Canada Housing/Debt: Trust me, I'm a landlord.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Canada Housing/Debt: Trust me, I'm a landlord.

HookShot: Dec 26, 2005

Lexicon posted:

Is Whistler still in bad shape, valuations wise?

I was a bit disappointed that the fairly serious price reductions across the board there did not remotely enter the narrative. I suppose the paymasters of the Vancouver Sun et al would want it that way.

The upper end of the market (3 million plus) still seems to be doing ok, as do the lower end (studios in what are definitely 'second home winter property' buldings) but honestly I think everything in between that isn't doing so hot. I have a sneaking suspicion the USD has something to do with that.

Of course you also have to factor in that there was already a major price correction here after the Olympics.

Honestly, if I had the money and didn't want to spend the down payment money elsewhere right now, I would probably buy up here. I figure I'll stay in Whistler long term, and renting here sucks loving balls way more than anywhere else I've ever lived. But, whatever, I'm still going to wait it out a few years and see what the market does.

# ? Jul 14, 2014 20:16

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# ? Jun 4, 2024 10:48

Precambrian Video Games: Aug 19, 2002

Kafka Esq. posted:

Cities encourage capitalist expansion, as shown by this very thread. Rural towns tend to limit it. Devising a sustainable future involves a lot of changes, but that's a good start.

Do you mean that small town living would inhibit industrialization and/or population growth, even if it's less efficient per capita than big cities? Because even that is pretty questionable, especially since higher standards of living generally lead to lower population growth (though also longer lifetimes and lower mortality, I guess).

# ? Jul 14, 2014 20:38

Baronjutter: Dec 31, 2007; "Tiny Trains"

Yeah, as someone with a keen interest and study into, marxism, urban planning, and environmental issues, this is one of the strangest things I've heard for a while.

# ? Jul 14, 2014 20:44

Kafka Esq.: Jan 1, 2005; "If you ever even think about calling me anything but 'The Crab' I will go so fucking crab on your ass you won't even see what crab'd your crab" -The Crab(TM)

Franks Happy Place posted:

When I was studying for my masters in Urban Studies (before I dropped out!), I read a shitload of papers that all point to increasing urbanization as a big driver of efficiencies and reduced environmental/carbon footprints. For instance, all of Krugman's important work, including stuff related to what got him a Nobel Prize, deals with interlinking externalities associated with urbanization and their massive economic advantages. Obviously you should build your cities like London and not like Dallas to get the most of those benefits, but I don't think a book about 19th century Europe really counters the massive overhanging glacier of evidence that bigger cities = a healthier planet.

Well, I can understand that putting people into a small space could be considered better than a low density area that operates in the same economic system, I was talking about a future where we actively try to reduce dependence on big power plants, continuous development of the periphery of the city, and endless growth to keep the system functioning. A smaller distributed system with a reliance on sustainability won't work like that.

It's very pie in the sky, of course.

# ? Jul 14, 2014 20:49

Rime: Nov 2, 2011; by Games Forum

Urban growth is completely reliant on cheap fuel to support the food supply. Maybe fifty years ago Vancouver could have fed itself when that supply chain breaks down, but we've spent a long time turning the most fertile delta on the continent into strip malls and condo towers.

I should really make that thread about this topic.

# ? Jul 14, 2014 21:41

Baronjutter: Dec 31, 2007; "Tiny Trains"

We've got a pretty ok energy thread (what's wrong with big efficient power plants vs a ton of expensive distributed stuff?) and every urban planning thread turns into two ridiculous suburban vs urban straw man fight without any actual data or urban planning being discussed. For instance did you know the only two forms of human land use patterns are Dallas/Calgary style sprawl or Yaletown?

Kafka I think you're associating a lot of the really lovely land use policies and problems with capitalism with cities them selves. Cities don't have to sprawl, cities don't have to be car-centric, cities absolutely don't have to be capitalism, and if anything has a chance for greater self-sufficiency it's cities. Smaller towns just don't have the talent or potential industrial base to create the diversity of goods or services needed. Cities absolutely depend on all sorts of stuff from around the world coming in to feed them, but so do small towns, if anything more so per-capita. That's not a city problem, that's a globalization and cheap-transport problem. When transport costs make globalism less and less economical we'll see more local manufacturing, and that will happen in cities and larger towns, not villages and small towns.

Of course not all cities are created equal. The less car-dependent cities will do better, and the cities with more adaptable planning will also do better. The real shame is that so much of our most fertile farmland has been basically destroyed by suburbia and it's extremely hard to turn it back. Even if say all of Delta was abandoned and food prices went up, we still wouldn't see the land return to farming because it's all cut up by roads and foundations and pipes and the soil has been stripped away or contaminated. People trying to reclaim abandoned suburbia in Detroit and turn it into farming are learning just how hard that process is. That's a real real shame.

Detroit and other cities like it are really chilling examples on how bad urban planning combined with race issues and economic changes can just throw what was once a great world city into absolute free-fall. How will Vancouver fair when the condo speculation factories shut down? REALTORS falling into gangs and violence, shooting each other over scraps of granite countertop salvaged from the ruins of half-finished decaying condo towers?

Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Jul 14, 2014

# ? Jul 14, 2014 21:59

Lexicon: Jul 29, 2003; I had a beer with Stephen Harper once and now I like him.

Kafka Esq. posted:

the concentration of rent-seekers in cities

Isn't this basically saying "people with money like nice places"?

# ? Jul 14, 2014 22:10

cowofwar: Jul 30, 2002; by Athanatos

Rural towns are more sustainable I guess if everyone goes back to living off the land with low intensity farming and we get rid of a couple billion people.

However, in the real world, densely populated cities are much more efficient. Especially those on the coast between the tropical latitudes where rivers and oceans can be used for transport and solar can be used for power.

The future will bring increased efficiency to cities such as these. The future will bring death to small rural towns.

I bet a lot of the smaller BC towns are dying due to issues with marijuana production. Rural BC is supported almost entirely on the proceeds of pot and Canada is supplying less and less of it to the USA each year, never mind the effects of legalization.

cowofwar fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Jul 14, 2014

# ? Jul 14, 2014 22:22

Rime: Nov 2, 2011; by Games Forum

cowofwar posted:

I bet a lot of the smaller BC towns are dying due to issues with marijuana production. Rural BC is supported almost entirely on the proceeds of pot and Canada is supplying less and less of it to the USA each year, never mind the effects of legalization.

It's quite a bit more complicated than that, I don't have time to troll back sixty pages to find the last time I posted my thesis on the economic decline of BC.

# ? Jul 14, 2014 22:56

Lexicon: Jul 29, 2003; I had a beer with Stephen Harper once and now I like him.

Rime posted:

It's quite a bit more complicated than that, I don't have time to troll back sixty pages to find the last time I posted my thesis on the economic decline of BC.

Got a brief summary for us at least?

# ? Jul 14, 2014 23:01

Rime: Nov 2, 2011; by Games Forum

Lexicon posted:

Got a brief summary for us at least?

Ah screw it.

Rime posted:

I'm not in a place where I can do a blog sized post about it right now, unfortunately. BJ hit most of the nail on the head quite succinctly with his second post up there, to be honest, but it misses the element which this entire thread is about : Real Estate Values.

There's a ton of small towns in BC which were "obsolete" well over fifty years ago, such as the former Granby Consolidated company towns down around Grand Forks. Basically anywhere which was built to extract a specific resource which no longer exists, or the even smaller settlements which sprung up around rest houses on a wagon road and just sort of clung on through the automobile era somehow.

All of these places should, in our economic reality, just have gone poof. There's no reason for them to exist, once the primary industry vanished. They clung on because rural BC has historically always been a remote and dirt loving cheap place to live where you could buy a house for a pittance and manage to scrape by. Towns were resilient, they found new revenue streams. By proxy, because so much of the province was viewed as a barely tamed backwater for much of the 20th century, big-box franchises were rare compared to locally owned businesses. It was a tenuous economy, but one which managed to perpetuate a lot of these towns well paste the date where they should have become history.

Come the end of the 1990's, when the Vancouver Real Estate Malaise started spreading further afield, and this is no longer even true for the most remote of communities. Property values exploded virtually overnight, to the extent that places which have literally been labelled "Abandoned Locality" on maps for decades (Bralorne, Gold Bridge, etc) are now selling for well over $100,000. Localized faux-booms like Revelstoke Mountain or the Alcan de-expansion saw house prices increase over 10x in under a year. Rents went through the roof everywhere as property traded hands feverishly, and multinational franchises such as wal-mart spread through the mid-sized towns of the interior at a stunning pace, putting local stores out of business and jacking unemployment as they hired TFW's en-masse during the labor shortage of '06-'08.

The end result of all this was the complete shredding of the economic and social fabric of most of these small towns. The middle class either cashed out massively or went bankrupt, and moved to the cities. The poor moved to the cities, because there is employment here. The young, having it drilled into their heads to go to university, left either to go to university in a city or to overdose on cocaine in the oil patch. The only ones left are those too elderly to leave, and those too utterly destitute to move elsewhere. Centralization of services in larger population centers has seen ICBC, MCF, and even the RCMP pull out of many places in favor of remote dispatch. Nobody is ever going to move back to these small towns unless forced to due to a bizarre employment transfer: why would anyone pay the same amount for a house in 100 Mile House as a house in Vancouver, when the price is the same but the gap in amenities is so vast?

tl;dr: Real estate speculation destroyed BC by kneecapping a fragile economic balance.

Best I can do from my phone, probably reads like disjointed poo poo.

# ? Jul 14, 2014 23:05

Mrs. Wynand: Nov 23, 2002; DLT 4EVA

Hey yeah are you sure you're not conflating cities with like population growth? If we go back to 18th century global population levels we can probably go back to 18th century urbanization levels too, sure why not. Because yeah distributed systems generally just trade efficiency for robustness and certainly ultra-centralization is too precarious to be "sustainable" (though "survivable" might be a better term here), but unless you find some other way of force-lowering aggregate demand for more or less everything efficiency is going to be the top priority by a wide margin.

# ? Jul 14, 2014 23:07

Baronjutter: Dec 31, 2007; "Tiny Trains"

Killing off the billions of people needed to go back to this sort of lifestyle would absolutely gently caress the housing market.

# ? Jul 14, 2014 23:11

Rime: Nov 2, 2011; by Games Forum

It'd be great for pretty much everything else on the planet though. :v:

V: That's what I did, aye. Slightly faster, but I post in here and CanPol possibly too much.

Rime fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Jul 14, 2014

# ? Jul 14, 2014 23:13

Brannock: Feb 9, 2006; by exmarx; Fallen Rib

Rime posted:

It's quite a bit more complicated than that, I don't have time to troll back sixty pages to find the last time I posted my thesis on the economic decline of BC.

For future reference, you can check your own thread-specific post history by clicking the [?] button at bottom left of your post.

# ? Jul 14, 2014 23:15

Kafka Esq.: Jan 1, 2005; "If you ever even think about calling me anything but 'The Crab' I will go so fucking crab on your ass you won't even see what crab'd your crab" -The Crab(TM)

Baronjutter posted:

Killing off the billions of people needed to go back to this sort of lifestyle would absolutely gently caress the housing market.

There's no "going back" involved, distributed, sustainable and technologically capable communities are a form of living the world hasn't seen before. However, I just floated it because it was obvious (to me, at least) that the current paradigm of cities supplied by 3,000 mile supply chains is going to be hosed if one of the cogs is jammed. Europe is basically swinging at every pitch right now in an attempt to stop the structural contradictions of its banking system from sinking most of the G8. On top of that we have uncertainties in climate change and energy production. There's also a lot to be said about the precariousness of American hegemony that makes all of this poo poo possible.

Anyway, it's a bit of a derail.

# ? Jul 14, 2014 23:18

namaste friends: Sep 18, 2004; by Smythe

loving renters

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/07/11/bad_tenant_bad_boyfriend_reveals_his_methods_says_i_should_have_a_big_red_flag.html

Also, no subprime in canada

# ? Jul 15, 2014 04:54

FrozenVent: May 1, 2009; The Boeing 737-200QC is the undisputed workhorse of the skies.

Mr. Wynand posted:

(though "survivable" might be a better term here)

"Resilient" is the buzzword you're looking for.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 05:15

Lexicon: Jul 29, 2003; I had a beer with Stephen Harper once and now I like him.

Cultural Imperial posted:

loving renters

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/07/11/bad_tenant_bad_boyfriend_reveals_his_methods_says_i_should_have_a_big_red_flag.html

Also, no subprime in canada

How is that 35 year possible? I thought CMHC won't insure it? So how can it be issued?

# ? Jul 15, 2014 13:40

Kalenn Istarion: Nov 2, 2012; Maybe Senpai will finally notice me now that I've dropped :fivebux: on this snazzy av

Lexicon posted:

How is that 35 year possible? I thought CMHC won't insure it? So how can it be issued?

I would guess that some of the offered terms are mutually exclusive and the broker is just being deceptive in his marketing. There is also a small market for non-standard mortgages financed by wealthy individuals but it's usually more geared towards less risky rather than more risky structures to account for risk in someone's income stream. For example, a small business owner with highly variable income might get an alternative mortgage but it would probably require a 30% downpayment among other things.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 16:44

computer parts: Nov 18, 2010; PLEASE CLAP

Rime posted:

Urban growth is completely reliant on cheap fuel to support the food supply. Maybe fifty years ago Vancouver could have fed itself when that supply chain breaks down, but we've spent a long time turning the most fertile delta on the continent into strip malls and condo towers.

I should really make that thread about this topic.

It's not cheap fuel though, shipping (especially by boat which is where most of international trade occurs) is just cheap, period. You can ship a lot of things for a comparatively small amount of fuel, such that a small town that's inland may use more fuel per capita than a large city by the ocean.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 16:53

Corrupt Cypher: Jul 20, 2006

Kalenn Istarion posted:

I would guess that some of the offered terms are mutually exclusive and the broker is just being deceptive in his marketing. There is also a small market for non-standard mortgages financed by wealthy individuals but it's usually more geared towards less risky rather than more risky structures to account for risk in someone's income stream. For example, a small business owner with highly variable income might get an alternative mortgage but it would probably require a 30% downpayment among other things.

I did some digging and it looks like they require 20% down with it.

https://www.facebook.com/naushy.saeed/posts/10201346775350778

Corrupt Cypher fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Jul 15, 2014

# ? Jul 15, 2014 17:05

Baronjutter: Dec 31, 2007; "Tiny Trains"

Rail (specially electric) and sea transport are orders of magnitude more efficient than trucking. There's been a lot of work lately into improving sea transport efficiency and environmental regulations for locomotives have gone wayyy up. Lots of crazy but totally practical ideas like putting sails back on cargo ships to save fuel are also being floated.

This is a big reason why europe has been getting really serious about cargo rail lately, both to get trucks off the clogged roads, and to save on fuel. They've got the passenger angle covered but most goods in europe are shipped by truck. Meanwhile in North America we're sort of making noises about maybe finally developing some better passenger rail but we have an amazing freight system.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 17:05

Mrs. Wynand: Nov 23, 2002; DLT 4EVA

Baronjutter posted:

Meanwhile in North America we're sort of making noises about maybe finally developing some better passenger rail but we have an amazing freight system.

We do? The vast majority of stuff is in the US (I'm less sure about Canada, but I bet it's not that much less) is shipped by truck. It comes down to the fact that you can't compete with a delivery method where you have to pay for your (extremely expensive) thing-you-drive-on by yourself (in the case of rail) or have the government do it for you (in the case of the highway system).

# ? Jul 15, 2014 19:33

computer parts: Nov 18, 2010; PLEASE CLAP

Mr. Wynand posted:

We do? The vast majority of stuff is in the US (I'm less sure about Canada, but I bet it's not that much less) is shipped by truck.

That's not what this seems to indicate-

https://www.fra.dot.gov/Page/P0362

e: it's ton-miles but basically that's saying that a large part of whatever goes long distance is shipped via freight.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 19:36

Mrs. Wynand: Nov 23, 2002; DLT 4EVA

Well colour me surprised! I wonder where I picked up that bit of misinformation from then - I've certainly held the belief for quite some time.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 19:44

computer parts: Nov 18, 2010; PLEASE CLAP

Mr. Wynand posted:

Well colour me surprised! I wonder where I picked up that bit of misinformation from then - I've certainly held the belief for quite some time.

It's fairly true for short term stuff but a lot of tonnage is done at long distances (which makes sense because the US is really big):

from https://www.fra.dot.gov/eLib/Details/L02696

# ? Jul 15, 2014 19:47

Lexicon: Jul 29, 2003; I had a beer with Stephen Harper once and now I like him.

Jesus, these chartmakers need to read some Tufte. I didn't know Excel was even capable of making charts that bad, and that's a strong statement.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 19:51

Baronjutter: Dec 31, 2007; "Tiny Trains"

Mr. Wynand posted:

Well colour me surprised! I wonder where I picked up that bit of misinformation from then - I've certainly held the belief for quite some time.

There's a general idea in north america that we do everything wrong and that the railways died post-war. Rail transport is absolutely booming, we're building new lines, we can't build locomotives or rolling stock fast enough to meet demand. Freight rail is so ridiculously efficient companies do everything they can to avoid trucking, trucking is what you do to get your cargo to a train or from a train, but there's almost always going to be a train involved if its possible. Containers have played a huge role in this too. Everything is containers now. From cargo ship, to train, to truck, to delivery all in the same container. It's not just international either, in north america there is a huge volume of "domestic" containers, containers just used to ship poo poo around the continent. These containers are often over-sized, too long to fit on most container ships.

People in cities see abandoned warehouses, rail docks not used anymore, and think rail transport is dying. Small local deliveries are dying for sure. That factory that used to get a single boxcar of stuff every couple days is probably shipping via truck now. But what's happened is that the routes have just sort of consolidated. Trucks have replaced the small local feeder trains and routes due to their flexibility, but they still all feed into some huge train. At the same time though there's tons of short-lines and local railways that were assumed to be dead that are coming back to life. Fuel is expensive, labour is expensive (a single truck driver can move about 1 container worth of stuff while on the clock, a 2 man crew can move thousands via rail). Trucking keeps getting more expensive but at the same time diesel locomotives keep getting more efficient and more "green".

And, for some housing related content, this rebirth of a lot of smaller previously assumed abandoned rail lines have pissed off a lot of people. REALTORS sell people a house saying "Oh don't worry that rail line is abandoned" then 5 years later there's 4 trains a day, then 10. The home owners try to sue the railway for damaging their property values but lol at any mortal or worldly power trying to win any sort of fight with a railway.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 19:55

namaste friends: Sep 18, 2004; by Smythe

https://businessincanada.com/2014/07/15/canada-housing-market-labour-market-diverging-real-estate-values-bubble/

quote:

In spite of the weakness in Canada�s labour market, home values continue to fly high.

Annual home price appreciation hit the highest rate in more than two and a half years in June; a month in which the nation lost 9,400 jobs and the 12-month moving average for job growth slipped to its lowest level since the recession.

Wage growth, which is a rather volatile metric, has picked up recently, but a smoothed average for this indicator shows that employees haven�t seeing the kind of robust pay increases that would justify the extent of this run-up in real estate values.

So how is it that the labour and housing markets have diverged, with one deteriorating while the other picks up steam?

To a certain extent, these markets haven�t quite moved in opposite directions � the national statistics have been very much skewed by outliers. The housing market�s strength is quite localized; in many metropolitan areas, cooling real estate reflects softness in the labour market.

�Price gains are quite concentrated,� said Bank of Montreal senior economist Robert Kavcic. �Calgary is easy to explain � it�s in the one province that�s seeing strong job and wage growth. Toronto is a little more difficult to explain, as employment growth has slowed recently.�

�Outside of a few major markets, price growth has been slowing � and that�s in part because of modest employment and wage gains,� said TD economist Diana Petramala, pointing to the trends in markets east of Toronto.

In June, quality-adjusted prices in Calgary were up double-digits year-over-year; Toronto was a distant second, with home values up 7.8 percent.

RELATED: Alberta�s Economic Boom Has Room To Run

The combination of weak employment growth and surging home values might lead some to believe that speculation and foreign buying might account for a larger share of activity than currently thought. But according to Kavcic, it�s difficult to make such a diagnosis. �We don�t have a lot of data that allow us to quantify speculation,� he said.

The economists cited two major reasons why the housing market has fared far better than the labour market in 2014: the scarcity of single-family homes on the market in certain large metropolitan areas and the continuation of ultra-low mortgage rates.

On the first point, it�s worth noting how much tighter the detached market within the city of Toronto is compared to its pre-recession peak. In May 2008, detached sales were slightly lower than they were in June 2014; but active listings for this property type were significantly higher. So while there were 3 months of detached inventory available back in May 2008, there are just 1.6 as of June. Sellers have the upper hand more than they have ever had before � and this dynamic puts upward pressure on home values.

�Supply has not been increasing very much over the past few years, and there�s still a big preference for single-family units,� said Petramala.

And while low interest rates were expected to mitigate the chances of any imminent correction in the housing market, many � including yours truly � doubted that they would fuel the kind of price growth seen this year, particularly in light of the fact that demand had been �pulled forward� as part of the �rush to beat rates� in 2013.

But as CIBC�s Avery Shenfeld and Peter Buchanan wrote back in May, this trend shouldn�t have taken people by surprise. �[A]ll asset classes�houses, stocks, toll bridges, commercial real estate�should trade at higher multiples to cash ﬂows in an era of low interest rates,� they asserted.

�Affordability is still decent even in light of modest income gains, and this is really related to mortgage rates hitting record low levels,� said Petramala. �This has added a bit more fuel to the tank.�

�There�s not a lot of pent-up demand for housing at the moment, but there is still strong underlying demand from immigrants and millennials attracted to Canada�s biggest cities,� said Kavcic, who believes that low interest rates have provided ongoing support for real estate and played a key role in its surprising strength.

However, Petramala also notes that rising interest rates are not a prerequisite for a decline in price pressures. �There are currently a record number of new homes under construction in many markets and history shows that a significant share of these units will end up on the market,� she writes. �In fact, we are already starting to market pressures easing in Edmonton, Regina, Saskatoon, Montreal, Quebec City, Ottawa and the Toronto condo market � where overbuilding was most prominent.�

# ? Jul 15, 2014 20:17

Lexicon: Jul 29, 2003; I had a beer with Stephen Harper once and now I like him.

An awful lot of housing-bubble denial going around these days in a country which categorically has no housing bubble

# ? Jul 15, 2014 20:31

Saltin: Aug 20, 2003; Don't touch

Baronjutter posted:

There's a general idea in north america that we do everything wrong and that the railways died post-war. Rail transport is absolutely booming, we're building new lines, we can't build locomotives or rolling stock fast enough to meet demand. Freight rail is so ridiculously efficient companies do everything they can to avoid trucking, trucking is what you do to get your cargo to a train or from a train, but there's almost always going to be a train involved if its possible. Containers have played a huge role in this too. Everything is containers now. From cargo ship, to train, to truck, to delivery all in the same container. It's not just international either, in north america there is a huge volume of "domestic" containers, containers just used to ship poo poo around the continent. These containers are often over-sized, too long to fit on most container ships.

This is exactly why Warren Buffett put $5B into railways during the downturn .

http://www.investmentu.com/content/detail/warren-buffetts-railroad

# ? Jul 15, 2014 20:46

triplexpac: Mar 24, 2007; Suck it
Two tears in a bucket
And then another thing
I'm not the one they'll try their luck with
Hit hard like brass knuckles
See your face through the turnbuckle dude
I got no love for you

I don't think I'll ever not think of Jimmy Buffett first whenever I see the name Warren Buffett.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 21:00

Baronjutter: Dec 31, 2007; "Tiny Trains"

Forget housing and "building equity", invest in Cheeseburgers.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 22:33

Kafka Esq.: Jan 1, 2005; "If you ever even think about calling me anything but 'The Crab' I will go so fucking crab on your ass you won't even see what crab'd your crab" -The Crab(TM)

Saltin posted:

This is exactly why Warren Buffett put $5B into railways during the downturn .

http://www.investmentu.com/content/detail/warren-buffetts-railroad

drat, and I was hoping it was because he got a slick sales brief by a guy who read Atlas Shrugged.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 22:41

Guest2553: Aug 3, 2012

I visited Calgary at last week and found a massive Railway Depot had opened up near where my parents live. There is a constant line of trucks going to and coming from that facility at all hours . Rail is totes alive.

# ? Jul 16, 2014 01:00

JawKnee: Mar 24, 2007; You'll take the ride to leave this town along that yellow line

Baronjutter posted:

Forget housing and "building equity", invest in Cheeseburgers.

open liquor stores, society will never stop drinking

# ? Jul 16, 2014 01:02

on the left: Nov 2, 2013; I Am A Gigantic Piece Of Shit

Literally poo from a diseased human butt

Mr. Wynand posted:

We do? The vast majority of stuff is in the US (I'm less sure about Canada, but I bet it's not that much less) is shipped by truck. It comes down to the fact that you can't compete with a delivery method where you have to pay for your (extremely expensive) thing-you-drive-on by yourself (in the case of rail) or have the government do it for you (in the case of the highway system).

A large reason stuff is shipped by truck instead of trains is the large money and time costs of getting a shipping container on and off a train. It's speculated that when self-driving cars become a thing, this issue will become heavily mitigated, because you can ship the entire truck with not too much trouble, or other schemes where you don't have to pay hundreds of drivers to sit around doing nothing for a while.

# ? Jul 16, 2014 01:06

Baronjutter: Dec 31, 2007; "Tiny Trains"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnlRw7ytyIc
Did someone say driveless container trucks???

# ? Jul 16, 2014 02:16

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# ? Jun 4, 2024 10:48

namaste friends: Sep 18, 2004; by Smythe

I'm surprised none of you marxist sjws have said anything about the erosion of labour rights as supply chains move away from trucking to rail.

# ? Jul 16, 2014 02:19

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Canada Housing/Debt: Trust me, I'm a landlord.

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