Nothing about the suburbs made sense to me until I had kids. Now everything makes sense.
Young kids require a lot of gear. Hauling all that without a car is hard. Walking and transit take time and kids have schedules or else you get meltdowns. Kids also get bored.
Density helps transit time but kids need safe space to play and that is at a premium in dense cities.
Unpacking and packing young kids into cars is painful. You have to get them in, belted, etc., which for <5yos can be an ordeal each time. Enter the drive through.
I could go all day.
Not saying you can't do kids in a city, just that the burbs make total sense now.
And yet, when it comes to real estate we act like we can't make more of it. The vast majority of land out there is still unbuilt. Simply start another city, say 50 miles away or more if need be and then create incentives for companies to move there. We'll have more jobs, much cheaper housing, an opportunity to build a brand new city with the latest technologies, parks, outdoor gyms, libraries, etc, not to mention it'll bring housing costs down in prior city too.
In practice new planned cities work out badly, because location is everything and cities need an underlying reason to exist. Residents don’t want to move to a place with no jobs, and jobs don’t want to be in a place where it’s hard to attract workers. An interesting article on how Songdo, South Korea is failing even though its location next to the country’s biggest airport should’ve helped it: https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/06/sleepy-in-songdo-koreas...
I’ve been to some of the top-tier “master planned” towns, transit villages and town centers.
At face value they all seem nice, walkable and urban. But they’re also generally extremely bland. They have the same chain retail and restaurant concepts, private security who will chase away anyone who seems undesirable (that is everyone from unsheltered folks, to rowdy teens, to street vendors) and they usually are not well integrated with the surrounding areas.
Plenty of fantastic places in Vancouver with character, but I don't understand that one. (And I work there.)
But I know the kind of blandness you're talking about. Richmond somehow is a metropolis that feels like a desert.
Though Joseph Phillips wound up in jail for running a Ponzi scheme, he knew what people wanted; a walkable community (small blocks), mixed use residential/commercial, a large central park.
If society just thought paying interest on your house was another form of feudalism and refused to play along, I expect you'd see more of your type of city and less of what we currently have.
There never will be a solution because no one will vote for a government that will bring down the value of their home.
Finally, Vancouver home prices are down over 15% in the over $2 million category. There are several buyers who have lost money on properties purchased in 2016 which was the peak of the market.
Sure, you can say you can move somewhere cheaper and pocket the difference. The problem is that until you actually do that, the cost of living will likely follow the property price increase and hurt your wallet.
Unless most of the homeowners own more than one property.
While I'm sure most of the market is investment based, there is also a decent chunk of people who just want to live here, even if a lot of them are priced out of the market at the moment.
I'm curious what the %s are.
But it’s all from real estate appreciating.
We should fight the cause, not the effect.
The rest of the world has been asking China to free capital markets for a long time, but there’s not much we can do if the Party doesn’t want to.
Article is from February 2018.
https://globalnews.ca/video/5091538/ontario-police-search-fo... just the past week
international students/people have been involved in some very frightening crimes, this sort of stuff rarely happens much less to students.. i mean its toronto/golden horseshoe for the most part its very safe
??? uhhh why am i getting downvoted?
Lately gossip has mostly focused on the motivations of the various auditors and authorities, who refuse to do their jobs. Leading theories include fear of racism accusations, corruption, laziness, and of course gross incompetence.
For example, a simple, 80/20 analysis they could perform: list at all real estate held by holding companies in GVA and GTA and generate a list of their corporate directors. Find people who are directors on a large number of those holding companies, and check if they are related somehow to law firms, banks/wealth managers, Real estate agents or immigration businesses. If so, you now have a short list of potential properties being used for money laundering that maybe merit further investigation.
Calling the top 25 people on that list should reveal some interesting findings... Re-organize by property value if you want to catch bigger fish first.
Now just one or two generations removed, these communities are facing the consequences of the same communist regime they thought they left behind.
