2015-05-22

Chinese Gentrify Vancouver, Why Not Sell The Whole Thing?

SCMP: Something is grotesquely wrong with Vancouver’s housing market, and the time for denialism is over
Fuelled by the special sauce of Chinese wealth - and good old Fear of Missing Out - prices have decoupled from the local economy, with an average detached price of about C$1.4 million (HK$8.9 million). So far, so normal for Vancouver.

But the past couple of months have witnessed a kind of awakening.

Eveline Xia - herself a Chinese immigrant - helped get the ball rolling with her very first tweet on March 18, in which the 29-year-old environmental scientist created the hashtag #donthave1million, and posted a plaintive cry about the drain of young Vancouverites being priced out of the city she loves. “To thrive, does @CityofVancouver not need people like you and me?” she asked.

It hit a nerve. Fellow millennials jumped on board #donthave1million, posting their own tales of real estate woe.

Around the same time, a petition sprang up on change.org, demanding that BC Premier Christy Clark and local mayors “restrict foreign investment in Greater Vancouver's residential real estate market”. The petition had about 24,000 supporters as of Wednesday.
It turns out the Chinese are gentrifying Vancouver:
Vancouverites still struggle to grasp the scale of this influx to their modestly-sized city. From 2005-2012, about 45,000 millionaire migrants arrived in Vancouver under just two wealth-determined schemes, the now-defunct Immigrant Investor Programme and the still-running Quebec Immigrant Investor Programme. Let’s put that in perspective. The entire United States only accepted 9,450 wealth migration applications in the same period under its famous EB-5 scheme, likely representing fewer than 30,000 individuals.

So, Vancouver has recently received more wealth-determined migration than any other city in the world, by a long stretch. This, in a city with some of the lowest incomes in Canada.
Formalize the process and make Vancouver a Chinese concession. Canada can request a Canadian concession in China in the interest of fostering trade and cultural links. Then Vancouver prices will be low because they will be measured by Chinese standards and the flood of money that comes in will allow the poor native Canadians sell their homes and move to Edmonton.

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