Image of the day: city of Vancouver vs. Metro
Pushing down on a balloon, people move further out
Location matters. Within a metro region, people want to live where they have easy access to lots of jobs. So there’ll be more people who want to live in a geographically central location. In Metro Vancouver, that means the city of Vancouver.
Because the city of Vancouver hasn’t been building enough housing, prices and rents go up, and people have to move further out, to Burnaby, Richmond, or Surrey. It’s like pushing down on a balloon.
It feels like the West End is doing its bit - It's over a year now, two(?) since a walk around the first four blocks up from Denman street, along about six blocks wide, had something like 2,000 new units going in, just summing up the counts on the placards out front of the proposed construction.
Is most of Vancouver NOT doing that, is that the problem? The big developments are all in a restricted area? Are all the ones in the papers - Jericho, Broadway - coming so slowly they'll be full before they open? Or is it going to be one of those great free-market overcorrections where prices really fall a few years from now? How desperately we need the latter.