Nemesis at VREAA 27 Feb 2011 6:16pm -
“Somewhere along the way our happy go lucky beer drinking, hewers of wood/drawers of water market economy transmogrified into the financialized market society of condohype and anomie… with all it’s attendant ills.
My childhood Burnaby home (similar to the over-ask Dunbar ‘tear down’ recently featured here @ VREAA) was razed to the ground and replaced with a wedding cake architecture/monster house… and then the brewery I worked at while attending college was demolished – the site is only now being redeveloped as a, “vibrant, walkable urban community destined to include almost 1.4 million square feet of retail, commercial, health and residential space.”…
Prior to that my Fraser Valley army base was sold and unsuccessfully marketed as a new housing development… and even my FantasyIsland (yes, that’s what we used to call Esquimalt/Victoria, “De plane, Boss! De Plane!”) based frigates were scuttled and turned into aquatic tourist attractions…
And subsequently (shortly after my 80′s tenure in the globalpixferbuxbiz) – even the Vancouver operations of my two largest domestic industrial clients – one a railway the other a manufacturer of heavy equipment/industrial plant for the forest industry) were razed to make way for… I think you can guess…
Which is probably why so many YVR indigenes have acquiesced… Opted out, packed up, moved on (especially those whose roots/origins afford them a longitudinal/historical perspective on the city’s evolution) …
Well, as strategies go – I can’t deny that it worked for me. But for Xiào necessitating my return in 2005 I would undoubtedly be somewhere else. Indeed, one day, when I am no longer needed here – somewhere else is where I’ll be. Caracas???”
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- LadyInWaiting on “My neighbours, in their late 60s, just put their house on the market. They had said they would die in that house, but now they are worried that with the housing market going south they may be losing a lot of equity and they better sell now before it gets worse.”
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Latest Anecdotes:
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- “I just visited Manhattan for a week, and happened to snap some real estate ads on both the Upper West and Upper East sides of the island. Compare to Vancouver. It simply doesn’t compute.”
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- ‘Vancouver City Hall: Housing Report Card 2012′; Plus Revised Version
- “My folks find themselves at 65 still owing half the value of their home and recreation property to the bank. After almost 30 years of ownership in the BPOE and a number of boom markets, they have very little to show for it.”
- “Rent for $2,200 a month or buy and have a mortgage of $4,310 per month. Why would anyone buy?”
- “They were talking about two couples they knew who had recently bought a lot and planned to each build a house on it and live as neighbours.”
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- “He’s sold all his properties except his current one, which is now for sale. He explained that the market’s currently in crash mode, worst that he’s ever seen.”
- “One of my old high school buddies finally got her mother to sell the family home in Kitsilano – sold for over $1M, monies realized after debt paid off $185K.”
- “I know someone who just declared bankruptcy because her condo was assessed at $150k and she bought it presale north of $250k in 2005 or 2006.”
- Sturdy, With Views – “Calling Froogle Scott!… Is Dr. Scott ‘In The House’?” [Not In This One, Certainly]
- “She said the market was dead in Victoria and that it would remain so for a very long time. I asked how she knew. Her answer was fascinating and should scare the pants off the real estate crowd.”
- Kits Notes – “I’m pretty sure that this is the first 3+ bedroom property of any type that I’ve seen in the 5 years I’ve lived here that is priced below $700K.”
- “A beautiful Belfast home, in the equivalent of 1st Shaughnessy, bought at their RE peak in 2007 for £3.5 million, has now sold for £800K, almost 80%-off. The market didn’t suffer any significant economic shocks. Rates & unemployment didn’t skyrocket. They didn’t build more land. Sentiment just changed and the prices fell and fell.”
- “Two family members of hers are trapped, underwater, in condos on the East Side.”
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- Vancouver RE: Not As Expensive Provided You Don’t Think – “It’s clear that our perception of affordability has been coloured by living on a continent where housing is unusually inexpensive.”
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- Rumor that some OV units will be reduced by 20%.
- Downside Weights On The Vancouver RE Market – “One of the older guys (over 60) mention to the guy beside him that he and his wife were thinking about selling their family home, and renting, in order to get some of the money that was locked up in the house.”
- “My buddy was looking to upgrade to a house in the Coquitlam area. With 200k extra for a home, that’s half of lifetime saving between him and his wife.”
- “I was walking in the Fraser neighborhood yesterday, I noticed that the population, on average, seem to be composed of workers. I belong to the top 5 percent in terms of income. Nevertheless, I cannot afford any of the houses for sale in that neighbourhood.”
- “Vancouver is an urban resort whose value mostly resides in its real estate and not much else.”
- “Rogers Communications is expanding into RE; aiming to relaunch website; providing critical data that can help potential buyers assess the value of a property from the comfort of their home computer.”
- I’m only 50 and I can just about retire if I want to, all because of a single simple decision – “When prices rebounded to their former highs, then rocketed another 30% higher to what I considered to be totally unsustainable levels, I decided that only a fool would pass up a second opportunity to harvest such a massive non-taxable capital gain, and in 2011 I sold my place.”
- The Vacant Lot of Versailles, Richmond.
- “I don’t think that most people think things are going to crash, just that there is going to be a slight correction, but it was amazing to me how sentiment has changed, and the fact Vancouver RE is too high was just understood.”
- “The ‘investor’ who purchased our house put it up for sale two months later, in January 1981, but the bubble had burst.”
- For A City To Have That Kind Of Vacancy, It’s Like Cancer – “Downtown, the vacant unit rate is so high that it’s as though there were 35 towers at 20 storeys apiece – all empty.”
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Actually, Vancouver itself was always about real-estate and land rights if you read though it.
It’s just that most people who invested heavily into real estate and land also had other businesses (e.g. CP).
The problem is that the idea that everybody has the right to own “land” has taken over and it will be BCs undoing, the destruction of most of the industries here in the last 10 or so years will have repercussions for the long term. Outside of the harbor and some basic support services what is left?
yIKEs! I’ve been headlined…
The only thing I would add to my remarks above, VREAA is that when I was slinging Luckys off the bottling line of Labatt’s in NewWest between semesters in 1976 – basically temporary, summer vacation-relief for the ‘lifers’ – I was in good company… The guy (sorry Girls, it was a decidedly ‘old school’ blue collar environment in those days) next to you on the line was as likely to be a post-Doc as a HarleyRidingHillBillyRedNeck. Regardless, RedNeck or aspirant member of the Academy we all earned the then princely sum of $8/Hr. Oh yeah, what’s today’s minimum wage in BC???
Strange Brew Indeed…
http://tinyurl.com/4koumyf
PS – if anyone’s curious about the etymology of “Hoser” (authentic brewery terminology/job descripton) I’ll repost with the answer…
Afterthought… for those interested in how/where/when things got so f**ked up, I highly recommend the following work of compelling socio-economic history [worth it alone for the deconstruction/analysis of 70's pop culture]…
Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class
by Prof. J. Cowie [Cornell/History]
http://tinyurl.com/4k38beo
links are broken.
[seem to be still working for us; try again. -ed]
The war on the working class is still on going though. Just look at the whole Wisconsin side of things.
We’re in the West are in a race to the bottom and in the end nobody will win (ignoring right now all the other challenges that lie ahead of us).
I may have to reconsider Caracas… ‘Nemesis’ prefers his breasts ‘free range’…
[NYT] – Chávez Tries to Rally Venezuela Against a New Enemy: Breast Implants
“I’ve never seen more silicone anywhere else,” Mireia Sallarès, a filmmaker from Spain who focuses on feminist issues and is working on a project about Venezuela…
http://tinyurl.com/5wdvl24