For anyone interested in a crash course on the recent history of Vancouver’s housing crisis, they need to look no further than the work of professor David Ley., on the impact of large amounts of cash poured into Vancouver’s property market following Expo 86. Now, he’s released a follow-up book,, which looks at cities that are disproportionately impacted by real estate investment.is among them.
“Question No. 2 is what are the consequences of this decoupling? When we’re thinking of affordability, we think of inequality and potentially even instability – political instability – which could reflect itself in people’s behaviour at the ballot box. The argument I make with Hong Kong is lack of housing is one of the reasons students are rioting.
The investment came in waves, starting with Hong Kong buyers who were looking for a safe place to land after the 1997 handover to China, followed by Taiwanese buyers, and eventually buyers from Mainland China., Prof. Ley has a line graph that shows house prices in Greater Vancouver moving upwards in lockstep with net domestic migration.
But a problem emerged. By 2016, at the peak of the boom, the divergence between local incomes and home prices in Vancouver had never been wider. That same gap had grown in London, Sydney and Hong Kong as well. And yet, when questioned throughout the 2013 to 2016 boom, public officials said they couldn’t meddle with homeowner equity, or even acquire the data to prove that foreign money had entered the market. It was painfully ironic, in light of the fact that the government had courted the money via trade missions and, at the federal level, offered Canadian citizenship in exchange for business investment, as part of a now-defunct scheme called the Immigrant Investor Program.
Responding to public backlash and growing media scrutiny, housing affordability became the key election platform for all parties.