When I moved to Vancouver I naively expressed an interest in buying a house to my new co-workers. I was taken aback when that innocuous statement was greeted with hearty laughter. I nervously tittered along until the laughter died out, and glanced around with a plaintive “what did I say?” look on my face.
“Man, no one buys a house here before they’re 40. It’s just not done.”
The housing crisis was a windfall for many Vancouverites; developers facing a dead market panicked and slashed prices on their inventory, finally putting houses within the reach of some (but not most) non-owners. If you got in at the right time you made a killing–so a big thank you should go out to the greedy bastards in New York for nearly destroying the financial system as we know it; it put the burden of ownership on some folks who wouldn’t typically have had the pleasure.
A report today has Vancouver’s “living wage” pegged at $18/hr per parent for a family of four.Technically that should be termed a “dying wage” as there’s no living actually happening; it’s a wage that covers the bills, covers food, and keeps the collection agencies at bay. There’s no room for savings, no room for growth or expansion, no room for life. Between partners $36/hr produces zombies, not human beings. It’s clear that Vancouver really doesn’t have any place on anyone’s livability list.
Should it? In a country that spends over half the year locked up under snow and ice, should this jewel of the Pacific Northwest have to be a place where just anyone can live? I’m not making a judgement there, I’m honestly asking the question: does everyone have a right to live here? The disparity between the haves and the have-nots is apparent with one trip to the downtown east side, but what gives anyone the right to complain about not having the resources to afford living in a beautiful, temperate seaside city?
It’s clear that BC’s strategy of maintaining an artificially low minimum wage is causing harm to some groups in the lower mainland. Something needs to be done for these low-income earners. That said, sweeping changes to the wage structure of the entire province doesn’t make sense to me right now.
So what’s to be done? Real estate is in demand in this space-limited region and that’s unlikely to change. Inflation will continue to rise and costs here will continue to escalate; on whom does the responsibility rest if you can’t afford to live somewhere? As it stands right now it rests on you alone. With help unlikely to come from the province any time soon it may be that the smartest thing for those who can’t afford to live here is not to live here. And that’s a sad verdict indeed.
Two things catch my attention here.
1) Is home ownership really a pleasure? Perhaps in old-timey land when a mortgage payment wasn’t 70% of your net income. But now? Not sure how you do it.
2) For wealth to exist, there must be poverty. In any well-to-do society, someone has to clean the toilets. Why? Because the rich sure as hell aren’t going to. This is the elephant in the room. There are things that can be done to make quality of life better for the lower earners, but I think society has to acknowledge the fact that for the wealthy or upper middle class to enjoy an easy lifestyle, it has to be done – directly or indirectly – at the expense of the poor.
Thats a great point! We’re a small fam from the states and we just visited Vancouver, and fell in love with it so much that we are now considering moving there. (which is how I ran across this article)
In such a desirable area, its seems only natural to have such high costs of living. The positive side to this is that everyone who lives there must really love the city, in order to stay there.
There must be some tricks for families to living in Vancouver, such as co-renting a multi-family household, right?