I have a new favorite blog that I think you might all enjoy as well. It’s called BT | A | Works and it is the “architectural and urban research and development division” of Bing Thom Architects in Vancouver.
I think it’s it’s important to have people in a firm who are researching and experimenting with ideas beyond the day-to-day tasks of a job. So I was excited to discover their work this morning.
Their most recent post is a look at ownership patterns of single family homes sold in 3 west end neighborhoods in Vancouver from September 2014 to February 2015 (a 6 month period). These are some of the most expensive areas in the city and, collectively, they found 172 properties sold with an aggregate value of around $520 million.
Given the presence of foreign buyers in Vancouver’s real estate market, one of the things they then did was identify “non-anglicized Chinese names” on the title records. This means names like “Li Xian”, but not names like “Andrew Shui-Him Yan”, because the anglicized first name suggests that they are probably not a new immigrant or probably not living abroad.
Here’s what they found:
In total, 66% of the properties in the sample (172 properties) were associated with a non-anglicized Chinese name. And for properties over $5 million, the percentage jumps to 88%. The other interesting thing worth noting is that 23% of the registered owners declared their occupation as “homemaker/housewife.”
I thought this would serve as an interesting follow-up to the post I wrote about a month ago called, Is Hongcouver better off than Vancouver? If you’d like to see the full BT | A | Works presentation, click here.
I was speaking with a friend this morning and he told me that he had a Pavlovian association between me and laneways. That made me happy.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ve heard me go on and on about the great potential of laneways and laneway housing (accessory dwelling units) in Toronto, as well as in other cities around the world.
So I won’t do that today. Instead, I’m going to link to a report that was just released by the Pembina Institute called Make Way for Laneway: Providing more housing options for the Greater Toronto Area.
The report is obviously about Toronto, but there’s no reason that the lessons and ideas won’t also apply to your city. So I would encourage you to give it a read.
For those of you who have emailed me about my own laneway house, the project is still on hold. And it will likely remain that way until the city becomes a bit more accepting of this housing typology. Hopefully that will happen soon.
It’s raining this morning in Toronto. The sun really hasn’t come up and out yet. And I’m spending the morning drinking coffee and reading a City Journal article from this past summer called “Hongcouver.”
The article talks about how the Chinese – first from Hong Kong and then from mainland China (PRC) – have dramatically reshaped the economic and cultural landscape of Vancouver.
I, unfortunately (it’s a great city), don’t spend a lot of time in Vancouver and so I don’t have an accurate sense of the local sentiment towards all of this change. But there’s no question the city has changed.
Here’s a snippet from the above City Journal article:
As for the notion that Chinese money tended to be ill-gotten, Yu pointed out that the property boom was propelled by the structural disparity between prosperous Hong Kong, a dynamic economy, and the comparative backwater of Vancouver, still “living on the fumes of empire.” For the price of a Hong Kong flat, a Chinese immigrant—even, say, an accountant—could buy a splendid home on Vancouver’s West Side. “The Hong Kong Chinese who came could buy their way into any neighborhood. [They] knew that money was a tool,” Yu told me. “They weren’t going to accept a second-class citizenship in Vancouver. They could say, ‘I don’t care about your British Imperial manners, I am going to buy your house.’ ” The irony was that the Hong Kong arrivals—“more sophisticated than the people they were displacing,” with “better schooling, better English accents,” Yu said—were themselves the products of a system of law and finance instituted by the British with the establishment of their Hong Kong colony in the 1840s, after Britain thrashed China in the First Opium War.
A lot of this was fuelled by the now defunct Immigrant Investor Program. The intent of the program was to allow “experienced business people” into the country in order to contribute to economic growth. If you had business experience, a net worth of at least C$1.6 million (that was gained legally, of course), and were able to invest C$800,000, then you could get permanent residency.
Between the mid-1980s and the end of the 1990s, approximately 30,000 Chinese came to Vancouver via this investor-class visa. And between 1987 and 1997, it is estimated that this group of Chinese possessed about $35 to 40 billion in disposable income. No wonder they bought real estate.
But the interesting question is whether or not Vancouver is better off now than it was in the 1970s before all of this migration really took hold.
There many who would argue that it is not. Vancouver now has the most expensive real estate in Canada and prices have completely detached themselves from local income levels – as they have in many international cities.
But there’s also a strong argument to be made that this influx of money has made the Vancouver economy more dynamic. Unemployment in the city was cut almost in half between the early 1980s and 1991 during the first wave of migration. It went from 13.6% to 7.7%.
In a way, it’s not all that different than what’s currently happening in San Francisco with tech and housing. I’m not saying there aren’t problems to be solved. But I think many of us can agree that the answer is not to eradicate the tech sector.
That’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I have a new favorite blog that I think you might all enjoy as well. It’s called BT | A | Works and it is the “architectural and urban research and development division” of Bing Thom Architects in Vancouver.
I think it’s it’s important to have people in a firm who are researching and experimenting with ideas beyond the day-to-day tasks of a job. So I was excited to discover their work this morning.
Their most recent post is a look at ownership patterns of single family homes sold in 3 west end neighborhoods in Vancouver from September 2014 to February 2015 (a 6 month period). These are some of the most expensive areas in the city and, collectively, they found 172 properties sold with an aggregate value of around $520 million.
Given the presence of foreign buyers in Vancouver’s real estate market, one of the things they then did was identify “non-anglicized Chinese names” on the title records. This means names like “Li Xian”, but not names like “Andrew Shui-Him Yan”, because the anglicized first name suggests that they are probably not a new immigrant or probably not living abroad.
Here’s what they found:
In total, 66% of the properties in the sample (172 properties) were associated with a non-anglicized Chinese name. And for properties over $5 million, the percentage jumps to 88%. The other interesting thing worth noting is that 23% of the registered owners declared their occupation as “homemaker/housewife.”
I thought this would serve as an interesting follow-up to the post I wrote about a month ago called, Is Hongcouver better off than Vancouver? If you’d like to see the full BT | A | Works presentation, click here.
I was speaking with a friend this morning and he told me that he had a Pavlovian association between me and laneways. That made me happy.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ve heard me go on and on about the great potential of laneways and laneway housing (accessory dwelling units) in Toronto, as well as in other cities around the world.
So I won’t do that today. Instead, I’m going to link to a report that was just released by the Pembina Institute called Make Way for Laneway: Providing more housing options for the Greater Toronto Area.
The report is obviously about Toronto, but there’s no reason that the lessons and ideas won’t also apply to your city. So I would encourage you to give it a read.
For those of you who have emailed me about my own laneway house, the project is still on hold. And it will likely remain that way until the city becomes a bit more accepting of this housing typology. Hopefully that will happen soon.
It’s raining this morning in Toronto. The sun really hasn’t come up and out yet. And I’m spending the morning drinking coffee and reading a City Journal article from this past summer called “Hongcouver.”
The article talks about how the Chinese – first from Hong Kong and then from mainland China (PRC) – have dramatically reshaped the economic and cultural landscape of Vancouver.
I, unfortunately (it’s a great city), don’t spend a lot of time in Vancouver and so I don’t have an accurate sense of the local sentiment towards all of this change. But there’s no question the city has changed.
Here’s a snippet from the above City Journal article:
As for the notion that Chinese money tended to be ill-gotten, Yu pointed out that the property boom was propelled by the structural disparity between prosperous Hong Kong, a dynamic economy, and the comparative backwater of Vancouver, still “living on the fumes of empire.” For the price of a Hong Kong flat, a Chinese immigrant—even, say, an accountant—could buy a splendid home on Vancouver’s West Side. “The Hong Kong Chinese who came could buy their way into any neighborhood. [They] knew that money was a tool,” Yu told me. “They weren’t going to accept a second-class citizenship in Vancouver. They could say, ‘I don’t care about your British Imperial manners, I am going to buy your house.’ ” The irony was that the Hong Kong arrivals—“more sophisticated than the people they were displacing,” with “better schooling, better English accents,” Yu said—were themselves the products of a system of law and finance instituted by the British with the establishment of their Hong Kong colony in the 1840s, after Britain thrashed China in the First Opium War.
A lot of this was fuelled by the now defunct Immigrant Investor Program. The intent of the program was to allow “experienced business people” into the country in order to contribute to economic growth. If you had business experience, a net worth of at least C$1.6 million (that was gained legally, of course), and were able to invest C$800,000, then you could get permanent residency.
Between the mid-1980s and the end of the 1990s, approximately 30,000 Chinese came to Vancouver via this investor-class visa. And between 1987 and 1997, it is estimated that this group of Chinese possessed about $35 to 40 billion in disposable income. No wonder they bought real estate.
But the interesting question is whether or not Vancouver is better off now than it was in the 1970s before all of this migration really took hold.
There many who would argue that it is not. Vancouver now has the most expensive real estate in Canada and prices have completely detached themselves from local income levels – as they have in many international cities.
But there’s also a strong argument to be made that this influx of money has made the Vancouver economy more dynamic. Unemployment in the city was cut almost in half between the early 1980s and 1991 during the first wave of migration. It went from 13.6% to 7.7%.
In a way, it’s not all that different than what’s currently happening in San Francisco with tech and housing. I’m not saying there aren’t problems to be solved. But I think many of us can agree that the answer is not to eradicate the tech sector.
That’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
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