{"id":161,"date":"2016-09-30T17:00:20","date_gmt":"2016-09-30T21:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dinani.ca\/blog\/?p=161"},"modified":"2016-09-30T17:00:20","modified_gmt":"2016-09-30T21:00:20","slug":"vancouver-real-estate-has-always-been-expensive-and-we-have-proof","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.dinani.ca\/blog\/2016\/09\/30\/vancouver-real-estate-has-always-been-expensive-and-we-have-proof\/","title":{"rendered":"Vancouver real estate has always been expensive – and we have proof"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Image by:<\/span> Tourism Vancouver\/Albert Normandin<\/span><\/div>\n
Article by: Felicity Stone | Sep 27, 2016<\/p>\n
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Vancouver housing is expensive. What else is new?<\/h2>\n

Vancouver has a long history of pricey housing, especially since the Second World War, and an equally long history of speculation about causes and potential solutions. In 1949, the Vancouver Housing Association noted, \u201cThere is a widespread illusion that with the rise in incomes, home ownership is possible for almost everybody. The facts are that owing to a still greater rise in building costs, fewer people can afford to build now than before the war.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the 1960s, the chairman of the Vancouver housing committee was recommending smaller lots or row housing to address affordability, while the Greater Vancouver Real Estate Board touted infill housing in 1976 to ease the high cost of single family homes. Just a year earlier,\u00a0the United Way of Greater Vancouver was blaming municipal red tape for the skyrocketing cost of housing.<\/p>\n

The Canadian Real Estate\u00a0Association first started tracking\u00a0housing market statistics in 1980,\u00a0and since that time Vancouver real estate has been the priciest in the country\u2014apart from a period in the late \u201980s when Toronto briefly pulled ahead (see graph below). Ever since, however, Vancouver has been in a league of its own\u2014with prices spiralling upward to increasingly\u00a0dizzying heights. This year appeared\u00a0to follow that trend\u2014at least until the\u00a0province muddied the waters with a foreign buyer\u2019s tax in June 2016. Whatever that tax\u2019s impact, there\u2019s little doubt that talk about \u201cour crazy market\u201d\u00a0will continue for many years to come.<\/p>\n

What people have been saying throughout the decades…<\/h2>\n

THE ‘<\/strong>80s<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\u201cPeople should not think single family home ownership is a right and … a young couple should not expect their first home to be like the one their parents had.\u201d \u2013Vancouver Sun<\/em>,\u00a0April 2, 1981<\/p>\n

\u201cReal estate is expensive because land is scarce around the city and because \u2018Vancouver is the California of Canada,\u2019 says Carl Nielsen, president\u00a0of Block Brothers Realty Ltd.\u201d \u2013The Gazette<\/em>, June 12, 1985<\/p>\n

\u201cReal estate analysts attribute the current housing boom to B.C.\u2019s strong economy and to growing interest from offshore buyers.\u201d \u2013Vancouver Sun<\/em>, January 5, 1989<\/p>\n

THE ‘<\/strong>90s<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\u201cVancouver has the highest cost of housing in Canada, after three years of rapid increases that pushed the price in several working-class neighbourhoods beyond the reach of many new home buyers.\u201d \u2013Globe and Mail<\/em>, August 12, 1993<\/p>\n

\u201cColossal increases in the price of average-sized lots have made many new houses unaffordable for average homeowners.\u201d \u2013Vancouver Sun<\/em>, May 4, 1996<\/p>\n

\u201cVancouver continued to be the most expensive city in Canada for house buyers last year despite steep price declines.\u201d \u2013Globe and Mail<\/em>, January 5, 1999<\/p>\n

THE <\/strong>2000s<\/h3>\n

\u201cThe cost of housing in Vancouver, already the highest in Canada, is predicted to climb still higher, an RBC report says today…. Not only is the city\u2019s housing the least affordable of any major Canadian city, it\u2019s the least affordable it has been in more than five years.\u201d \u2013Vancouver Sun<\/em>, November 18, 2004<\/p>\n

\u201cThe buzz leading up to the 2010 Winter Olympics will continue to drive up housing prices in Vancouver next year, Royal LePage said yesterday in a new market survey.\u201d \u2013The Province<\/em>, December 18, 2007<\/p>\n

THE<\/strong> 2010s<\/h3>\n

\u201c[I]n Vancouver, the country\u2019s priciest market, as in other \u2018globalized\u2019 markets like Sydney and Hong Kong, Asian wealth is coming in as investors diversify and look for hard assets, fuelling valuations that in some cases are \u2018extreme.\u2019\u201d \u2013Globe and Mai<\/em>l, June 16, 2011<\/p>\n

\u201cSoaring housing prices have squeezed out a generation of young buyers from ever owning a place with a front lawn and backyard.\u201d \u2013Globe and Mail<\/em>, June 3, 2015<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Image by: Tourism Vancouver\/Albert Normandin Article by: Felicity Stone | Sep 27, 2016 Vancouver housing is expensive. What else is new? Vancouver has a long history of pricey housing, especially … [read more<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11,13],"tags":[20,24,4,25,19],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dinani.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dinani.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dinani.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dinani.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dinani.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.dinani.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":164,"href":"http:\/\/www.dinani.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions\/164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dinani.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dinani.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dinani.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}