A severely woke activist journalist has published a screed in the Georgia Straight, essentially calling anyone who complains about high real estate prices in Vancouver a racist:
When people in Metro Vancouver started feeling the pain (or pleasure) of rising housing prices, the focus immediately fell on foreign buyers, especially Chinese people.
The 2010s coincided with China’s growing assertiveness under President Xi Jinping, and the increasing presence of “Asian-looking” people in Metro Vancouver that included old-stock Chinese Canadians as well as the rising number of students, businesspeople, new immigrants, and affluent travellers from across the Pacific.
The author conveniently ignores an endless stream of news stories about money laundering from assorted “foreign” investors. So get it straight, Canadians, if you work hard in your middle class job, pay your taxes, and try to be a good citizen, any anxiety you have about the fact that you’ll never be able to afford to buy a home in Vancouver is merely an extension of your “white privilege” and inherent racism. In other words, shut up.
The banks must have been complicit in some way about properties going way above asking w/o multiple offers…
Same in GTA, then Calgary and more recently Montreal.
The consumer loses again.
Banks have protection as well.
Any assets you have with them, only $100,000 is protected and the rest, the banks can take.
Again, you lose.
So, some crisis event and the banks get in trouble, you have no assets anymore.
This was from the Cyprus Bank crisis and adopted worldwide including Canada.
Don’t know if you are familiar with this.
Chinese guys walk around with pockets full of cash.
No record of anything.
Sometimes I sell thing on Kijiji, when a chinese buys it, he rolls out a wad of cash, every time.
There was a story yesterday on the news where this guy lost just that while hiking. Thankfully one violin player from the Calgary philharmonic found it and managed to return it.
I wonder when China will demand a Hong Kong type crack down at its colony of B.C.
Hardly an unbiased POV. Those poor, poor, billionaires/millionaires! And all they wanted was several expensive ppties with which to wash their ill-gotten gains from fentanyl, human trafficking, extortion, prostitution, MDMA, merhamphetamine, animal parts, organ harvesting, yadda yadda, and a foothold in our country! We should just give them what they demand, without question. Gwai Lo, you will pay for this insubordination!
This fuel crisis coming in May 12 will certainly trigger this.
That’s why anything up for sale now is being scooped up as smart money wants solid assets and everything is on the table being bought out.
No assets in the banks are safe assets as your limit is $100,000.
Why keep money in the bank??????
I routinely keep $10,000 in my chequing account with SIMPLII Financial. I get like $0.15 deposited monthly LOL.
Gov’t bonds at what? 0,50% interest? Invest wisely or get your cash out
It’s no different in southern Ontario. I couldn’t afford to buy the house I bought 15 years ago even thought I bought it easily and paid it off in ten years and make substantially more money now than I did then. I have no idea what my children will do because unless something changes radically there is no way they will be able to live in their home town.
One reason our corrupt elites will do nothing about international money laundering has to do with what is highlighted in the posted article: nearly all money launderers are non-white, so let them off. We live in a world of identity politics these days. This is what counts. Not the social good.
My story is one that I believe is typical as I have heard many variations of it from others:
Five years ago, my wife and I sold our Montreal condo to a just-arrived immigrant Chinese couple. Neither spoke a word of English or French. The wife had no official source of income. The husband’s job reportedly paid $60k per year. Yet they were able to pay the $350k price of the condo in cash.
I mentioned to my wife that, if we had been the purchasers in that situation, the CRA would have been all over us – demanding an explanation as to where the money had come from.
I spent my teenage years (late 1980’s/early 90’s) in BC and remember hearing stories like that coming out of Vancouver – even back then.
Today, while Vancouver is still the epicenter, it seems to be a Canada-wide thing.
When I was at UBC more than 40 years ago, I, having moved there from Alberta, was made to feel quite unwelcome because I didn’t convert to the Lotusland way of thinking.
I haven’t been in Vancouver itself for many years, though I often have stopovers at the airport as I travel to and from my house in Fort St. John. I get the sense that what I just described is even more so now, making me glad I no longer live there.
I am shocked – shocked, I tell you – that this racist and privileged so-called journalist used the term “old stock Chinese Canadians”. We know that the adjective “old stock” is unacceptable, deeply “triggering,” and racist “dog-whistle”. It is used to attach privilege to those Chinese Canadians whose families have been in Canada for decades (many for almost two centuries) and who are deeply infected with wrongthink, believing in work, family, good citizenship, actually living in the country, etc., etc.
Can you understand newspeak?
Chinese are not, they are Asian looking people.
This hatred of foreign home buyers by supposed fiscal conservatives is weird.
It is particularly weird as the fiscal conservatives also claim to know that high home prices are caused by municipalities and provinces artificially restricting the supply of developable land. Vancouver is a perfect example of this. Its home price problems are 100% caused by the city councils of Vancouver and the lower mainland and the execrable and insane Agricultural Land Commission.
Foreign home buyers bring a ton of money here and ought to thanked, solicited and catered to. They not only bring cash to buy, they pay ongoing property taxes and spend their sweet, rich, juicy foreign money here. This is especially good when they are the best of all foreign home buyers, the absentee ones. The absentees have to pay property taxes, but they use no services. No kids in school, no health care costs, no poop going down the sewer, no cars on the road, nothing. We get their tax money for free. They’re not here so they have no alternative but to pay Canadian residents to maintain their properties. You can’t be a home handyman if you’re not at home. Don’t for a minute think that Canadian tradesmen dislike absentee owners or give them small bills.
Same thing is happening in Nova Scotia, people from outside of the province moving here has driven the prices through the roof. My house sold before I even listed it, most homes are going for 20 grand more than the asking price. Not sure where the people are coming from?
I’m out towards Langley. Odd thing in my neighborhood. Entry level Properties had been selling for 1 million to 1.1M
3 bedroom bungalow 8k sq ft lots, of varying degrees of updating.
All the sudden, boom, the shitiest one, a day after listing sells for 1.28M – way over asking.
Other far far nicer homes within 2 city blocks, with extensive upgrades, did not sell.
Why did the buyer want this particular home soo badly that they would pay at least 200k over market value, when far better homes were available for less?
(Rhetorical question)
Feng Shui.
Yes it’s really a factor in Lower Mainland real estate and can skew prices for seemingly identical properties by hundreds of thousands.
I am probably the the most proudly Sinophobic person here, and even I don’t attribute high housing prices in Vancouver JUST to demand by rich Chinese. Ottawa house prices are out of control too, Wuhan flu be damned, and the third language of this city is Arabic, not Chinese.
Our correspondent comes nearer the truth by blaming QE, but only because she thinks the Jews control global finance. (If they did our world would be halfway to being healed. I digress.)
The problem is a combination of the two—what Ben Bernanke coyly called a “global savings glut.”
China, Inc., flush with the proceeds of slave labour, has spent the last twenty years investing that money in Western assets—especially government bonds—to buy influence over Western governments, pushing down yields to absurdly low levels.
Mortgage rates are generally related to long-term bond yields, so mortgage rates also became absurdly low—and house prices absurdly high—throughout the Western world.
So among our masters’ rewards for stabbing their countries in the back was practically free loans from the Chinese.
Thanks for clearing that up for me SG.