The Survival Guide to British Columbia by Ian Ferguson

Author:Ian Ferguson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Heritage House
Published: 2019-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

Finding a Place to Live

Surviving Residentially

There’s more to British Columbia than just the Lower Mainland. Not much more, but still. As I mentioned in Chapter Seven, half the population of the province lives in the Greater Vancouver Area. If you can call it living. They crowd together in leaky condominiums, cluster around the only working washing machine in the basement laundry room of walk-up apartments, jam themselves into minuscule micro lofts and diminutive laneway housing, and congregate in postage stamp–sized yards in townhouse complexes. Some people even live in single family homes, also called detached houses, as in “detached from reality.” Those people are called millionaires. Unless the single family home they live in is a Vancouver Special. That’s called a misnomer. What you need to understand is that the Metro Vancouver area is dense. Also, a lot of people live there.

The cost of housing in the Metro Vancouver area is quite high, if “quite high” is a euphemism for “the most expensive city in the country.”59 If you combined every type of housing that sold last year and then added up the total amount of money spent buying property last year and then divided that amount by the number of properties ... Lemme see, carry the four, drop the nine ... The average, or mean, price per unit of housing sold would come to, aha, $1,156,050. Yikes. That’s not just mean, it’s downright nasty.

Following the dictates of Keynesian economic theory, ridiculously high housing costs in Vancouver sent interested buyers further afield into neighbouring communities like Burnaby and Richmond. When the influx of new buyers in those cities caused house prices to spike it was on to North Vancouver and Coquitlam. And so on and so forth. It even affected Kamloops. But it all started in Vancouver. Why, you might ask? Money laundering as it turns out. Wealthy plutocrats in mainland China viewed Vancouver as a safe place to park their dough, real estate being the preferred choice, to the tune of several billions of dollars each and every year for the past decade, coinciding with the steep annual increases in the price of housing. A remarkable coincidence if nothing else.

What I’m trying to tell you is, even if you’re the sort of person who can afford to drop a fistful of Lauriers (in metric: 20 dollars) on a humour book, unless you come from a very wealthy overseas family who are worried about the whimsical nature of your local Communist dictatorship, you won’t be able to buy yourself a place to live. So you should rent.

The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $2,100 per month. Vancouver prides itself on being above average. In most places, two grand a month would be a mortgage. In the Lower Mainland, that’s only a mortgage if you’re paying bi-weekly like on the lease for a new Corolla.

The only mildly cheaper option available is to try to get an apartment in a co-op building. Don’t do this. If owning a condo is the

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