Although Canada doesn’t track where real estate purchasers are from, I think most people understand that the inflationary pressures are clearly foreign, and likely from mainland China. Once upon a time Cantonese was commonly heard. Now Cantonese accents are hard to hear over all the Mandarin. Any discussion of this has been met with screams of “racism!” from the land development and real estate trades.

One consequence we are experiencing here is despite extremely low vacancy rates (fractions of 1% by some estimates) there are enormous numbers of empty properties. This has two curious and troubling results.

The first is the creation of high rent ghost towns. People are essentially getting paid to leave by foreign money looking for landed safety deposit boxes. This squeezes the supply of an already artificially inflated market, further inflating it.

The second is after years of people complaining, the city has decided that that solution is to socialize private property. In the spirit of imminent domain, if the city feels you aren’t effectively using your private property to help address the public problem of low rental stock, they’re going to tax you.

While I appreciate the ostensible intent, I just don’t think state encroachment on private property to address public problems that were caused in large part by the state’s own willful ignorance is really a solution.

Neither of these are good for any city.

While our urban problems are very different in detail, I suspect they are the same in cause and consequence. Rapacious greed is killing its host. Jacobs said “when a place gets boring, even the rich people leave.” And this is what concerns me most about the place I’ve chosen to call home.