Vancouver

Anondson
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Vancouver

Postby Anondson » August 8th, 2014, 4:42 pm

Certainly could use its own thread. It is often referenced as urban awesome.

Anondson
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Re: Vancouver

Postby Anondson » August 8th, 2014, 4:43 pm

How did Vancouver become one of the most family friendly cities in North America?

http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2014/0 ... es/375617/

Local bonus: Minneapolis appears in the chart, and compares badly.

grant1simons2
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Re: Vancouver

Postby grant1simons2 » August 8th, 2014, 9:37 pm

I think there is a ton of family friendly stuff in the twin cities! Maybe not just in Minneapolis but as I kid I was always being brought to new places in St. Paul and such where I would never want to leave. And then there's that super cool senior living complex in Edina that kids could run around in and watch magic shows and it was an indoor forest. So the list goes on and on. Now that I've said that, that graph was population of <15 in each city. We dropped by 4.6% which I don't think is awful.

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Re: Vancouver

Postby John » August 13th, 2014, 6:49 am

I love Vancouver, but I question how "family friendly" that city would be if you included the cost of living and housing compared to the Twin Cities. Maybe I'm wrong, but I would think the cost of housing is very expensive there and difficult to afford for even the middle class.

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Re: Vancouver

Postby mattaudio » August 13th, 2014, 8:09 am

But when comparing housing affordability, it's not sufficient to compare the cost of housing alone. It's much better to compare cost of housing + transportation. When we do that, donuts invert and places like Vancouver likely become much more competitive.

Personal preference disclosure: Family friendly to me would mean a place where my wife and I can thrive with one car rather than two, and where our future kids wouldn't be eager to get their own car when they turn 16. I'd say many "transit-connected urban SFH neighborhoods" in Vancouver would be appealing.

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Re: Vancouver

Postby David Greene » August 13th, 2014, 8:28 am

We have some great family-friendly assets in Minneapolis. No other city in the country can compete with our parks availability. The downtown riverfront is developing some family-oriented amenities such as Izzy's. The bike paths are awesome for kids too young to drive (and those old enough too!). The Midtown Global Market has some nice family programming.

There are lots of places we can do better. Our libraries stink for family programming compared to, for example, the Rondo library in St. Paul. The housing amenities mentioned in the article are really important for families. Even something as seemingly simple as not requiring strollers to be folded on the bus is a huge deal.

It's great to see babies multiplying in the Wedge (mainly since 2012 so I wonder what the chart would look like now). But we can't rest on our laurels. We need to do much better by families if we're going to reach 500k.

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Re: Vancouver

Postby John » August 13th, 2014, 2:10 pm

But when comparing housing affordability, it's not sufficient to compare the cost of housing alone. It's much better to compare cost of housing + transportation. When we do that, donuts invert and places like Vancouver likely become much more competitive.

Personal preference disclosure: Family friendly to me would mean a place where my wife and I can thrive with one car rather than two, and where our future kids wouldn't be eager to get their own car when they turn 16. I'd say many "transit-connected urban SFH neighborhoods" in Vancouver would be appealing.
^^^ I recall reading the average price for a detached home is well over one million dollars in Vancouver. You will have a huge mortgage payment, not to mention property taxes. Rents are astronomical. It's a nice place to visit but...

LakeCharles
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Re: Vancouver

Postby LakeCharles » August 13th, 2014, 3:09 pm

According to The Economist, Vancouver has the highest cost of living of any city in North America. I'm not sure how heavily transportation costs are weighted in that calculation, but I can't imagine any scenario where Vancouver is cheaper than Minneapolis.

Anondson
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Re: Vancouver

Postby Anondson » July 9th, 2015, 9:53 pm

Suspicions against foreign speculators being the cause of the explosion in housing prices seems to be behind a fair bit of xenophobia in Vancouver.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/soaring-vanco ... ector.html

The thought is the Premier of China is cracking down on corruption, sending officials with ill gotten gains stashing their wealth in real estate overseas.

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Re: Vancouver

Postby mulad » September 15th, 2015, 2:05 pm

Vancouver is always pretending to be somewhere else (in the movies):


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jw138
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Re: Vancouver

Postby jw138 » December 2nd, 2015, 3:05 pm

Suspicions against foreign speculators being the cause of the explosion in housing prices seems to be behind a fair bit of xenophobia in Vancouver.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/soaring-vanco ... ector.html

The thought is the Premier of China is cracking down on corruption, sending officials with ill gotten gains stashing their wealth in real estate overseas.
Another interesting article:

http://www.thestranger.com/blogs/slog/2 ... al-capital

mplsjaromir
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Re: Vancouver

Postby mplsjaromir » December 2nd, 2015, 3:10 pm

Suspicions against foreign speculators being the cause of the explosion in housing prices seems to be behind a fair bit of xenophobia in Vancouver.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/soaring-vanco ... ector.html

The thought is the Premier of China is cracking down on corruption, sending officials with ill gotten gains stashing their wealth in real estate overseas.
Another interesting article:

http://www.thestranger.com/blogs/slog/2 ... al-capital
https://twitter.com/MarketUrbanism/stat ... 2683571200

Author fails to mention that condominium and apartment prices are relatively low in Vancouver. Single family homes are ridiculous.

Anondson
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Re: Vancouver

Postby Anondson » May 30th, 2016, 10:01 pm

Vancouver has a housing affordability problem like few other cities in the world, and single family zoning is coming under the glare of examination as truly playing a significant role in keeping housing out of the range of middle classes for familiar reasons, character.

Some are calling it snob zoning, and there is a proposal to counter it.
Davidoff proposed a further rule change that would automatically allow the rezoning of a lot when it became more expensive.
He said when a lot became worth $2 million, the owner would automatically be allowed to built a two to three-storey building of townhouses or apartments. He allowed for some exceptions, such as heritage value, but said the general rule should be to allow development, not restrict it.
http://bc.ctvnews.ca/snob-zoning-is-kee ... ign=buffer
Fascinating idea. I'd love to see something like this tailored to the Twin Cities.

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Re: Vancouver

Postby RailBaronYarr » May 31st, 2016, 8:10 am

I suggested something similar to this about a year ago https://twitter.com/alexcecchini/status ... 2424181760

I think you're waiting too long if the threshold is $2m (or something in that range) and doing too little for affordability (2-3 stories). The end result would obviously help in the long-run, and it's good to see single family zoning and the reasons for maintaining it start to come under criticism more publicly. I'm also not sure that leading with the language of Snob Zoning (following the book title) is necessarily the best idea.

Anondson
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Re: Vancouver

Postby Anondson » May 31st, 2016, 8:31 am

Right. 2mil is waiting too long. We shouldn't wait until we have a Van City level problem with affordability.

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Re: Vancouver

Postby mulad » May 31st, 2016, 9:35 am

Zoning that follows land value would be pretty interesting, and would probably encourage development along the lines of what occurred in denser areas back before zoning took hold and put arbitrary caps on everything.

I'm a bit surprised at Vancouver's population. The city itself was a bit over 600,000 in the 2011 census, and by the Canadian definition of metro area, they only get up to 2.3 million. Due to the arbitrary nature of city boundaries, it's hard to compare, but the population of Minneapolis plus Saint Paul was about 670,000 in 2010, and our metro area population is now 3 million by pretty much any measure. Of course, Vancouver is more than twice as dense as Minneapolis. They've had greater need to build densely since their developable area is hemmed in by the ocean and nearby mountains, and they have to conserve the limited amount of arable land that exists in British Columbia (since it's so mountainous, only around 5% of the province's land can be used for farming, compared to about 50% for Minnesota).

I haven't visited Vancouver yet, but it'll probably be one of my next targets for a trip, along with Seattle.

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Re: Vancouver

Postby EOst » August 3rd, 2016, 10:37 am

http://www.thestranger.com/features/201 ... ate-crisis

"A city of empty towers: What Seattle can learn from Vancouver's real estate crisis"
But how did the property market get so bad? Local market urbanists like Roger Valdez, the director of Smart Growth Seattle, and real-estate developers often place the blame on a lack of supply. Like San Francisco, the city is not building enough homes and apartments to meet demand. If the market becomes less restricted by rezoning certain sections of the city, it could meet this demand, prices would fall, and everyone (developers, the rich, the workers) would be happy.

The supply-and-demand model seems so reasonable, so logical, so rational. But the forces at work in Vancouver seem anything but that. Something totally insane and even monstrous is happening in this city.

In 2005, according to Yan's research, around the time Vancouver's housing market started heating up, just 19 percent of single-family homes were worth C$1 million or more in Greater Vancouver. Ten years later, 91 percent of single-family homes are worth more than that.

Yan's research shows Vancouver's real-estate market has growth rates far beyond what is normal.

"We can talk about supply and demand. Fine, but we need to also ask: What kind of demand is going on?" explains Yan. "Is it your regular kind of demand in Vancouver?" he says, meaning a low supply of houses and apartments in a city that has lots of potential buyers and renters. "I don't think it is. We are dealing with another kind of demand. A demand that's not making things clear but distorting the marketplace."

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Re: Vancouver

Postby amiller92 » August 3rd, 2016, 12:41 pm

It would be nice if that article was a bit more rigorous. We learn that one condo development was 50-60% empty, but not for how long or even whether it was a new development that hadn't been filled yet. We learn that one study found 11,000 unoccupied units, but again, nothing about how long they remained unoccupied or even what proportion of units that is.

Of course you're going to have unoccupied units among a construction boom. The hypothesis that it's all outside investors needs more support than that.

Then again, that piece contains this, so maybe we shouldn't spend too much time taking it seriously:
Eventually, forms of social housing were destroyed, and poor and working-class people were displaced, and the city became more and more dependent on the revenues generated by rising property values to fill budget gaps. Lastly, gentrification became big business and whole neighborhoods were transformed seemingly overnight.

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Re: Vancouver

Postby mplsjaromir » August 5th, 2016, 8:07 am

The irony is that among North American West Coast cities Vancouver it one the least expensive. The fact that single family detached homes, a commodity that will not increase in supply, have appreciated is to be expected. Rents in Vancouver are very reasonable, probably why the article omits any statistics regarding rents.

Even if the 11,000 unoccupied units are merely foreign money laundering schemes, they represent less than 3% of the city's housing stock. Hardly a 'City of Empty Towers'.

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Re: Vancouver

Postby RailBaronYarr » August 6th, 2016, 6:22 pm

I wonder how many bedrooms in Vancouver single family homes are unoccupied? What's the square footage per person in all SFHs vs these "empty towers"? (Alert! I live in a single family home!)


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