Femtosecond posted:

You can buy a dump in East Van for under $1 million again!

https://twitter.com/fivre604/status/801972089179648000

cowofwar posted:

1800 sq ft, 7 bed, 2 bath? Wtf?

Is this a human trafficking house or something? Or are they now listing every room without plumbing as a bedroom to somehow justify the prices?

That's nine 10x20' rooms assuming no kitchen or hallways or any other common space. So maybe 150 sq ft per room?

Throatwarbler posted:

Basements are not typically included in the sq ft quote so it's probably got three or four rooms below grade.

cowofwar posted:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/city-of-vancouver-property-taxes-1.3865023

A bloo hoo, property taxes rising in Vancouver. Just like Toronto, its property taxes are stupid low.

Lobok posted:

Property taxes pretty much have to rise so that's not a big deal. And 3.4%? Haha, big whoop.

cowofwar posted:

The councillors from suburban shitholes in Hamilton are making progress on knee-capping the LRT project.

It seems Vancouver is the only municipality that is actually able to periodically build new infrastructure in step with growth and demand.

Expo line
Millennium line
Canada Line
Evergreen line

And now they're planning the broadway line out towards UBC.

Can't wait to bail on Ontario's dysfunctional municipal governments. They can't even build infrastructure when the province and country give them money on a silver platter to do it.

cowofwar posted:

The councillors from suburban shitholes in Hamilton are making progress on knee-capping the LRT project.

It seems Vancouver is the only municipality that is actually able to periodically build new infrastructure in step with growth and demand.

Expo line
Millennium line
Canada Line
Evergreen line

And now they're planning the broadway line out towards UBC.

Can't wait to bail on Ontario's dysfunctional municipal governments. They can't even build infrastructure when the province and country give them money on a silver platter to do it.

The vast majority of the TTC was built by 1965 and from what I can tell it's just been tiny changes since then. 60 years and they haven't built poo poo all! A concise summary of Ontario.

leftist heap posted:

building poo poo is not the canadian way.

leftist heap posted:

building poo poo is not the canadian way.

JawKnee posted:

what about building poo poo condos

JawKnee posted:

what about building poo poo condos

cowofwar posted:

The councillors from suburban shitholes in Hamilton are making progress on knee-capping the LRT project.

It seems Vancouver is the only municipality that is actually able to periodically build new infrastructure in step with growth and demand.

Expo line
Millennium line
Canada Line
Evergreen line

And now they're planning the broadway line out towards UBC.

Can't wait to bail on Ontario's dysfunctional municipal governments. They can't even build infrastructure when the province and country give them money on a silver platter to do it.

The vast majority of the TTC was built by 1965 and from what I can tell it's just been tiny changes since then. 60 years and they haven't built poo poo all! A concise summary of Ontario.

EvilJoven posted:

They don't even vibrate the concrete

quote:

25 November 2016
The Sentinel-1 satellites have shown that the Millennium Tower skyscraper in the centre of San Francisco is sinking by a few centimetres a year. Studying the city is helping scientists to improve the monitoring of urban ground movements, particularly for subsidence hotspots in Europe.

Completed in 2009, the 58-storey Millennium Tower has recently been showing signs of sinking and tilting. Although the cause has not been pinpointed, it is believed that the movements are connected to the supporting piles not firmly resting on bedrock.

To probe these subtle shifts, scientists combined multiple radar scans from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 twin satellites of the same area to detect subtle surface changes – down to millimetres. The technique works well with buildings because they better reflect the radar beam.

EvilJoven posted:

Even the summer pours are loving crap. They don't even vibrate the concrete, that's the bulk of the problem.

You can pour concrete in the dead of winter, you just need a different concrete mix. It's more expensive though so it wouldn't surprise me if the companies stamping out the houses in these lovely subdivisions don't even use winter mix.

JawKnee posted:

what about building poo poo condos

EvilJoven posted:

Even the summer pours are loving crap. They don't even vibrate the concrete, that's the bulk of the problem.

You can pour concrete in the dead of winter, you just need a different concrete mix. It's more expensive though so it wouldn't surprise me if the companies stamping out the houses in these lovely subdivisions don't even use winter mix.

EvilJoven posted:

My wife built a 17 storey ICF tower in Waterloo. Her crew meshed really well and took pride in their work. Their building was finished on time on budget and top notch quality.

The crew building the sister site had high churn and lovely management. That site at one point was shut down by the engineers because if work had been allowed to continue it would have been structurally unsound. Core samples from what had already been poured were apparently terrifying to look at. They were going to have to do some crazy after the fact injection repair bullshit to get it up to code.

I don't know what became of that building but it didn't make the papers so it's at least still standing, for now.

quote:

Vancouver’s mayor never dreamed foreign-funded housing crisis would get so bad. If only he’d been warned…


Vancouver’s Mayor Gregor Robertson never thought the city’s housing affordability crisis, driven by foreign money, would get so bad.
If only someone had warned him. It’s downright tragic.
Robertson is right that things have got very, very ugly since he moved in to City Hall in 2008, though it’s not all (or even mostly), his fault. Prices have exploded. More than 90 per cent of Vancouver’s detached homes cost beyond C$1 million, even though the city’s household incomes are among the lowest in Canada. The benchmark price for all housing kinds across the wider Metro Vancouver region is C$919,300, by far the highest in the country. The average detached price in the City of Vancouver itself? An astonishing C$2.6 million.
In an interview with the Guardian published this week, Robertson says he “wouldn’t have dreamed the crisis would get this intense” over the past six years, blaming “global capital”, as well as the federal and provincial governments not doing enough. He almost comes off as an heroic figure in the battle for housing affordability, joining a “global cadre of mayors squaring off against superheated housing markets to ensure that middle- and low-income earners have a place to call home”.

Robertson describes city-level governments “dealing with chaos on our streets and people struggling to find a place to live”.
Housing superfriends unite! Call in the Mayorvengers!

The inconvenient truth, of course, is that alarm bells have been ringing about foreign money and Vancouver’s housing crisis for ages. And it was a lot more recently than six years ago that Robertson had been ignoring the claxon.

Not just ignoring it, but throwing a blanket over it, trying to kick out the plug and calling it a racist.
It was only one year ago that the mayor tried to swat away housing researcher Andy Yan - who highlighted the massive role of foreign and recent immigrant buyers from China in some segments of the market - for his work’s supposed “racist tones”. In an environment like Vancouver - which deservedly prides itself on diversity and inclusivity and has a major ethnic Chinese population - such an assertion was like Kryptonite. Yan, himself an ethnic Chinese Vancouverite whose grandfather paid the racist anti-Chinese head tax, was infuriated by the slander.
But nowadays, the mayor is all about the pernicious impact of foreign money, or “global capital” as he prefers to call it. How times have changed.

Robertson started talking about how “unregulated, speculative global capital” had detached housing prices from local Vancouver incomes only as recently as June this year, or thereabouts. He has since used the “global capital” line in a series of op-eds and interviews.
If only someone had warned him sooner.
But what you hear depends which way you turn your head.

I wonder where Vancouver would be if Robertson had swivelled his ears not towards the real estate development industry that helped fund his political ambitions, but instead towards the likes of Professor David Ley. Perhaps the most renowned geographer in Canada, Ley has been cranking the foreign-money siren for years, most notably with his 2010 book “Millionaire Migrants”, in which he described a 94 per cent correlation between immigration and home prices in Vancouver over a 30-year period.
Robertson blames “global capital” now, but what if he had been so inclined six years ago, back when detached prices were a bit more than half what they are today? What if Robertson had caught wind of the peer-reviewed work of Markus Moos and Andrejs Skaburskis, who in 2010 described how wealthy and foreign-earning immigrants were de-coupling Vancouver’s housing market from the local economy?

It’s not as if the real estate industry itself, in its more candid moments, was ignorant of the forces at play either. In its Q1 2011 sales summary, the Landcor Data Corporation, the most respected private number-cruncher in the industry, concluded that 74 per cent of luxury sales in Westside Vancouver and Richmond likely went to buyers hailing from mainland China.

In 2014, MacDonald Realty concluded that 33.5 per cent of all houses it sold in the City of Vancouver the previous year went to buyers with “mainland Chinese names”.

Because they were such big spenders, they represented almost half the dollar value of the detached market. MacDonald would later report that 70 per cent of all C$3million-plus sales in 2014 went to such buyers, mirroring Landcor’s data.
Dan Scarrow, vice-president of Macdonald Realty, found that buyers with non-anglicised mainland Chinese names made up about 50 per cent of the company’s sales of detached homes by value in 2013.

Maybe Robertson would have been quicker to note data like this, had it not been for the pro-development Iagos dripping poison in his ears about the supposed racist intent and lack of evidence behind assertions about foreign money.
But if only someone had warned him sooner, right?
None of this lets provincial and federal authorities off the hook. But as the mayor of a city at the epicentre of a globally remarkable phenomenon, Robertson was uniquely placed to raise the alarm himself. Instead, a development lobby desperate to downplay the role of foreign money had the run of the city, peddling the insidious case that it was all in Vancouverites’ bigoted imagination.
The great, sad, irony is that the housing crisis has gotten so bad that the risk of a genuine racist backlash is very real.
I take no great satisfaction from the fact that the very first Hongcouver blog, published almost exactly three years ago, took Robertson to task for branding concerns about mainland Chinese money “ridiculous”.
Robertson did not have to dream about Vancouver’s housing crisis, nor the catastrophic role of foreign money. The crisis and its causes were unfolding in plain sight for years, even as he and others squeezed their eyes wide shut.
If only someone had warned him.

EvilJoven posted:

They don't even vibrate the concrete, that's the bulk of the problem.

Pop-o-Matic Trouble posted:

ICBC, BC's auto insurance corporation, announced it will no longer insure vehicles worth over 150,000$. Expect the Chinese exodus to Toronto to continue.

Poldarn posted:

Hey, do you mind elaborating on this? I don't know poo poo about construction.

ductonius posted:

Concrete is a mix of cement, sand, aggregate, water and admixtures. It doesn't flow very well, and despite being very dense, can trap air in/underneath it when you pour it. To get around this, the concrete is vibrated* which causes it to temporarily liquefy and flow. Vibrate too much and your aggregate settles out, don't vibrate at all and you trap air bubbles (called "bugholes") and your concrete will not flow into corners or other tight spaces.

quote:

*Concrete vibrators are 1.5" wide steel dildos attached to a six foot steel braided rubber hose with the motor at the other end.

ductonius posted:

Snuffman posted:

The mental gymnastics people are doing over this blows my mind.

Somehow, this is not a GOOD thing because it's favouring the wealthy by allowing them to pick their insurance provider, unlike "the poor".



Wait until you see what kind of insurance premiums people with luxury cars will pay, I guarantee it'll make ICBC look like a good deal.