% discount, but there were claw-back provisions in the contact if you wanted to sell within five years. The prices were still pretty high. Many townhouse units also have built-in basement suites for rental to students.
UBC was only allowed to develop these lands if they could assure there would be no increase in vehicle traffic, so they tried to sell some to staff and students. They also increased parking fees for everyone else to discourage car traffic. There will undoubtedly be conflicts between fun-loving students and wealthy residents, although, UBC has the lowest school spirit of any big university in Canada so maybe it won’t be a problem.
p.s. the discount I mentioned above was if you agreed to become a “co-developer” (basically a pre-build contract) and it’s an estimated discount, not guaranteed at all. As I recall, the first few ones were very popular, but then interest petered out as prices continued to rise.
http://www.co-development.ca
Don’t know if you noticed but UBC is also “Asian style”, and owning in that area has never been cheap. Not sure what the surprise is here. Many of the students and some staff will still be able to “afford” it.
As far as school spirit goes, I always thought SFU was the most suicidal. But apparently there are “definitely more suicides” in Ontario universities than at SFU. UBC at least has a larger arcade.
Universities continue to make their products and services irrelevant, the cost of university is getting so high and the potential reward so uncertain, that the level of risk on paying for a university eduction will justify not going to University and just using the money to launch a business.
UBC could have built business offices on those lands and given students cheap offices to rent at below market rates, to encourage spin offs from the University, that would have probably produced a better benefits for the area with a positive public benefits, and for an institution that is publicly funded public benefits should be a major goal.
BUNK. Total and utter bunk.
This is no longer Vancouver, folks. Wake up and smell the expresso, or bubble tea.
Totally pathetic optics, in my humble opinion.
“Oh honey, while you are getting your 15 grand a week allowance from “home” – and the new Mercedes is being painted Black, after the accident – we should get you a nice 500 grand shack, so you so you don’t have to live with those Canadian riff raff”.
Please.
. . . reducing the number of vehicles coming to the campus.”
What utter nonsense. I live near King Edward and Arbutus. Ever since UBC started building its residential complexes, the traffic on King Edward has increased ten fold and become a nightmare. People in our area now have difficulty turning right onto King Edward at any time during the morning and afternoon rush hours – often waiting up to 10 minutes for a large enough space in the traffic to make a right hand turn.
Well – the developments are lining pockets and coffers – housing for Faculty/Staff/Student is optics behind getting the planning permit (wag the dog)!!
There are condo developments on south campus that are 100% Asian – some of the kids may be UBC students.
Higher Ed has been in a bit of a bubble since 2003 – at UBC the Higher Ed bubble is frothing with the real estate bubble.
You would not believe how many Professors would not survive working in their professional field outside of higher ed – the politics that goes on can make kindergarten seem like child’s play (pun intended). At the end of the day, may kids are getting short-changed – the winners are the prior generation who were like purely due to time.