The #VanREalities – Hindsight is 2020
This page is inspired by the late Jason Botchford’s “Best of” Canucks postgame columns (The Provies/Athletties/Armies) where he would bring together the best of Canucks Twitter community reactions to the game with a healthy dose of humour and his own thoughts.
I’m going to try and do the same for Vancouver housing Twitter where I spend no small amount of time. I’m hoping I can add to the conversation and maybe get you, the reader, quickly up to date on the latest news as it pertains to housing and affordability. We’ll see how this goes and we’ll see how often I can keep this going.
Best Beef with the Mayor
As usual, the good professor Patrick Condon has some very insightful thoughts into the future of South False Creek – a beacon of hope for a site where it was originally conceived as an affordable housing solution. Goading the mayor into having to confirm the land wouldn’t be sold was also pretty masterful.
Co-op housing on government-owned land is one of the few tools the government has to add density in a manner that doesn’t drive land speculation by property developers and wealthy investors.
Best Proof of BMO’s Customer Service
Arresting a perfectly innocent indigenous grandfather and his 12-year old granddaughter trying to open a bank account is a pretty bad look, but it’s even worse when you consider all the cases where Vancouver banks really should have called the cops and didn’t.
Best Kaboom Kaboom Kaboom
Mortimer is the hero Vancouver Housing Twitter needs and deserves. His weekly “kaboom” tweets show some of the biggest speculator losses on the market and are true schadenfreude material.
Best Missing Option
Looks like the person running the StatsCan twitter account had their “OK Boomer” moment.
Best Snipe
Jean Swanson got near unanimous support for a motion to protect low-income housing due to concerns that development near the new St. Paul’s hospital site would put even more pressure on the limited low-income housing solutions like SROs.
Best Ratio
Mayor Kennedy Stewart quotes a Globe and Mail story that has precious little actual data on how more rentals in Vancouver would help keep rents down for existing tenants. The research being cited is for several cities in the U.S. and it’s unclear how it even applies to Vancouver.
Best shot/chaser
Shot:
Chaser:
Best Proof Starchitecture is Fascism
Best Maybe She Finally Gets It
But then again, maybe calling someone’s only housing option a “shithole” is a poor choice of words.
Best Schadenfreude
Let’s face it. If it makes Beau Jarvis, President of Wesgroup and head of the Urban Development Institute unhappy, it probably makes me really happy.
“I’m getting sick of this bulls – ,” said Beau Jarvis, president of Vancouver-based Wesgroup Properties and the new chair of the Urban Development Institute, which represents residential, commercial and industrial builders
…
He talked of costs that have escalated “exponentially” while revenues are “frozen” and warned that “capital has a low tolerance for uncertainty,” explaining that banks loan based on land values, which are based on zoning, and that some municipalities were eroding some of these “land rights.”
He predicted that with measures such as speculation and vacancy taxes that have curbed the demand for housing sales, and without federal money in B.C., plus the possibility of vacancy controls, the industry would “continue to under-build” even much-needed, purpose-built rental units.
Tough life, not having your land values go up every single year because those wealthy offshore buyers stopped buying your condos. The level of entitlement and fear-mongering here is a surprise even for me.
Best Behind the Scenes at Vancouver House
If there’s any truth to these tweets, it sounds like there are some crazy, crazy problems and explains why there are so few lights on in the building.
Best Meme
Demovictions Memes is straight fire. If you’re not already following them, what’s holding you back? (They’re also on Facebook)
