Photo: sofard.tumblr.com

By Saeid Fard,
Special to The Post

Vancouver, once a city with its own unique spin on Canadian ideals and culture, is well on its way to becoming a vacation city for the world’s rich, its economy transforming into one predicated almost entirely on catering to their luxurious proclivities, and its citizens transformed into modern serfs permitted to live in smaller dwellings on the city’s periphery, if you’ll allow me to exaggerate for effect.
Hyperbole aside, consider this: the nature of serfdom was one where serfs, unable to acquire their own plot of productive land, worked and lived on the land of wealthy nobles whom they served. In Vancouver the average person who owns a detached home made more money from capital gains on their property, roughly $100,000 per year in the last decade or so, than the average Vancouverite made in income, roughly $65,000. At those rates, it’s effectively impossible for average people without seed capital to join in on the boons of the Vancouver property boom, and so their role in the city’s largest source of wealth generation, property ownership, becomes catering to those who can take part, selling to them luxury booze, food, cars, clothes, and even their bodies. We have two classes of society forming along a divide that is growingly difficult to cross.
Real estate appreciation is not unique to Vancouver. Calgary and San Francisco, for instance, have seen gains in the real estate market near Vancouver rates, but those gains were a result of booming economies and income growth in those areas from oil and tech respectively. Vancouver has experienced no commensurate economic or income boom. According to Teranet’s housing price index, over the past 5 years Vancouver’s property prices have grown by about 23% compared to about 16% in Calgary – this despite Calgary’s economic growth running near double that of Vancouver’s over the same period. With the decline of oil prices, Calgary’s real estate market has tanked, as it would in a rational market. It’s safe to say economic prosperity has little to do with our real estate market. Anyone arguing that Vancouver growth outpaced Calgary’s because it’s a nicer place to live should note that Vancouver has been a nicer place to live than Calgary for a few decades now – suffice it to say any difference between the cities’ populations as a result of such known factors would already have been accounted for in the base population.
Foreign ownership is, of course, the culprit. Beneficiaries of the property boom, homeowners, developers, and the politicians whom they finance, often claim that foreign ownership isn’t actually as big of a problem as we make it out to be. This category of people cherry pick misleading statistics propped up by biased stakeholders and lobbyists like real estate agent associations, and almost always has something to gain....
Read the rest of this article at sofard.tumblr.com.

Saeid Fard is the President of Enterprise at Sokanu Inc. He has a degree in Finance from Queens and has worked at Goldman Sachs.