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Guess the year/country this article was written in:quote:Two years into the pandemic, Rundown bungalows command bidding wars, buyers keep snatching up places they’ve never seen, and homebuilders can’t find enough cabinet doors for everyone who wants a new home. The median price for an American home is up nearly 20 percent in a year. The for-sale inventory is at a new low. And the hopeful buyers left on the sidelines have helped drive up rents instead. So is the Canadian bubble going to burst first? I know, I know, why even bother asking when this thread is a decade old itself. I just don't know what to think anymore. If housing bubbles are reinflating around the world even without a resurgence in subprime mortgages or whatever you blame 2008 on, maybe Canada's just not that unique of a snowflake and this is just the new global normal. Meanwhile, Bloomberg asks if there was ever a housing bubble even in 2008.
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Jan 27, 2022 05:49
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sleep with the vicious posted:Housing prices in Canada can't drop without financially ruining the entire country. Housing prices can't stay nearly as high as they are without financially ruining the entire country, though. There's a giant chunk of GDP that could be used toward productive ends but gets shoveled into the void instead. Oakland Martini posted:Nothing much really happened to the Canadian housing market during the Great Recession, at least compared to what happened down south. Yes, because the government of the day brought in 40-year mortgages and did other dumb poo poo to stop number from going down. That led to a bunch of people believing that even the worst financial crisis in our lives to that point couldn't possibly make number go down. eXXon posted:maybe Canada's just not that unique of a snowflake and this is just the new global normal The difference between Canada and most of the other parts of the world that have experienced significant housing inflation since the start of the pandemic is that Canada was experiencing significant housing inflation for the 15 years prior as well. That's why U.S. real estate, which has seen price rises in the past two years that aren't backed by increases in wages, still looks fantastically cheap compared to Canadian real estate. And this isn't the new normal unless central banks are completely unwilling to tighten (and that's a bad bet for the ECB, since the Germans run the show in the eurozone and really don't like inflation). The long period of loose monetary policy we've seen over the past decade and a half is what's driving people to put money into utterly insane investments like crypto, NFTs, and memestonks. The ability to make overtly idiotic investment decisions and not lose your shirt goes away when there's not always more money to borrow where that came from.
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Jan 27, 2022 06:39
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SFH across the street was just listed. Single bath, 900 finished sqft, unfinished basement, and probably two decades of deferred maintenance. Assessed value July 2020: 560k Assessed value July 2021: 725k Asking price: 800k  eXXon posted:Meanwhile, Bloomberg asks if there was ever a housing bubble even in 2008. I am really surprised to see this argument, I thought there was a pretty clear consensus in the wake of 2008 that it was caused by the mortgage-backed bonds (subprime lending being a symptom of this). This article concludes: quote:But it is possible that insufficient supply was, and still is, a bigger problem than excessive demand.
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Jan 27, 2022 06:51
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Oakland Martini posted:I'm just saying that a price decline of that size wouldn't cause it all by itself. We're not talking about erasing 5-6 years of price growth (like the collapse in the US did), but just a single year's. That's far fewer people that could end up underwater on their mortgages. And remember, the Fed raises interest rates by 400 basis points between Q42004 and Q42006, so people with variable rate mortgages in the US had a massive increase in carrying costs. There's no way we're looking at any more than half that in the next few years here. I just don't see it. The past 5-6 years (you mean past 2 years) of growth has been caused by the lowering of interest rates. Plain and simple. If you lower the criteria for people to enter the market, you increase the risk of catastrophic numbers of defaults when rates rise again.
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Jan 27, 2022 09:15
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qhat posted:He's not talking about going back to last year's prices. He's talking about a crisis of confidence in the Canadian credit market. If the banks stop lending because too many people start defaulting, it would devastate not just the housing market, but pretty much every private industry that relies on being able to borrow cheaply and consumers having money to spend. Anyone who doesn’t already have a crisis of confidence in the Canadian economy is a delusional moron. This country is turbo-hosed.
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Jan 28, 2022 04:37
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Why start a business doing anything but buying and selling and sitting on real estate? There's no point in doing anything else.
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Jan 28, 2022 15:16
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Slotducks posted:Why start a business doing anything but buying and selling and sitting on real estate? There's no point in doing anything else. No kidding. We put in an offer on a place in Oak Bay. Three bids, we were outbid by $200K. We priced based on comparable and went over asking. And that’s not even saying anything about the place in Victoria that was listed 1.7 and sold for 2.3. If people like my wife and I who have great incomes are priced out, what is the endgame? I can’t get to see a doctor here because there aren’t any. I can’t get a competent dentist because they can’t recruit hygienists to work for them, and my haircut tomorrow got canceled because there aren’t enough barbers for the shop owner to justify opening the place. Childcare is a nightmare here. Try to get your kids into swimming lessons and that’s almost impossible because there are no instructors. It’s a good thing I was an instructor so I can teach them myself if it comes to that, but seriously? Victoria is hosed and despite having a good job, I don’t know why I should stay. This truly is the worst timeline.
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Jan 28, 2022 17:13
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Mandibular Fiasco posted:No kidding. Like 3 of the already impossible to get into walk in clinics in Victoria are shutting down too. We'll have only 5+ hour wait emergency room service soon.
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Jan 28, 2022 17:16
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Mandibular Fiasco posted:I can’t get to see a doctor here because there aren’t any. I wonder about this all the time. When I moved here I had to struggle to get a walk in appointment for a minor issue - when I asked the doctor if she knew anything about finding a new family doctor she got this horrified look on her face and almost laughed. But surely rich people who move can get family doctors? Like how does that work? They're clearly insulated from the issue because nothing is being done about it, but like - is there a secret black market for getting a family doctor? Are there "special" family doctors that aren't region-attached that you can only get referrals to from friends of friends in high places? I still have a family doctor on the mainland but that's not much use for anything that I need to get seen for and presumably if I try to fill a prescription or something over here they will turf me. I knew getting family doctors was hard across the country but I just heard that a bunch of the walk-ins here are just straight up closing (edit: beaten above!). I guess the moral of this story is expect zero and make sure you research every possible life event to death before moving. Jokes on me for trying to improve my career and learn something new, should've just stayed where I was and rotted. To return to the broader issue, it seems we've collectively decided that sitting dragon like atop your mountain of paper gains is more important than having a functional society.
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Jan 28, 2022 17:46
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Also as a further aside, no housing, no doctors, big time inflation etc is destroying my morale at work and my will to try at my job. If what I get paid is enough to tread water, then they are going to get treading water. Had I dumped every cent I had into real estate immediately out of high school I would be in an immeasurably better position now, ~15 years later, but like an idiot I thought that getting 2 degrees and trying to do something I was interested in was a good idea! I don't think the government understands how hugely corrosive all of this is to productivity for the people who need to be productive (ie those under 50). It promotes apathy and mediocrity in everything.
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Jan 28, 2022 17:57
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Autochrome posted:It promotes apathy and mediocrity in everything. It's the Canadian way! 
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Jan 28, 2022 18:43
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just pretend you're like most people and didn't possess real estate-buying money fresh out of high school
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Jan 28, 2022 18:57
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Autochrome posted:Also as a further aside, no housing, no doctors, big time inflation etc is destroying my morale at work and my will to try at my job. If what I get paid is enough to tread water, then they are going to get treading water. Oh, I'm totally with you there. I thought investing in myself, being able to create value, and bettering the lives of others would be a path to a decent quality of life commensurate with what I saw those who came before me earn. Turns out that was just bullshit. Invest everything in real estate and watch the profits go nuts. Meanwhile, our 'society' commits slow-motion seppuku, leaving behind the poor and the young. I also didn't have any money. No one gave me a nickel to get started. My first job was at 11 years old and I've never not had a job since then. This place is mediocre. All of BC is. There is nothing here that promotes innovation and ambition. We aren't even a branch plant anymore. When 1-800-GOT-JUNK is considered an innovative company and half the 'best 50 companies to work for' are in the public sector, you've got a serious loving problem. My biggest mistake was staying here in my 20s. Should have left, gone east, and then gone to the US. They might be insane there but at least hard work and success is rewarded proportionally (probably excessively in many cases but certainly better than here given cost of living).
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Jan 28, 2022 18:57
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Autochrome posted:I wonder about this all the time. When I moved here I had to struggle to get a walk in appointment for a minor issue - when I asked the doctor if she knew anything about finding a new family doctor she got this horrified look on her face and almost laughed. But surely rich people who move can get family doctors? Like how does that work? They're clearly insulated from the issue because nothing is being done about it, but like - is there a secret black market for getting a family doctor? Are there "special" family doctors that aren't region-attached that you can only get referrals to from friends of friends in high places? I still have a family doctor on the mainland but that's not much use for anything that I need to get seen for and presumably if I try to fill a prescription or something over here they will turf me. There is no 'secret black market' as you put it. There are the occasional private clinics (Copeman Healthcare was one in Vancouver) but these are few and far between. For the most part, the 'rich' get screwed too. They just don't have as many problems to deal with because they're old (no daycare worries, no school worries, etc.) and they have their pile of money, so their mountain is comparatively less. Getting family MDs in Victoria has always been a problem because the population is full of old people with tons of health problems, the cost of living is stupidly expensive, the cost of operating a business equally so, and remuneration is terrible for GPs given the intensity of the work. Shocking to see why GPs don't open family practices. It also doesn't help that our approach to physician training has been stupid for decades. We didn't train up NPs when we should have, we didn't open more medical schools because if you have a license, you can bill the province, and we ignored alternatives like capitation that are proven to improve outcomes. Instead, we're going to go poach people from other countries. What bullshit ethics we have...we'll steal South Africa's physicians and Filipino nurses instead of training any of the 90% of applicants who are TURNED DOWN FOR TRAINING EVERY YEAR THAT GREW UP HERE. Ultimately, the solution is that all physicians need to be salaried employees of the government, if you want a public system, and embed them in team-based settings. Otherwise, privatize everything - medical schools, nursing schools, pharmacy schools, and create unlimited seats so that the market is flooded (I'm aware of the issues in doing this practically, there's no need to point them out) and people can see for themselves. Of course, we'll do nothing and pretend things are going to get better 'somehow'. Health care works on people. People can't live here. Therefore, healthcare can't work here. A=C. The reality is that governments were told they needed to train way more people, and they kicked the can down the road. They were told that the way we did remuneration wouldn't work, and they ignored it. They were told CoL was too high and wages needed to go up, and they ignored that too. Now, that the structural advantages of the boomer generation have evaporated (they had cheap housing that inflated), we are super-colossally hosed. MDs won't come. Too expensive, pay not enough. We aren't training enough of them to even scratch the surface of the problem even if they did. Nurses won't come. The arms race is on and the morons in the BC government seem to think people will choose climate and scenery over an affordable home and competitive compensation. AB next door pays 25% more and still has housing a fraction of the cost here in BC. I am truly depressed for my kids...I'm fighting as hard as I can to try to create something good to leave them, but I feel that greed has taken over everything. loving greedy rear end boomers have wrecked it for everyone. How the "Greatest Generation" spawned the worst generation I'll never understand. Mandibular Fiasco fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Jan 28, 2022 |
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Jan 28, 2022 19:13
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Mandibular Fiasco posted:Getting family MDs in Victoria has always been a problem because the population is full of old people with tons of health problems, the cost of living is stupidly expensive, the cost of operating a business equally so, and remuneration is terrible for GPs given the intensity of the work. As someone born in the late 80s who lived in Victoria until the late 2000s, this only really became a major issue in the mid-late 90s, I think. My parents had no problem finding a family GP back then, nor did a lot of my childhood friends' families who moved to the city in the 90s.
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Jan 28, 2022 20:30
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MeinPanzer posted:As someone born in the late 80s who lived in Victoria until the late 2000s, this only really became a major issue in the mid-late 90s, I think. My parents had no problem finding a family GP back then, nor did a lot of my childhood friends' families who moved to the city in the 90s. That's fair. I lived here in the late 90s as a student and remember it being a big problem then. I got a GP through a connection, otherwise, I'd have been hooped. The narrative has ebbed and flowed, but the consistent message has been that Victoria is a desert when it comes to GP service. So let's revise from 'always' to 'more than 25 years'.
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Jan 28, 2022 20:34
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Mandibular Fiasco posted:That's fair. I lived here in the late 90s as a student and remember it being a big problem then. I got a GP through a connection, otherwise, I'd have been hooped. The narrative has ebbed and flowed, but the consistent message has been that Victoria is a desert when it comes to GP service. So let's revise from 'always' to 'more than 25 years'. Yeah, we moved here in November and are fully aware that finding a GP is so impossible we just aren't trying.
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Jan 28, 2022 21:59
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My wife works in urgent care here and when I ask about trying to get friends a primary care physician or NP she just sighs. The doctors are all getting the gently caress out of dodge and the one NP centered clinic that opened recently had it's waiting list full before it opened. We're lucky to have "inherited" our family doc from my childhood and once you have that entry point into the system I've had great access to tests/specialists etc for anything that comes up. I have friends that have been looking for ten years since they moved to Victoria and are still lining up at walk in clinics for prescription refills. Little 3 bedroom house down the road from our place in Fernwood just listed for 1.7 million. It seems excessive even for this market so I'm sure it'll sell over asking 
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Jan 28, 2022 22:12
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large hands posted:Little 3 bedroom house down the road from our place in Fernwood just listed for 1.7 million. It seems excessive even for this market so I'm sure it'll sell over asking I just saw that. Seems insane. Fernwood, the land of counterculture, but only if you have millions to buy a 100-year old house.
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Jan 28, 2022 22:45
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Mandibular Fiasco posted:I just saw that. Seems insane. Fernwood, the land of counterculture, but only if you have millions to buy a 100-year old house. A story as old as time. Same thing happened with Kits in Vancouver, or currently happening with the drive. Its cheap so artists/counterculture moves in, they make it cool, prices rise from people now actively moving there, then whammy, expensive place full of old artists.
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Jan 28, 2022 22:57
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Claes Oldenburger posted:A story as old as time. Same thing happened with Kits in Vancouver, or currently happening with the drive. Its cheap so artists/counterculture moves in, they make it cool, prices rise from people now actively moving there, then whammy, expensive place full of old artists. That's funny because the house I'm talking about has been having bands stay there and do small "house concerts" for the last twenty years.
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Jan 28, 2022 23:01
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The doctor situation here has gotten so much worse since I moved here in 2011, and it was bad then. I used to go to Cook St. Medical Clinic (a walk-in) when I first arrived. Back then you could walk-in most times of the day and expect to get in in an hour or so. This evolved into getting there early and being given a time to come back, usually in the afternoon. After a while if you didn't get there sometime in the morning, like before 10am or so, you couldn't get a slot at all. Finally before covid if you weren't lined up a good hour before it opened you probably weren't getting in that day at all. Recently I had to book like nearly a month in advance for a telephone appointment. Now clinics are closing all over the place. The UPCC model is an improvement, but it's such a drop in the bucket and it's clearly just one piece of the puzzle. New ones are basically over-capacity as soon as they open (the Esquimalt one sure was). It's the same thing as housing in this province, decades of under-investing and then just pushing around at the margins in order to try and fix things, when realistically only sustained, massive levels of investment have a hope of doing anything substantial.
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Jan 28, 2022 23:09
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Also all the periphery services around health care, like lab testing, have also gotten remarkably worse!
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Jan 28, 2022 23:14
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leftist heap posted:The doctor situation here has gotten so much worse since I moved here in 2011, and it was bad then. I used to go to Cook St. Medical Clinic (a walk-in) when I first arrived. Back then you could walk-in most times of the day and expect to get in in an hour or so. This evolved into getting there early and being given a time to come back, usually in the afternoon. After a while if you didn't get there sometime in the morning, like before 10am or so, you couldn't get a slot at all. Finally before covid if you weren't lined up a good hour before it opened you probably weren't getting in that day at all. Recently I had to book like nearly a month in advance for a telephone appointment. Now clinics are closing all over the place. The UPCCs don't work because they don't offer enough capacity, you're right. I personally don't care for the model, as it makes it about the building instead of the care team. There aren't enough people on the care team to a) offer team-based care and b) provide access. A UPCC without a GP or an NP is just a pointless empty building. It's what this government got profoundly wrong about trying to do something with primary care. They didn't address structural causes, but instead, built a bunch of buildings without thinking about what would be needed to staff them, assuming skilled professionals for which there is a huge shortage would just show up somehow because 'reasons'. Honestly, the state of play in our government is so horrifically awful, I don't know how we recover from it.
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Jan 28, 2022 23:41
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leftist heap posted:Also all the periphery services around health care, like lab testing, have also gotten remarkably worse! Oh yeah, I forgot about this. I needed some blood work, so went to book an appointment. Five weeks to get in at LifeLabs. Absolute madness. Why? They don't have any staff because their pay is garbage and no one wants to work for them.
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Jan 28, 2022 23:42
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Mandibular Fiasco posted:The UPCCs don't work because they don't offer enough capacity, you're right. I personally don't care for the model, as it makes it about the building instead of the care team. There aren't enough people on the care team to a) offer team-based care and b) provide access. A UPCC without a GP or an NP is just a pointless empty building. It's what this government got profoundly wrong about trying to do something with primary care. They didn't address structural causes, but instead, built a bunch of buildings without thinking about what would be needed to staff them, assuming skilled professionals for which there is a huge shortage would just show up somehow because 'reasons'. Honestly, the state of play in our government is so horrifically awful, I don't know how we recover from it. I mean, i mostly agree, but they were created to address at least one structural cause, and that's doctors not wanting to run their own clinics, which was and remains a common complain among GPs. I don't really see a way out of this mess without the government building its own primary care clinics. But otherwise, yeah, still a massive failure.
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Jan 28, 2022 23:56
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leftist heap posted:I mean, i mostly agree, but they were created to address at least one structural cause, and that's doctors not wanting to run their own clinics, which was and remains a common complain among GPs. I don't really see a way out of this mess without the government building its own primary care clinics. But otherwise, yeah, still a massive failure. I agree it wasn't nothing and that they do offer something to people who otherwise wouldn't get anything. A positive to some extent but like just about anything we do in government, it's tinkering around the edges because we're afraid to tackle the entrenched interests.
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Jan 29, 2022 00:20
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UBC has the largest family medicine resident training program in Canada but that doesn't really matter when no-one wants to be a GP here.
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Jan 29, 2022 03:18
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Autochrome posted:But surely rich people who move can get family doctors? Like how does that work? In Ontario the doctors just build a clinic in a rich area and don't register patients outside the postal code. Then, because they selected for richer / whiter / healthier patients, they switch their payment model to patient outcome instead of fee for service, and get rich!
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Jan 29, 2022 03:23
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evilpicard posted:In Ontario the doctors just build a clinic in a rich area and don't register patients outside the postal code. Then, because they selected for richer / whiter / healthier patients, they switch their payment model to patient outcome instead of fee for service, and get rich! I hadn’t heard of this. Any links that describe this practice?
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Jan 29, 2022 04:26
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leftist heap posted:The doctor situation here has gotten so much worse since I moved here in 2011, and it was bad then. I used to go to Cook St. Medical Clinic (a walk-in) when I first arrived. Back then you could walk-in most times of the day and expect to get in in an hour or so. This evolved into getting there early and being given a time to come back, usually in the afternoon. After a while if you didn't get there sometime in the morning, like before 10am or so, you couldn't get a slot at all. Finally before covid if you weren't lined up a good hour before it opened you probably weren't getting in that day at all. Recently I had to book like nearly a month in advance for a telephone appointment. Now clinics are closing all over the place. I just save up all my medical needs and hope for a big snow. No one leaves their house when it snows in Victoria so I can just walk down to the Cook St clinic and see a doctor for like 40 min since no one else is there and get all my doctor stuff done in one go.
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Jan 29, 2022 07:33
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So, like, once every 7 years?
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Jan 29, 2022 13:56
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Mandibular Fiasco posted:I hadn’t heard of this. Any links that describe this practice? My source is my own experience looking for a doctor for 4 years after moving to Ottawa. I lived in a mixed income neighbourhood which was perceived by many people to be poor. Whenever I googled new doctor's offices they would almost invariably be in high income areas, I would call the office and ask if they were accepting new patients and the first question 100% of the time would be "what's your area code" I find it nearly impossible to find news stores from half a decade ago, but here's a study showing how they used to be even more brazena bout this: https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/wealthy-may-have-an-edge-over-poor-for-medical-appointments-1.1376759
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Jan 30, 2022 00:43
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evilpicard posted:My source is my own experience looking for a doctor for 4 years after moving to Ottawa. That’s super helpful. Thanks for digging this up. I had not heard of this and a quick Google didn’t find anything. Sorry if it came across skeptical, wasn’t the intention. Genuinely curious about this do it can’t make its way here.
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Jan 30, 2022 00:48
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Claes Oldenburger posted:A story as old as time. Same thing happened with Kits in Vancouver, or currently happening with the drive. Its cheap so artists/counterculture moves in, they make it cool, prices rise from people now actively moving there, then whammy, expensive place full of old artists. When people think of gentrification they think of some building in a hip artist area being razed to create condos for rich yuppies, but people rarely think of the above passage as gentrification, even though it's dramatically worse for regular working artists/people. The old artists in their now incredibly expensive houses they bought long ago fight against any and all change to their neighbourhood, preserving SFHs as the only housing option. Eventually the houses are so valuable that the landlords that were renting dumpy SFHs to a bunch of young artists that had affordably split up the rent, put them up for sale, evicting multiple artists and reducing the rental supply in the neighbourhood. The working artist renters are replaced by a household that can afford to buy a house at the current extreme prices, assuredly a very wealthy, non-artist, household. So we see that steadily all the occupants of these SFHs are replaced by the wealthy. The rich old artist homeowners don't complain about any of this since it doesn't disrupt them any and the neighbourhood appears to physically be the same, even though the entire demographics is shifting. For example Margret Atwood seeing nothing wrong with the Annex being frozen in amber and prices skyrocketing because she occasionally sees some young people with a baby carriage. Those young parents of course are only there because of top 5% incomes and inter-generational wealth. The notion that a young emerging author could buy there is laughable. I've seen so so much of this between Mount Pleasant and Strathcona. This is not as obvious as a big tower but it has the same outcome of displacing working artists. This type of gentrification is even worse since at least the tower adds vacancy to the region. The replacement of existing working class SFH occupants with rich occupants most likely results in a net reduction of vacancy. Very common for a single house split up into two or three suites to be renovated back into a single house for a single rich family. Femtosecond fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Jan 30, 2022 |
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Jan 30, 2022 03:34
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I suspect part of this is also that any neighborhood built after 1950 in this country is just loving AWFUL One of the reasons why Kits, the Annex, Fernwood etc. are also going stratospheric is because nothing built in the past 70 years even remotely reflects their physical form. They are basically a built environment everyone loves that we just decided to throw in the garbage in favour of strip malls, stroads, big box stores, curvilinear streets and tract housing. What I’m saying is: buy in livable inner city neighbourhoods in cheap prairie/east coast cities while it’s still affordable.
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Jan 30, 2022 03:57
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On the subject of UPCC and other integrated care facilities that work with their personnel as staff, I think it's a model that has to happen, it just needs to be heavily expanded to make a real difference. The doctor as a private contractor model was important to the way we transitioned to public care in Canada, but it's a pretty poo poo system for the doctor that's just coming in. A new doctor isn't set up to be a business person, or do the kind of admin work that's necessary to back that up. You end up with older doctors with infrastructure acting as gatekeepers. There's no reason they should be spending their time managing that poo poo. It's also a terrible way to try and balance care across an area. Government as the employer feels like a much better model to allow doctors to just be doctors.
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Jan 30, 2022 04:04
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What are people's thoughts on protected historic districts? I live in an original neighbourhood of Bytown that has been protected since 1994. So some stuff was upzoned/replaced in the preceding 150 years but not much. It's about 95% 19th-century vernacular double houses built by blue-collar workers. I'm a big dork about Victorian architecture and local history in general so I love it. But Ottawa has a LOT of historic districts near the core. What is the balance between increasing urban density and keeping the character of these areas alive?
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Jan 30, 2022 15:37
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Fidelitious posted:What are people's thoughts on protected historic districts? I live in an original neighbourhood of Bytown that has been protected since 1994. So some stuff was upzoned/replaced in the preceding 150 years but not much. It's about 95% 19th-century vernacular double houses built by blue-collar workers. I'm a big dork about Victorian architecture and local history in general so I love it. But Ottawa has a LOT of historic districts near the core. Personally I love heritage homes and I think cities should try to enact measures to retain the best of them. I think this sort of history is part of what makes a city unique. When I'm travelling I love to poke around and see how people built their residential houses and how they differ from those back home. That being said I'm sure that as support grows around ending exclusive SFH zoning, "heritage preservation" is probably going to be one of the rallying cries cynically used by established homeowners to try to halt any and all change. We can't preserve everything. The challenge for cities is to strike the balance in enacting heritage preservation measures that do retain the unique history of the city while not being so expansive so as to make new development effectively impossible. The thing is that while most NIMBYs that will exclaim about "heritage!" are probably selfishly trying to retain their neighbourhood exclusivity, they do have a bit of a point. Left to their own devices, developers aren't going to give a poo poo and will be all too happy to raze a historic hood to the ground. In Vancouver in particular, the oldest houses in the city are in Strathcona, adjacent to Downtown and the old "East End" companion of the West End. The West End of course was razed in the 60s for tower development and is now an incredibly dense, urban, hood. There is no doubt in my mind that developers will badly want to turn Strathcona into the West End 2 if they get a whiff that it may be politically possible. I think the right approach isn't to draw a line around Strathcona and declare it off limits forever, but rather to enable new development, but find a way to incentivize home owners of well kept heritage homes to retain them as is. Effectively to make it so that homeowners that have decaying teardowns, or non-heritage homes in the district are able to redevelop them denser into apartments, while homeowners with pristine victorians are not financially worse off for not doing so. One way to do this would be to make it so that heritage home owners can build second, denser apt/homes in the backyard if they retain the old home. This way the property owner can create new housing and financially benefit regardless of whether they knock their home down or not.
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Jan 30, 2022 19:49
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| # ? May 23, 2024 04:10 |
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Oops my pristine heritage home burned down in a fire. Can I build a condo now?
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Jan 30, 2022 20:13
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