As someone who's lived in Vancouver for more than 10 years, then went to Waterloo for school (and lived in Toronto for most of my co-ops/internships), I think we Canadians should be more worried about highly educated millennials fleeing Canada entirely. Everybody I know from school who were offered the option to work in the US have picked up their Canadian degrees and left.
To the Canadian tech industry: How are you ever going to become competitive with the US if you keep offering these humiliatingly low salaries and letting the best and brightest of our own talent get leeched away?
I think that's an issue everywhere in the world. I'm living in Taiwan (not from here originally), and the tech scene is really being hollowed out for years if not decades. The really best, brightest, and most motivated people are already working abroad. "Humiliating" is a strong word, but the more I think about it, the more apt it feels, there should be a lot more reward for the good techies here (there are some left, miraculously!)
It is sad when hire salaries for programmers are to be had in mainland China (e.g. Beijing) than Taiwan. There are just tech friendly places and those that are not, with the USA being at the top in terms of pay.
Yes, this is definitely not a problem unique to Canada, but I feel the effects are felt a bit more strongly here due to the fact that the barrier to entry into the US for Canadian citizens is practically nonexistent (TN Visa) compared to elsewhere in the world (H-1B).
We have a similar problem in Scotland, I know a lot of people would love to have continued living in Scotland but can make >2 times the salary as a developer by making the move down to London. The cost of living in London is higher, but the increase in pay more than makes up for this. Granted, this is a move within the UK so it's not really a drain on the UK's economy but it leads to a more London-centric economy and, with an increasingly devolved Scottish parliament, is not good for Scotland.
What's really crazy is that salaries in London aren't that high (unless you are in the financial sector). I am constantly astonished by the low salaries (for qualified programmers) offered in most parts of Britain. I suspect that you could actually get away with building a consulting firm in the country side and getting companies to offshore work from the US.
In the UK you get ahead by going into management. Tech (or sales, or accounting, or whatever) is just a short term thing you do for a few years until you get promoted into management. We don't like to reward people for being clever; we like to reward people who tell others what to do.
It's really difficult to generalize the situation in the US due to the size and diversity, in terms of industry and business scales, of the country. In general, I would say that you hit a ceiling in career development within 10 years on a technical track. (Of course, there are exceptions in industry sectors and a small number of geographic locations. But, I'm looking at the aggregate.)
However, management is no panacea. The pay is higher, but you can easily be stuck in mid-level management limbo with no say on budget or technical direction. Of course, you are "empowered" (read the remainder of the sentence with an abundance of sarcasm) to do reviews, deal with resource allocation issues for projects, operations, support work, and not to mention the coveted verification that your team does mandatory training on sexual harassment and the like. My manager is a prime example. He sits in many meetings. Ostensibly, he has a voice at the table with the "big wigs". In reality, he controls nothing and has the boring administrivia to handle. Mid-level management is also the first layer to be cut in a down-sizing.
If you stay on the technical track past 10 years, it really has to be because you love the ability to create something and see it used. I've been on the technical side for 25 years. Much of my job I find boring and intellectually vacuous. But, the times when I can actually create something still thrill me like the first time I wrote a program and saw it run.
Also IMHO management is risky because you become specialised to your companies systems.
One downsizing later you find yourself with 10 years of experience in working around limitations in the stationary ordering system at NowBustCompany. Welcome to the scrap heap.
By contrast in IT you can stay fresh more easily and be in demand should you need to move on.
The same thing can certainly happen in IT. How many IBM folks specializing in lotus notes are being laid off as we speak? Its one of the bigger problems working at BigCo's - you can end up only knowing internal people and internal systems. The only place you can conceivably jump to is companies nearby founded by other ex-BigCo people (in many cases nowadays, the primary competitors are overseas - capital has free trade to move freely but humans do not).
If you don't maintain some semblance of connection with the outside world you can get stuck. The scariest thing in the world to me is a job that is only internal facing.
I noticed this phenomenon myself. I work in retail data analytics, and deal a lot with both American and British customers, as well as technology companies.
It is mind-blowing to me how huge a disparity there is between the British and US mindsets on technology talent in an identical industry. The American companies, even the more old-fashioned ones, are (or are starting to) treating technical talent the way a sports team treats it's players. The British companies are way, way more 90's style: the techies need to stay in the closet and let the big-boy managers do all the talking. The pay, of course, reflects this. I'm sure there are numerous exceptions in both directions, but within my industry it is pervasively accurate.
It works similarly in Germany and other economies with strong social support systems as well, it seems. You're doing really well to break 65,000ish Eur as a developer, but get on the management track and the sky opens up.
As an American, when I was early in my career, and had a baby and wife to support, being underpaid was super painful. Medical care, for instance, was expensive. Being able to be easily and quickly fired without a typical European justification process is another factor. You can find yourself unemployed at any time, with any justification.
It all lit a fire under me to demand better pay. In fact, I got very used to doing so, and also got very comfortable with the idea of doing whatever it took to turn myself into a sought-after commodity, with a goal of being able to find a new job as fast as possible "just in case" things went south quickly. I quickly learned to recognize companies where technologists are treated as a cost center. These companies, if they are indeed technology focused businesses, are going to inevitably have terrible products, mediocre employees due to the dead-sea effect, and awful work environments.
I wonder if a strong social support system would have never incentivized me to get comfortable negotiating, to invest in myself as a valuable piece of human capital in a very cutthroat, competitive market. Who knows?
I think you're overestimating European social support systems a bit.
Here in the UK, you can be fired quite easily until you've been in a job for 2 years.
After that, you can still be made redundant. IBM are currently laying off a lot of people and only paying them the legal minimum settlement (1 week's pay for every year worked).
Our unemployment benefits are very low. Most professional people wouldn't even bother claiming them when between jobs, the hassle involved is huge.
It's nice to know the NHS is there and I'm not going to go bankrupt if I get cancer, but it's massively overstretched and under-resourced. I'm happier knowing I have private health insurance.
So I still feel pretty damn incentivised to look out for myself, even in this socialist utopia.
Yes, perhaps I was overestimating, especially for the UK. We Americans tend to jealously view the EU as a bit of a utopia when it comes to these things, as you correctly pointed out.
However, don't underestimate the NHS. My biggest fear when I was early in my career was not having health insurance for my baby boy and wife. Getting ill between jobs (this was before Obama's new health care expansion) could result in bankruptcy.
In fact, perhaps the biggest driver for me was the fact that my wife was not insured by her job when she became pregnant with my son. My job charged unaffordably high premiums to cover her (they don't scale to your salary, and I was being paid $11/hour, so it was literally a third of my monthly pay to cover her).
The awful medical care she was able to get was Medicaid, which is the government subsidized health plan for the poor in the United States. Good doctors don't take it at all, so you end up getting terrible health care from the doctors nobody wants to see. She received horrible pre-natal care, typical screening procedures were never done, including simply looking at her cervix to check for warning signs of pre-term labor. Had these warning signs been even checked for, we could have avoided my son being born 3 months premature. But they weren't, and we didn't. The doctors at the hospital were appalled when they found out that my wife had gone to a checkup and been cleared a few days before the labor started, and one of them began crying when she found out from us that the doctor hadn't looked at my wife's cervix. My son was given a 70% chance of survival at his birth, because my wife didn't have fucking insurance.
Just be thankful you have the NHS. Healthcare here is a fucking horror show.
I had to accept that I live in a country where not having a GOOD job means that you and your family are going to get inferior medical care in tangible, life-threatening ways.
Point taken, perhaps my final point was overstating things a bit (or underestimating just how awful the healthcare situation is in America).
I think people like me who are lucky enough to be basically healthy can get a skewed view of the NHS, because for routine medical care the 'customer service' is pretty awful.
I've come to believe this slightly mediocre experience is actually necessary to the survival of the NHS. If you could (for example) instantly see a GP and get referred to a physiotherapist every time you got a bit of back pain, the whole system would be inundated with demand. For routine stuff like this, most working people would skip the NHS altogether and go direct to a private physio (or have it covered by their employer's plan).
But it's there for all the important (and expensive) stuff like childbirth and serious illnesses. And for that we are insanely lucky.
I'm sorry to hear about what happened to your wife and son. I hope they're both doing great now.
> It's nice to know the NHS is there and I'm not going to go bankrupt if I get cancer, but it's massively overstretched and under-resourced. I'm happier knowing I have private health insurance.
I have private medical insurance in the US. I can still go bankrupt if I go to the emergency room and whomever is providing care isn't covered by my insurance plan.
> It's nice to know the NHS is there and I'm not going to go bankrupt if I get cancer, but it's massively overstretched and under-resourced. I'm happier knowing I have private health insurance.
Is the NHS really that bad? I understand there must be some disadvantages to it but it is still pretty damn impressive especially when you consider that Americans spend more per capita on health care but still need to get private health insurance.
Generally speaking, you don't need to be paid as much if you don't have to pay for your own healthcare, pension, schooling for kids, etc. I believe that's what the parent is alluding to.
£35,000 salary in the UK has the same buying power (for want of a better expression as a $60,000 US salary. Adjust for "because London" and you're looking at £45/55K (not hard in London) equating to $75K - $100K.
Thinking about it, I know a dozen or so people in the "poor deprived" north east of England earning over £40K who are under 30 years old so we're not all badly paid.
Well 45/55k is /cheap/ for a senior dev. Unless you work for a bank/inner london (or google) all you can hope for is perhaps 65k, at the top...
So yeah, if you want more, the only way is to sell off and 'manage', or go off contracting.
There's many junior 'managers' who can barely lace their own shoes who get quite a bit more than 65k.
The difference is that Brits feel poor when they come to the US, whereas Americans feel rich when they come to the UK.
Sure, PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) comparisions are important (e.g. it's easier to live in Thailand with $1000 per months than in NYC), but absolute values matter as well.
That's probably the 20% VAT that's included in the price. If you are coming from a state with no sales tax, this could explain your surprise. Hell, coming from Canada where I was paying 13% sales tax (never included in the sticker price), I found UK prices shocking.
I live in one of the most "miserabilist" parts of the UK (where Morrissey grew up, just to mention one celeb), and everyone goes crazy for Disneyland. We don't have direct flights to SF but we get dailies to Vegas and Florida. 'nuff said.
Sure they matter, but only to the extent that foreign expenditures are a part of your costs.
I.e. sure when you go to the US and have to buy USD with GBP you'l be at a disadvantage, or when you buy some electronics priced in USD, but how big a portion of your spending is that compared to food/rent/commuting/hobbies etc., all of which are priced in your local currency.
Wrong way round, when I go to the US I generally don't bother looking at the price of things as it's all so cheap. Even if the exchange rate was 1:1 it would be cheap (decent clothes are amazingly cheap, petrol/diesel is laughably cheap and eating out is great) but with the exchange rate being the way it is it's even better. The was a time before the crash when the exchange rate was $2 to the £, so long as you could afford the flights over you could have the best holidays in the US.
This is only true when being a tourist though as you are thinking in your native currency and basing purchasing decisions in that frame of reference, when you actually live and work in the respective country then (ie if you move to another country) then that stops being an issue as you are earning in the new currency.
I'm not familiar with how things in the US are, but in the UK and specifically in London a lot of senior tech people do contract work which pays considerably more than permanent positions.
Contracting rates != salaried rates. You have to charge more because you don't get any benefits (vacation, sick leave, pension), and have little job security.
Re job security - In reality as long as you produce value it is just as secure as a perm job. Also, psychologically I think it is more "secure", ie. there are no surprises. Companies hire you for a reasonably well defined task and term, hence you are fully aware how much you will earn during this period as well as when you will have to find your next gig.
What I've said above is of course anecdotal based on my circle's and my own experience, but when looking I was never without a new contract longer than a couple of weeks in the last 7 years. The next 10 years... I don't know, however another advantage being a contractor in my opinion is that you have more opportunity to be exposed to and learn new stuff, which helps staying current.
London. Agreed, next 10 years who knows. 7 years is interesting because it's just not long enough.
Pre 2008 I was surrounded by contractors all citing the benefits of the extra money. Then things thinned out. I remember one day looking up and I was sat with loads of empty seats around me and I realised just how many contractors they had let go over a period of time.
Odd - I'm ~6 years out of a Scottish university with a CS degree. Everyone of my class who stayed in Scotland owns their own property and has a much higher disposable income than those in London. They're in Edinburgh mind you, why anyone would choose to live in Glasgow is beyond me...
Edinburgh recently topped the stakes for average disposable income in the UK - £800 per month compared to £300 in London.
Londons great when you are young, but in my experience people eventually leave when they realise they cant afford property even though they are well paid. Plus they realise quality of life is important too, and that the work centric culture in London isnt for them
This definitely depends on the specific job, but in general there are more opportunities for high paying positions and a higher salary ceiling. It also depends on where you want to live within London and the kinds of activities you want to take part in. For me, I've found I have way more disposable income since the move to London as I had a huge salary increase from my previous job in Edinburgh. Although I have much, much less free time and would say I'm generally more unhappy
Amazon opened the Toronto office back in 2011 because there was demand- Canadians who didn't want to live in America anymore- often because of family, friends back home or because they wanted to have kids and not raise them as Americans, culturally.
It started with less than 10 people, plus the hiring they were able to do locally. It's now an office of over 300 people, maybe 100 of which transferred from Seattle. And the transfers back haven't slowed much- lots of folks simply want to come back home after a few years.
Lots of room here to grow. If Trump wins, I expect we'll need it.
Then I would guess you haven't worked as a developer at Amazon. I can talk for hours on what I like and don't like about the culture here, but suffice to say the benefits far outweigh any downsides to me.
Or, you can look instead at Google Waterloo, which is a similar-sized office just an hour away from here. Same pattern.
Amazon already has an office on the low here in Vancouver that I heard has upwards of 200 employees and started out the same at 10. I heard it is also used as a staging ground to get people into the US office, and also easier to get foreign workers in Canada than the US.
I moved from the US to Canada (European originally), Canada on the outside looks like the US but inside it's closer to Europe from my point of view (not everybody agrees and think we're very similar).
In terms of politics and religion, US is an outlier compared to western countries, many US Democratic politicians (say "liberal" Hillary Clinton) would be considered "conservative" in Canada, we're way more "progressive" than the US. Donald Trump for example would have a big chance of being prosecuted for hate speech in Canada or taken to the Human Rights Tribunal if he was a local politician.
I know quite a few tech people in Canada who had the chance to move to the US and they wouldn't even consider it for cultural reasons, perceived violence or whatever. I know a lot of people that moved as well.
American: huh, guns are great, healthcare IF you can afford it, language #2 = spanish, hockey is a sport they play in Canada, worlds most powerful military, Trump, avg. American knows little about Canada, metric system - who needs that, good universities
Canadian: eh, no guns allowed, healthcare FREE for all, language #2 = french, hockey is the 2nd most popular religion, neighbors with country with worlds most powerful military - they'll have our back, no Trump, avg Canadians knows a little about America, metric system, good universities - taxpayer subsidized
But there are plenty of Americans that fit most of your Canadian stereotypes (see sanders's popularity among young Americans for example) and probably vice versa too.
I suspect 2 US states that are far from each other will have more cultural differences than a US state and Canadian province that are adjacent.
Gun culture is a big aspect of it; I wouldn't want my hypothetical children raised in a place where people keep handguns around 'for protection'. Conservatism; Bernie Sanders would be a centrist up here, not a liberal. The strange mania of patriotism and flag-love. The military culture with half the tax dollars spent there and politicians fighting to increase it. The absolute hatred of taxes.
It's not that all Americans are like this (or that no Canadians are) but so many are that the laws, rules and norms reflect it. The culture is much further in those directions than I want to be.
I loved living in Seattle, which is more liberal than Canada in many ways, but it's still very American.
In a nutshell: Canada was one of the first countries to legalize same-sex marriage. America was one of the last in the Western world. No one is surprised by either of these two facts.
It's fascinating, in Saskatoon we've got a pretty neat little tech community. Some people leave, but there's a few companies that identified that people were leaving or contracting remotely and increased their salaries to be sufficiently enticing to keep people here.
There's still some people who leave (apparently there was a thing for a while at Apple where people would hang their Saskatchewan license plates on their cubes), but as a whole there's a lot of people staying and making good money here. In the last 10 years or so since I've graduated, entry-level salaries are up probably 50-70% and intermediate-experience salaries around $90-100k/yr aren't unheard of.
I think this is a rather unfair, and possibly dangerous, attitude, to simply dismiss this phenomenon as typical young people "adventuring". Is it really adventuring if it's a decision made after countless hours of carefully weighing different employment options and coming to the conclusion that the US offers far more opportunities and far better rewards for our careers?
I have nothing but anecdotes to support that the brain drain is actually happening at any significant scale, but it's certainly not difficult to imagine why young people who are offered a US position would come to these same conclusions, given the sorry state of the Canadian tech industry today.
RE: Settling down. Seattle, which is a 3 hour drive from Vancouver, offers about double the average Vancouver salary with comparable housing prices. Needless to say, I'm not planning on going back until the situation improves dramatically.
Disclaimer: grew up in Ontario, studied at UWaterloo, then worked at BB, then worked in London, UK for 2 years, and now moving to Silicon Valley on a TN visa.
I wouldn't worry _too_ much about the brain drain. Sure the US is more lucrative for young people, but I would say Canada is more lucrative for families. Consider the public schools in Canada vs in the US, and cost of a UW degree vs a comparable university degree in the US. I don't think that most young Canadians who move to the US will stay there permanently.
So the consolation is what? That although people will flee to spend their best years elsewhere and sell their potential there at least they'll come back to Canada so their younglings will benefit as they did from the better formative conditions?
Nope. I left Canada 8 years ago with two school-age kids who are now finishing high school. They'll probably go back to Canada for university, but honestly higher pay solves a lot of problems.
As long as they can fill the seats they have open, paying "Canadian" rates, why not?
Sure, they are aware that some talent is leaving for greener pastures southward, but there is no "shortage" of talent available in the Vancouver market.
When/if enough of the developer supply has exited, that filling those seats becomes difficult, salaries will increase.
This definitely looks like a tragedy of the commons type situation. Companies act in self-interest by paying as low as they possibly can, with no regards for the damage being done to the Canadian talent pool.
It honestly feels rather hopeless for the Canadian tech industry at this point.
Or maybe that Canadians are willing to work for less? (I remember reading an article that auto manufacturers charge more for the same cars in Canada simply because Canadians will pay more.)
Local salaries are driven by supply and demand. Tech workers in Vancouver are paid very well compared to other workers in the city. If all tech workers suddenly demanded 20% raises I guess it would happen, but at lowered profit margin for the employers who may end up relocating.
Good point. Perhaps Americans are better negotiators, and haggling over price/salary "isn't done" in Canada (I know nothing about Canadian culture, but fascinated about the possible effects of culture on an economy).
This isn't done in America very much either. We have a white list of things that are appropriate to haggle price on (cars, houses, things on craigslist), but everything else is basically, "wait for sales."
Well, in the case of Toronto, I make a better salary relative to the cost of living (all things considered -- rent, health care, insurance) than I could make in SF or NY at the moment. Taxes in Cali aren't that different from Ontario, but the cost of living is nuts (and for the most part astonishingly suburban). Even if I could get slightly more money, I'd lose a lot of quality of life because my entire network is here. Personally, the idea of dropping my entire life for a pay cheque would necessitate a substantial increase in pay.
I think companies pay what the market will bear, and enough people feel the same way I do.
There is always (your) life cycles. Both myself and my brother Waterloo grads in the 90s. He is in the sv and I stayed in Toronto. My company sent me down to the valley to "help" for a few months (ie living and food all expensed) when I was still fresh. Hated it.. there is nothing at night. So I never have the urge to move there afterwards.
Then once you have multiple kids, single income doesn't take you far in the valley even with Google scale salary and mortgage. Plus Amazon has dev centre in downtown Toronto that pays well (not silicon valley well, but Seattle well). (Yes, startups don't pay well in Toronto, but then there are lots of small and profitable sw firms that pays decently).
Or just convince google to move that Kitchener office to Toronto, when so many people are commuting anyway..
well, that's why so many people commute from SF to the valley, if they want a certain culture. Toronto suburbs seem to go on forever, so not fair to compare Toronto to SV (and not SF or OAK)
Exactly same issue with India. India has tons of IT Company and Government invests a lot in education.. obviously pay is more in US but I think it is also environment.
That makes me wonder what has US done right to remain talent magnet
It sells itself better. Given the same conditions, an US offer will sound better because the benefits (the pay) will be highlighted while the drawbacks will be presented in a lesser manner or even hidden from view entirely. This is more so when it's about foreigners for which the discrepancy of what's currently available to them and what can be promised is simply staggering. Here is less about the job offers in themselves as means to cover needs as it is with them as advertised goods that generate tremendous amounts of attraction. That's why so many foreign talented individuals are jumping through hops and work on mediocre conditions (which includes the payment) just to be able to dream about the advertised big rewards. I say "to dream" because it works like a lottery, it's a rat race not for a piece of cheese but for a chance to that piece.
There is a lot to talked about on this subject, but it's suffice to say that at its root the difference comes from what is a fair trade, which differs greatly from USA in comparison to other places.
The issue in India is that our IT Companies are way overhyped. None of them are doing well financially, all of them barely scraping through each quarter given the Industry at-large stance on outsourcing.
The ~$700k number the article cites takes into account condos.
If you're only looking at detached houses then Vancouver is as expensive as SF if not more expensive. The median price is $1.3 million in the east side and $3.2 in the west side.
> The price of a typical Vancouver home rose 21 percent to C$775,300 ($584,290) in January from a year earlier, according to the city’s real estate board.
The costs quoted in the article are a bit vague. If one were to assume that by "Vancouver home", she was referring to a "house" located within the city of Vancouver, you would be in for a rude awakening. Average house price is pushing 2M and what that will buy you is a place to tear down in what was/is the less desirable part of the city.
If your talking a 1 bedroom condo in the city, 500k will get you started and the 775k quoted will get you something a bit above the basics.
When you can figure out how your going to pay that mortgage with your "Vancouver tech" salary, and still be able to afford to live, I'm all ears :)
Problem is those $700k condos are being bid up to $800k, and often sold so fast there's no time to go back to your bank and request an additional $100k mortgage. The Chinese buyers have cash to make the sale immediately.
The newer buildings are now exclusively luxury condos, like the tower being built on Harwood St that's one unit per floor for offshore millionaires.
Based on some quick Googling and Glassdoor, it looks like average salaries are ~110k vs. ~80k. The cost of rent in San Francisco looks to be ~190% higher.
Not sure how well those figures line up with reality, though.
Most people here make way above average, and that's when differences increase dramatically. In the US I make close to $300k. In Europe, and London in particular, I get offered under 80k EUR.
Your right. For a typical 1 Bedroom unit, in the city, you would be looking in the $1500 ballpark, a 2 Bedroom unit closer to 2K. For a 3 Bedrooom unit, well good luck with that.
Even with the cost/affordability, the bigger problem is the lack of availability of rental units. The current vacancy rate in the city is at 0.8% and heading downwards.
They can be. It's more accurate to say that Vancouver has a narrower range of salaries with a lower ceiling.
Right now I'm in NYC making about 4x what I would make in Vancouver for a similar job (disregarding exchange rate! It'd be ~5-6x if we include exchange rate), so yeah, still way ahead despite NYC's astronomical cost of living.
I agree as an American. I've met some super smart Canadians in SF and DC. They all say basically the same thing: most Canadian cities have a high cost of living, and salaries don't always keep up, so much so that even the Bay Area is attractive over Vancouver, since at least there's tons of jobs to choose from and they can optimize on salary with many offers.
It's not that Canada or anywhere else in the world has humiliatingly low salaries, it's just that the USA has such strong regulations on skilled immigration, that the wages for developers are artificially inflated.
Most other countries, when faced with a shortage of workers in an industry, prioritise them over everyone else. In New Zealand, you need a certain amount of points to immigrate, and being in a high demand industry gives you a whole stack of points. Meanwhile, the USA still runs a lottery for immigration, as well as H1B, which is a lot more restricted than skilled immigration to a lot of other countries.
"the wages for developers are artificially inflated"
The wages are reasonable given extremely strict "culture fit" requirements. Must be male, must be white, must be under 30 with precisely 1-3 years experience never more or less, must be an ivy grad or close equiv, must perform well in hazing rituals like the whiteboard interview, must tolerate sweatshop working conditions, etc etc etc.
I mean, if you want to hire developers, the USA currently has way too many. Regardless, if you require incredibly narrow "culture" criteria, then there is going to be a massive shortage and opening the floodgates will be useless.
Seriously, does anyone think a bro-filled startup would hire, for example, a middle aged black woman immigrated from Senegal with 6 years experience and a non-ivy degree? "Oh I'm sorry, you're overqualified". "I don't think you'd be a culture fit".
You can be a developer and not be working at a startup.
There's a general shortage of developers. I'm fairly sure that IBM and other large companies are short of developers, and they'd absolutely hire "a middle aged black woman immigrated from Senegal with 6 years experience and a non-ivy degree"
Why does everyone act like everybody else wants to work in startups. I don't. I was a nice job, where I come to work at 0900, leave at 1730, and do my own thing outside of work.
I'd hazard a guess that 90% of programmer jobs aren't at startups.
I see this as a problem all over the world. - San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Vancouver, London, Oslo... Really the list could go on for quite a while.
So many of these cities feel like they have to retain their "identity" or the "feel" of the town, so they set restrictions that make it very hard to develop properties that can hold more people. The result is always the same: continually increasing prices in the center of the city whether you want to rent or buy, so you have to go further and further out to find something affordable, especially if you are young or if your parents can't help you finance a purchase.
This is going to continue until planning commissions start allowing the construction of higher density housing.
I'm not sure if a fix would be so easy. Housing prices have been rising everywhere, even in small cities like my home town, where a decent amount of construction is going on.
I think that the biggest reason for growing housing prices are the currently low interest rates.
There are two factors that cause rising prices (due to low interest rates):
1) It's more affordable than ever to borrow money, so people are willing to pay higher prices, and even people with little savings can afford to buy a home. At 8% interest rates nobody would be able to afford current prices. This means that sellers can ask much higher prices.
2) Since interest rates are so low, people are increasingly looking at the housing market as an investment opportunity. Aspiring homeowners now have to compete with deep-pocketed investors leading to a further increase in prices.
So I think that housing prices would naturally fall if interest rates went up. (Of course, for young people without savings this makes little difference; they would likely end up paying just as much due to higher financing costs.)
> I'm not sure if a fix would be so easy. Housing prices have been rising everywhere, even in small cities like my home town, where a decent amount of construction is going on.
Yeah, this doesn't get enough attention. Everyone's so focused on NYC / Boston / San Francisco / Seattle / Denver, that they're missing that this problem is happening almost universally, in the vast majority of markets across the US.
I live in a very small city in flyover Midwest that commonly hits the top ten "affordable places to live" lists, and has the lowest average incomes of any market in the entire US. Despite all of that, even here our costs have skyrocketed. Monthly rents have doubled over the past five years.
It's feels like another housing bubble, but this time everyone is refusing to let it pop.
So I think that housing prices would naturally fall if interest rates went up.
The problem is that falling house prices put people "underwater", and rising interest rates put people on variable rate mortgages in arrears. This inflicts a huge amount of pain on middle class floating voters.
Yes, I think this is a huge problem -- if interest rates rise again, a lot of people will suffer. Therefore policy makers have a big incentive to keep interest rates low.
I don't know how this will end, but I don't think that the current low interest situation, which incentivises credit and discourages saving, can be stable in the long run.
Both of those things encourage economic growth, though. Until we come up with some better way of meeting our demand-side needs, rates are going to stay low.
Well that's the downside of variable rate, yes, but that's more of a feature than a bug.
Locking in the interest rate costs a little bit more (in the form of a higher fixed rate), so perhaps the folks taking the variable rate weren't financially prepared to handle those terms in any case?
I think one way to soften the blow could be to make all property sales, even your first home that you live in full-time, fully capital-gains taxable. Homes need to be seen less as investment vehicles.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but the whole point of making the changes to the capital gains taxes is so that it only affects people who sell. The old ladies will simply be earning less profit when they _sell_ their homes, there would be no "huge tax bill" while they are still living in them.
It's telling that Toronto isn't on that list. It's taken me a decade of living here to really understand what makes this place tick, and one thing that's become clear is that a near universal friendliness to newcomers in both word and deed is a huge part of Toronto's identity. I've said it before in many conversations on the topic, but I think that this pervasive openness is going to do nothing but help Toronto's place on the world stage
I suspect Toronto's the most multicultural, international city on earth, and it's high on my list of places I'd live if I wasn't married to someone with zero tolerance for snow.
Unfortunately, Toronto still manages to suffer from a god-awful housing market made worse by insane NIMBYism in the most affluent and attractive neighborhoods. I think "I got mine, time to dig a moat around it" is a pretty universal phenomenon.
The snow really isn't a factor at all anymore. If you live right (near the subway & in a neighbourhood where you can get everything you may need in a pinch locally) you don't even notice it. I can probably count on one hand the number of days that I've been impacted by snow in the past few years.
In terms of NIMBYism, I don't think there's much more here than in similar cities. To my eye it's more about people being indifferent to the effects of gentrification on marginal populations, and a growing danger of homogeneity in many 'hoods.
Agreed. It would be nice to see Toronto build more of it's identity around this inclusiveness and openness. Surely the fact that Toronto is now the most diverse city in the world is worth trumpeting a little bit.
There was an article a couple of months ago, shared all around urbanist social media, lamenting that rental prices in Seattle were declining because of an increased supply of housing (it was in one of those ubiquitous business insider journal type magazines). For a variety of reasons, it can be hard to increase supply, but that's the best way (barring a recession) to lower the cost of housing.
And it's not even that, rental prices in Seattle haven't declined, just the percent growth rate in rents year-over-year is declining.
Which makes it even more ridiculous to see them lamenting it. They seem to feel like they deserve double-digit rental growth rates every single year, and "falling" to a single-digit growth rate just won't cut it.
Vancouver has various restrictions just like any town, but in general it would be incorrect to state that they restrict construction or don't build high density buildings. Comparing a photo of 1990s downtown Vancouver to now it is shocking how many glassy residential towers there are now. Vancouver and its satellite cities are constantly building new condo buildings.
I suppose you can always argue that a city can build more, but I've seen more construction cranes in Vancouver than just about any city I've ever visited.
I think more dominant issues that have influenced the price of Vancouver housing is low interest rates, lax lending rules, government policies that promote home ownership and speculation, and the influx of foreign capital.
Actually, we do restrict construction particularly in the "view corridor" that is downtown. It's not that we don't build buildings, it's that they are all under 40 stories, whereas a typical city of our size would have buildings of the same type pushing 100 stories easy.
Right of course but my point is that view cones and other restrictions on the form of housing are not a dominant factor when you compare how much housing supply they would bring versus the level of housing being created elsewhere.
Vancouver is upzoning the entire corridor along Cambie street and is planning on building significant residential parcels at Oakridge (~2000 units) and Pearson Dogwoods (~3000 units). If you go out further to Burnaby, New Westminster and Coquitlam they're building tons. Burnaby just announced their long term plan for a redevelopment of Lougheed Mall that will create 11,000 units.
Basically adding further height downtown isn't really necessary and the gains are minor in comparison with the gains achieved by rezoning low density single family houses and low density commercial to higher density forms.
> This is going to continue until planning commissions start allowing the construction of higher density housing.
Or we have more remote jobs, and/or satellite offices. For example in the UK why have your developers in London? Open an office in Newcastle or Glasgow, you're just a few hours away by train (an hour on the plane) and you'll save a fortune on salaries and office space (and probably a tax break or two). Or use remote workers where it makes sense.
> Or we have more remote jobs, and/or satellite offices.
So much this. Especially for the "tech industry". A good portion of Vancouver's startups and tech companies are "downtown". Why not move out of the core? Why not add a satellite office somewhere affordable? Why not start to offer remote work options?
This is not an industry where you need to be physically present to get the job done, for the most part, yet the tech companies here(and elsewhere) aren't/don't seem to be looking at work options other than the status quo.
>This is going to continue until planning commissions start allowing the construction of higher density housing.
This is already happening here in New York City and has been for a few years. It's not solving the problem and honestly this seems like pretty a reductive way of stating the problem.
New York City construction rates are extremely low. It only seems high because high density means you're always close to development, just like you always hear ambulance sirens even though heart attacks aren't more common.
Many Manhattan neighborhoods are classified as historic and don't easily allow tearing down old buildings for new ones. Many buildings in other Manhattan neighborhoods are landmarked and can't easily be improved. And though he upzoned some areas of the city, Bloomberg also downzoned large swaths of outer borough neighborhoods, preventing cheap multi-family home construction (to replace single-family homes). The outer boroughs also suffer from onerous parking minimums, limiting the amount of land used for housing.
De Blasio has been slow in pushing for any sort of upzoning. He's only recently made his first attempt with the relatively conservative East New York rezoning.
The key is that when construction is allowed to lag behind needs, prices will rice much more quickly than they otherwise might. But sure, I agree that there will always be multiple factors at play.
Yes, and that won't change until we have something like a land value tax that is based on active use of the land. There needs to be a mechanism in place to stop wealthy investors buying up property they barely use. At the moment luxury property in a large city is seen as a safe investment (for the most part).
It's sad, but with the level of corruption in many governments, the only way to get change that serves the people is to educate the people so that they can see through their misinformation. Once the population is highly informed about the issues, they can't pull their usual tricks without a high risk of losing their job.
I realise that the general population should have an active role to play in all democracies, but sometimes you'd wish they'd just do the right thing without needing to be micromanaged through it.
This seems to be a direct result of capital flight from China. Wealthy chinese who are able to get their money out (through corruption, money laundering, or otherwise) are looking for somewhere safe to park their money for the inevitable decline in value of the yuan. China can only artificially peg their money to the dollar for so long, until they run out of dollars, and they are drawing down their reserves at a record pace due to the appreciation of the dollar.
I'm standing at my desk in my apartment that I pay $1589/month for. An equivalent apartment in SF or NYC would be $3500 or higher.
The problems are two-fold.
1) Vancouver hasn't created a single-family detached home lot since the 1970s. There is an ocean to the west, the US border to the south, Burrard Inlet and mountains to the north. There just isn't any land. The only way to expand is east into the Fraser Valley.
The single-family detached home is dead. Live in a condo. Everyone gets a view. Everyone gets sunshine. Everyone gets services. Everyone gets a park a block away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouverism
2) Vancouver companies pay dick-all for salaries because Vancouver companies make dick-all for revenue. Everyone that lives here and can afford works or consults for a company that is not from Vancouver. A tech company that can't afford to pay an employee to rent a $1589/month apartment is not a tech company.
If property values were tied directly to incomes, as they are in any normal market, and what you are saying is true about salaries being low, the Vancouver market would not be as hot as it is right now.
The market is being artificially inflated by foreign buyers. Don't forget that Vancouver is a very attractive destination for wealthy Chinese multi-nationals. This is the same phenomenon that has wealthy Chinese buying $5 million luxury apartments in Manhattan through shell companies to hide their identity.
I saw an answer on Jeopardy! recently that described Vancouver for one of the daily doubles. Oglethorpe math professor Philip Tiu apparently had a long enough brain fart before responding correctly that I had time to yell at the television, "How do you not know Vancouver?! You're Chinese!"
My spouse immediately informed me, "That's racist."
We then had a short discussion about the ways in which the Chinese nouveaux riches expatriate their assets.
It's not racist, but it is prejudiced. Racism is basically "prejudice + power". You don't have any power over the person on the screen, so your comment is just prejudiced. If, on the other hand, you were using your hypothetical sway on social media to besmirch him in some way, that would be racism.
I'm American but I've never read "To Kill a Mocking Bird". "How could you have never read an iconic piece of American literature that literally every public school child between the 70s and 90s was forced to read in highschool?!" Easy: I didn't go to public school, and I wasn't in highschool until the new millennium.
It was a stereotypes-based joke. It's like pushing a boulder rolling downhill as it passes by. You're not so much using your own power as adding just a little to the destructive power that is already there. In this case, the stereotype is "all Chinese people own a house/condo in Vancouver", which is an abuse of the conditional probability that a property is owned by a Chinese person given that it is in Vancouver (and also clearly impossible, due to there being somewhat fewer than a billion residences in Vancouver). Imputed property ownership is not a derogatory stereotype, so I don't feel particularly bad about perpetuating it.
I was forced to read _To Kill a Mockingbird_. As a result of the forced consumption and interminable in-class literary dissection, I don't have a very high opinion of it, and only a vague recollection of the plot. Nothing could make me hate a book quite like English class.
But that's actual fact of having a national literary canon shoved down our throats, and we're looking at non-factual stereotypes here. As an American, you would have had no chance at all at answering the question, because Americans don't know where anything is outside the borders of the U.S., unless there is a war happening there, and then we can correctly identify the continent it is on about 80% of the time. To the stereotypical American, Vancouver might be barely recognizable as a city somewhere in Washington state, just as Montreal is in Vermont, Toronto is in Ohio, Windsor is a suburb of Detroit, and Ottawa is an illusion maintained by the Canadian military to distract its enemies from the real capital in Toronto.
The movie Canadian Bacon is based almost entirely on this national stereotype, and the Canadian national stereotype.
Yeah, let's see some sources on how foreign buyers are propping up the Vancouver market. Last time I looked (around 2010) all the studies were claiming that immigrants that were buying homes had borrowed money from their Chinese parents, and thus this was foreign money. But almost everyone under the age of 40 borrows to buy.
I think the real problem lies in interest rates. They show a clear correlation between sustained low interest rates and asset inflation.
"If property values were tied directly to incomes..."
They are not because there is no land left.
It is impossible to buy a single-family detached home because there is no land left. Renting a condo is still very economical compared to other large cities.
A New York Times article with a single mention of Vancouver with zero hard data on the real estate sales in Vancouver does not constitute data.
The British Columbia Real Estate Association points out that, as of mid-2015:
> the available data and analysis on the housing stock and flow of residential transactions in the region suggest that foreign ownership of housing is considerably less than 5 per cent of the housing stock and not more than 5 per cent of sales activity.
Less than 5 percent of sales activity and ownership hardly constitutes a major factor for inflation of prices; sure, there might be some impact, but remember that the other 95% of transactions are performed by Canadian citizens.
Canadians need to stop blaming foreign investment as the reason for absurd home valuations, and start looking at the fact that the debt-to-income ratio is 165%, where most people have leveraged themselves at dangerously high ratios (I personally know of a few couples that have household incomes of ~$120,000/year and have $650,000 mortgages in Toronto), mostly due to the incredibly low interest rate environment that has been present since the 2008 financial crisis, and worsened by the lowering of rates last year.
The reason homes are expensive is due to rampant, unfounded speculation on the housing market, fueled by the lowest interest rate environment making cheap money readily available to people who would most likely not be able to afford their mortgage if interest rates rise a percent or two in the next few years.
> "A tech company that can't afford to pay an employee to rent a $1589/month apartment is not a tech company."
Tech companies don't have to be in Vancouver. The fundamental component that a tech company requires is talent. There's relatively little distinguishing talent in Vancouver that can't be found in several other comparable jurisdictions within Canada. A tech company that pays higher wages simply because the employee lives in a high-cost jurisdiction is a tech company that is less competitive.
That's the from the company view, now to address to your personal view:
> "I'm standing at my desk in my apartment that I pay $1589/month for."
and:
> "The single-family detached home is dead. Live in a condo. Everyone gets a view. Everyone gets sunshine. Everyone gets services. Everyone gets a park a block away. "
Yikes! That rent adds up to $381,000 over 20 years. You can easily find single-family detached homes for that price in places like Waterloo, Ottawa, or Montreal suburbs and in 20 years have it paid off and own an asset while Vancouver renter will have no asset and more rent to pay. Those 3 locations have comparable tech job prospects as Vancouver with a whole lot more sunshine in the winter.
Agree with you 100%, but they are. And a good portion of those are in downtown or in the city proper. Why? I can see if your an Amazon or Microsoft and need to hire 100+ developers but the majority of Vancouver startups need nowhere near that many people. Why would you locate your startup in Vancouver?
apparently those corporations can find the people willing to work at those salaries. It's up to the tech workers to decide whether the location is worth the lower bank account.
> This seems to be a direct result of capital flight from China.
It's even happening to tiny PEI in the east we have seen a massive surge of Chinese people (to clarify yes from China) investing in and living in the province.
Five years ago you could walk down the street and it was typical small town Canada last summer I went to a Starbucks and every single person was Chinese. There are now at least two if not three Buddhist monasteries too.
I'm not complaining I like the new investment and more people living here I'm saying it's not just a Vancouver or Toronto thing. Although here it's more business investing here not so much speculative condo buying.
I wouldn't even say it's speculative condo buying - it's more like treating the condo as a piggy bank. It's considered a safer investment because it can be purchased through a shell company (LLC), hiding the true identity of the buyer, and unlike the funds in a bank account, can't easily be seized.
"In London, Chinese investors are purchasing high-end apartments in wealthy neighborhoods and big skyscrapers in the financial district. In Canada, they are paying $1 million for modest Vancouver bungalows. In Australia, a Chinese sovereign wealth fund bought nine office towers, one of the biggest real estate transactions in that nation’s history."
The shell company used to purchase high-end property is mainly a strategy I learned about that is prominent in the Manhattan luxury apartment market. If someone like Brad Pitt is buying a $10M condo, and doesn't want his name in the public property records, he will buy it with an LLC. This trick is also used by foreign buyers to hide their identity, especially if their money is a result of criminal activity.
You're right, but the implication of your post is that there's nothing Canada could do about the problem.
The correct response is that Canada should implement Australian-style restrictions on foreign ownership of real estate. This problem has been solved before, it's not that hard.
It would suck for those who bought into the game late, those in the high-end RE business, but the benefits of having a real estate market that has actual price discovery based on the population who could actually live in the properties is definitely worth it, because housing would become more affordable, disposable income would increase, and consumer debt would decrease.
I mean, yes, but who says cities have to allow Chinese investment to dominate the market rather than the people who live in these cities? Maybe that is the best political choice, but it is a political choice and we all pretend it's a neutral and inexorable natural law.
> who says cities have to allow Chinese investment to dominate the market rather than the people who live in these cities?
Vancouver's dirty little secret is that the real estate market IS the economy.
If restrictions were placed on foreign investment and this RE bubble burst, the city/region would be in for a world of hurt.
If you know what $30 oil is doing to our neighboring provinces, you would get an idea of what the future holds for Vancouver without it's "foreign investment" fix.
That's been a common theme among people talking about the rising house prices in Australia as well. That Chinese people just buy property to park their money overseas.
But when someone looked at the numbers the number of houses that were bought by Chinese people were in the low single digit percentages.
While this could create some upward pressure on prices it cannot be the only factor. For instance in Australia most of the blame lies of negative gearing (where any money paid in interest on a property can be claimed against all income).
A single digit percentage of actors in the market with the objective of not losing 100% of their capital by turning it into a hard asset in another country is sufficient to move the market.
In Australia it is the combination of negative gearing AND the 50% capital gains tax concession on investment properties. Average rental losses per negative gearer were reasonably constant and small up until 2001 when the 'sound economic manager' Costello introduced the CGT discount, intially for a limited time only to make up for the introduction of the GST. From 2001 onwards, claimed net rental losses have blown out significantly, such that the annual forgone tax is greater than what the federal government spends on universities. This is because the gains permitted with such generous CGT concessions more than make up for year-on-year rental losses. This strategy only makes sense when house prices are rising, which has been the case for ~20 years in Australia. Given that Australians are at, or close to the limit of their ability to take on more credit, real standards of living (real net disposable income per capita) have been falling for the last five years, it seems that the bubble may not be sustainable. Unless you internationalise the housing market and make it a place for turning cash into hard assests, like London.
The data has been notoriously unavailable - when did someone figure out the numbers?
But yeah as siblings said, even a small minority can move the market like that. Just hearing of these huge (successful) prices makes people list higher, etc.
Yeah, funnily enough that's where I used to live, although in an old block of apartments, and I believe I know which place you are talking about. Granted the single family houses around those streets are not exactly 'low density' as they are packed in quite a bit.
HAM is not the only reason. Canadian banks are lending insane amounts. People always say Canada's banks are "sound". Every bank is sound until land prices go into reverse.
>Every bank is sound until land prices go into reverse.
Generalize that to building prices, and if true, that's going to make it very difficult to use construction to lower housing prices. Banks aren't going to lend for construction if they think making loans is going to threaten the bank's own soundness.
Or to put it another way, if falling housing prices add unacceptable risk to construction loans, then the banks efforts to mitigate that risk might include not lending if housing prices are in decline. Which means you could sweep away all zoning and NIMBY impediments, and you still wouldn't be able to use construction as a way to lower housing costs, because the banks wouldn't let that happen.
You are treating it as a big brain. It's split many ways. There are many banks, they don't behave as a mass. Some will lend because they want / need the income.
Secondly most lending decisions are made by employees. Their interests are not aligned with the long-term health of the bank. They want their bonus. Who cares if it blows up in 10 years time?
We've seen this in 2008. Banks behaved insanely.
Finally if banks were playing the long game together why pump up land prices until they are backed into a corner? Better to drip to maintain throughput.
It's not 2008 anymore. Things have changed substantially. Banks became much more risk-adverse in the wake of the burst of the housing bubble and subsequent economic crisis. The era in which loan officers are incentivized to skip risk evaluation has passed.
My point was not that there's some grand conspiracy among banks. Merely that any loan that uses real estate as collateral will be riskier if real estate prices are declining, than if real estate prices are increasing. That means that construction loans are going to be harder to get when prices are decreasing. Which suggests that the ability to use construction loans to lower the absolute price of housing is self-limiting.
In the past year, I've had 3 colleagues quit their jobs at a Vancouver startup to work remotely for a US company (to get paid in USD). Tech salaries in Vancouver are too low for the cost of living.
Its especially discouraging to see an employer with offices in Seattle and Vancouver offer their Canadian employees salaries that are >30% lower than their American counterparts. I won't be surprised if Canadians working remotely becomes commonplace.
I'd agree 100% on this. As a Canadian, looking at our future career prospects it is in our best interest to learn how to work well as remote employees.
The USD median house price in Vancouver is misleading too, because it wasn't long ago that the dollar was at parity, and incomes certainly haven't changed much as the dollar has dropped by a third.
Anyway, so far the effect on Victoria seems to be our own mini (compared to Vancouver; still nuts for most of the world) housing boom. I have three couples of close friends all house-hunting right now, and it's not a fun time to be doing so. I can't imagine committing to pay the better part of a million dollars for something with less than a day's deliberation, no time for an inspection, and a need to offer over asking price to even have a hope of "winning".
Honest question here - why not just rent and wait it out?
edit/from the article; Rentals are hard to come by, and just as unaffordable. The vacancy rate of 0.8 percent is one of the lowest in the country, and the average monthly rent of C$937 for a bachelor suite is tied at highest with the cost in Toronto, according to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. Rents for newly built units and renovated basement suites are pricier.
You've pretty much got it. Still, while expensive, renting is still much more affordable than buying. The other problem is, decent SFH rentals are very difficult to come by. Here in Victoria, my friends who are looking for houses are all starting families and would like more space than most apartments offer. Many of them would be fine with renting as long as prices are unbalanced, but the rental market selection if you want something larger than a 2-bedroom apartment is really sparse. Plus, many of the places you can find are only there until the owners manage to sell them, which obviously isn't ideal if you're looking to settle down.
"The better part of" a million dollars. I believe the SFH median in Victoria is around $600,000 CAD. (Which of course means half of them cost more than that.) My point is that it's a lot of money to spend with no time to think it over or do due diligence.
I'm a millennial immigrant to Vancouver (came with my family when I was 10).
I'm a software developer by trade.
The problems are real, but the outcome is greatly exaggerated.
The fact is MOST millennials outside the most lucrative STEM/Law/Finance fields are in no position to be buying real estate anywhere in North America.
And the Vancouver rental market is actually not half bad. You can get a basement suite for under $1000 in the city proper. You can get a 2 bedroom downtown for $2000. Or at least you could a year ago, the Canadian dollar has plummeted.
Meanwhile people are weighing in with terrible salary stories. It's also not exactly true. Yes, I could make more in Seattle, and even MORE in Silicon Valley. But there are lifestyle costs to both. I value the Vancouver lifestyle quite highly. Now, full disclosure, I moved to Europe for a 2-3 year transfer with my company last year. But this was also a lifestyle based decision to allow me to travel more - I took a paycut.
The truth about salaries is Amazon pays very well (though not as well as in the States). Microsoft pays very well. So does Facebook, and Apple, and Salesforce pays the best (supposedly they are competitive with US salaries).
These big players are forcing the rest of the market to kick up. And all these players are also relatively new to the scene (most growth in the last 5 years). As a result, I foresee in the next few years a lot of ex-employees from these places going out on their own and doing great things in the startup community, or commanding similar salaries from local shops that want to get experienced engineers with big scale experience.
The problem with Vancouver is it's hard to find a city to compare it to. Yes, the economy isn't the strongest it can be, but the proximity to nature is unbelievable and very difficult to match. That intangible IS worth something despite people not taking advantage of it complaining that "that's all there is". If you don't care about world-class ocean and mountain sports in close proximity to outstanding international food options, this city is not for you. There are places with more vibrant art and culture and nightlife scenes, no doubt. But if you make the most of Vancouver's strengths, it is unbeatable.
Maybe major major cities, but it's not unreasonable to get a 3-4k sq ft house for less than $1400-1500 a month all in in "B" cities or outlying areas of major cities.
> The problems are real, but the outcome is greatly exaggerated.
> The fact is MOST millennials outside the most lucrative STEM/Law/Finance fields are in no position to be buying real estate anywhere in North America.
Well then it sounds to me like the problem is not overstated but understated.
I'll be honest. It's hard for me to hate on Vancouver too much as I truly think Urban planning is difficult.
I think people should move to lower costs cities if the situation makes sense for them. Vancouver might be at a disadvantage due to Brain Drain at this specific moment in time, but I believe there's an argument to be made that Vancouver has significantly been a beneficiary of Brain Drain from other countries in the past.
As the USA and Canada continues to transition to a knowledge based economy, our cities should emulate what made Vancouver a economic powerhouse, which is a world class research university, great public transportation, and effective immigration programs. Now, there are things you can't emulate like great weather or prestige, but we can make more cities like San Francisco or Vancouver.
Toronto is not much better. Million dollar homes in the boonies like Vaughan and Stouffville. It is a disaster for young people starting out. We deferred a home purchase since we were in grad school/there was general talk of a housing bubble since 2006. At this point, we're in the top 1% in terms of income and can barely afford a home.
Oh .. and homes are getting multiple offers, buyers are getting into bidding wars regularly. We are searching for a decent place since we just had a child. It is causing a lot of misery in our life.
As another datapoint, the govt decided to add to the misery by making it harder to get mortgages. This doesn't affect the people coming into the country with suitcases full of cash but hurts us a lot. The banks are giving us a hard time since we changed jobs in the last year (both my wife and myself improved our employment situation so a move was a good thing; banks want 2 years in the same job; WTF??).
It's counterintuitive, but making it harder to get mortgages will actually reduce housing prices in the long run, because it discourages real estate investment. In the same way, lowering interest rates appears to make it easier for first home buyers to get into the market but just results in investors snapping up more properties, driving up both mortgage amounts and rents.
I seeing REIT's, and just about every wealthy person I kinda know buying up realeste, and renting it out at outrageous prices.
Some of the wealthy are buying the third house for the kid, and the kid is renting out rooms, at outragious prices.
Low interest rates, mortgages that are being thrown at the wealthy, all cash sales by wealthy foreigners/Americans--who only seem to care about ROA, young/middle class individuals who are just are being denied loans, young/middle class individuals who didn't want to be tied down and just rent, young/middle class individuals who will most likely always be just renters, a huge sector of the public who blame rent control on high rent, county and local building officials who are making it very difficult to build Anything.
If I had money, and believed their was absolutely nothing wrong with charging market rental rates; why wouldn't I buy every house I could afford, especially the under 1 million homes, that have at least 4 bedrooms, and room for four vechicles. Rent out the rooms, and make a profit?
Again, I hope your right.
Right now the poor, and middle class are being imprisioned, and I don't see much change on the horizon. (I was for Dodd-Frank--until banks just seemed to use it as an excuse to not loan, unless your Thrurston Howell the 3rd. And use the bill to raise bank fees on everything. Fees only the poor/middle class are paying.)
I've given up all hopes of buying real-estate.
I'm getting really tired of fees/fines. I'm tired of bank fees. I'm tired of being of overcharged by municipal revenue collectors(cops). I tied of new laws going up daily. I'm tired of being held hostage by the medical community for refills on drugs that should be over the counter. I tired of being charged close to a thousand dollars to get my 4 cylinder, 2300 cc engine to pass a CA smog test. A vechicle that in the bigger picture did nothing to the environment. Why, because I drove the same small car for the last 25 years. Even at it's worse, it doesn't pollute, or add to global warmimg like most newer vechicles--if you include the the carbon emitted when that new vechicle is manufactured in China.
I don't like this America.
It seems like some people don't realize they are being exploited?
Right know, Sausalito CA police are harassing Anchorouts.
They don't want the ugly boats there. I ate my lunch, and counted maybe 5 ugly boats form my vantage point. I counted 20 beautiful yachts, but they arn't the problem? See, there is no problem, but the powers at be just don't want the poor people out there. Ticket them until they are forced to abandon the boat, and it can be towed away--yea! "Rent a room for $700 week on land Sailor. Get your act together. Learn R, or ROR, I hear they are paying well in SF? Hay--put up a social network just for Sailors? I hear Adsence pays well? Oh, you can't code? There's landscaping, or I hear that burger place pays $12 per hr? Get off your old ass! I'm tired of looking at you. You arn't aesthetically pleasing, and no one get free rent in my world. Just think--instead of catching pneumonia on the frigid waters here, you can die on shore while being harrrased/ticketed in Dunphy park for falling asleep. Another yea!"
Yea, call it a narcisstic rant, but I'm just looking in, and hate what I see. It puts a knot in my stomach just writing about it.
Do you mean Oshawa? By downtown connectivity are you referring to Go Transit or the 401? We were looking at Markham but I shudder at how I'll get to downtown except by Go. DVP is a disaster. Thanks in advance!
By Durham I mean Pickering, Ajax, Whitby, Brooklin, and Oshawa.
GO trains are every 10 minutes during rush hours and every 30 minutes at all other times. Trains start at 4/5 am and go until 1am.
Markham does not have that level of connectivity. There are only a couple trains that run in the morning and then a couple in the evening. It is serviced by buses at other times.
Real estate prices wise, for what you pay for a town home in Markham, you can get a full detached home in Pickering...and it's only like 15 minutes away from Markham.
Victoria is nice, but it is a small city and being on the island it's pretty isolated.
While you do have direct access to the said island, there's a limit to how much "nature" activities one can do. Diversity Nanaimo (another city) is utterly unremarkable. Tofino is very nice, but it's 4-hour drive away. Everything else is even farther and unremarkable. Getting to anywhere outside of the island is a major hassle. Victoria International Airport provides fine selection of international flights, though to Seattle only. Ferries are slow and expensive. Floating plane taxis tend to crash now and then, so that's not very good either. So, yes, in theory you can get off the island on a whim, in practice though it's so much hassle that more often than not you simply won't bother. Hence the "isolated" remark.
YMMV, but my experience was that outside of work things get very boring very quickly.
I've never been to Victoria before but remember seeing it from the Olympics @ Port Angelus. It didn't look that far from on top of one of those mountains.
Very cool page, it's lacking salaries however that would improve the posts quite a lot. Have you heard of AngelList? Their best feature is likely the public salary data.
In BC, 'competitive salary' ranges from 40-160K for the same role :)
I lived in Vancouver for 5 years. Beautiful spot. Met a lot of interesting people from all over the world. But, even by Canadian standards (which are much lower than the US) the salaries in Vancouver are notoriously low. A much better (2X) offer brought me to Toronto.
Staring to feel the same about Toronto too expense and hassle wise. Want to try remote work from the States and live in the country in Canada. Only interia prevents me.
I find it interesting that due to high rent prices the article hypothesizes that people are moving away from Vancouver and the next upcoming city is a peninsula on an island? What do you think is going to happen in the real-estate market there?
I work for a boring company in Canada that requires significant IT skill and experience. The salaries at this company are decent. In the last ~6 years, I've lost coworkers to Cisco (2 people), Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Yelp.
They're leaving for the experience of working for those companies, not the money.
I know a couple of people who did the move and both said it was a wash money wise once you factor all your costs (healthcare, rent, private school for the kids etc). Your job options are an order of magnitude better though.
Well, to be fair, I'm not really sure any area can compete with SV in terms of raw salaries. But then again, how far does that salary really go given the absurd cost of living?
If millennial are fleeing Vancouver for London because they can't afford housing, as this article suggests, they're going to be very disappointed with our housing prices!
Ha. That's true but as a Londoner living in Vancouver I can tell you that for young people here moving to London would be exciting and educational compared to staying at home for the same money, so many would leave for that reason.
I think it's likely that tech in Vancouver is having trouble hiring and retaining as millenials flee to SF, where they can get paid dramatically more, but in general Vancouver is seeing net gains in millenials.
I have no idea how Bloomberg made their chart but using census and BC stats data no one has been able to reproduce it.
This UBC sociology prof crunched BCStats numbers and found that there is net positive millenial migration into Vancouver.
This doesn't change the fact that the unaffordability situation in Vancouver is deeply problematic and is probably accelerating a brain drain to the USA.
This is a major issue everywhere. Take stagnant wage growth and stack that up against high housing costs and you have a double pinch. Prospects are extremely bleak.
Canadian tech salaries are a pittance compared to US ones. In the Bay area, 150K to 250K are standard for people with 5 years of experience. This is not the case in any Canadian city. This neglects the lower exchange rate.
You're way off. 150k for 5yrs experience is pretty typical in big tech & unicorn companies, but not anywhere else. 250k base salaries are highly atypical anywhere (except for very senior engineers). Total comp will be more than that, but if that's what you meant you shouldn't have said salaries.
It's getting bad in Seattle, but there are a couple things Seattle has going for it that Vancouver doesn't. It actually has industry, and more people have jobs that pay living wages. The $15 minimum wage will go a long way for the bottom income bracket.
I grew up in Seattle, moved to Vancouver for school and worked there (software) for a year, and then came back to Seattle because Vancouver just wasn't going to be sustainable for me and my fiance. I'm going to throw numbers around for concrete-ness; I don't mean to offend anyone.
We were renting a 3 bed, 1 bath home with 2 roommates in Vancouver that had last sold in 2011 for $1.6 million that was falling apart. I was working at a very well funded startup (with ~120 people) making $60k CAD. After about 8 months I looked for other jobs (mostly because I just didn't like the work, but the money situation didn't help) in Vancouver, and it was really slim pickings. I interviewed at a few places and really wasn't a fan of what I saw, and was feeling bad about the situation. Then I sent an email to a company (with ~200 people) down in Seattle, and after a really reasonable interview process had an offer for more than twice (2.3x) what I was making in Canada (adjusted for exchange rate i was making 42k USD in Vancouver). My fiance and I talked a lot about it and agreed that the next year was going to be super shitty being apart, because she has a year left of school, but it was going to be a better long term bet. I moved down and it was indeed super shitty, but we're in a better place now going forward. Now we're actually looking at buying a place (because landlords are awful) and it's totally within our budget, when it never would have been possible in Vancouver. She's moving down in less than two months and there are more job prospects for her in Seattle, so the shittiness is almost over, and the future is looking great.
I know it's anecdotal evidence, but the economic differences between Seattle and Vancouver are worlds apart. When a financially stable, educated, white dude like me is having a hard time keeping up in Vancouver, you know it's bad. I can't imagine what it's like for everyone else. It makes sense that people that can leave are leaving, but being able to pick up and leave is a privilege. Vancouver is going to have some very serious problems in 5 or 10 years.
There is a diaspora of Vancouverites in their late 20s, early 30s here in Toronto. They left home for better employment and housing opportunities. I think we all would love to move back but it's just not worth it. Vancouver is a better city than Toronto but not THAT much better.
Believe it or not, I have a number of coworkers come from Canada. I am not sure if they have all converted to US citizenship or not, but most of them have family or have a stable life here, and they blend in extremely well. And then there are a number of British coworkers too...
spend some time on that page and it gets worse, in the middle of reading the article it just refreshes the page losing your place for no apparent reason and then starts autoplaying the video again.
"The vacancy rate of 0.8 percent is one of the lowest in the country, and the average monthly rent of C$937 for a bachelor suite is tied at highest with the cost in Toronto, according to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp."
Montreal is great. I recommend it. Yeah it's a bit cold but it's dry so not damp cold. Would you rather be a bit cold or working like a dog for some US company where your healthcare could vanish overnight because your boss was in a bad mood?
""My mom was laying in her bed, she turned over and I noticed she was crying," says Martin. "That's when she told me a nurse had just yelled at her for speaking in English.""
Thats the kind of mean spirited people that work in the "civil service".
Anyone who denies it, hasn't lived in Montreal long enough and needs to get out to Sherbrooke or Drummonville a little more often to see that natives in their full hatred.
> Would you rather be a bit cold or working like a dog for some US company where your healthcare could vanish overnight because your boss was in a bad mood?
Neither. That's why I moved from California to Australia five years ago. Don't regret it.
Real-estate has been fucked up here since 2000, and no one has ever done anything about it. Our condo market was a money market for years. People would pay other people to camp out for pre-sales a week in advance in tents and a new development would be sold out opening day. It would be flipped 5 times before it was even built.
The "affordable housing" initiatives here mostly seem to be for homeless people or those on fixed incomes. There is a big resentment from middle class or the "working poor" here now. But young people don't vote or they vote on social issues that seem nice when they are 20 but not on something that is going to effect them when they are 28-40. People who own houses love it but know it is fucked up. My mom is an example basically, and just banked her retirement selling her downtown condo. Lots of you are talking about tech wages because that effects you, but I have lots of friends that grew up that are in the 40k-50k range that would at least like a shitty condo in east van. I wish we could go back to 10 years ago about DINKWAD jokes, but the Double Income No Kids With a Dogs can't even afford detached houses here anymore. It's $2-million for a tear down crack shack. It is fucking crazy. $2-million is a lot of money. $2-million used to be a beautiful water view mansion, and not that long ago.
At the same time we keep saying the "Chinese money laundering!" yea it is illegal to them. But we also don't live under laws that only allow us to move $50k a year out of the country. We have to imagine living under that ourselves I guess.
Assuming one has a really good heater and sleeping bag, it legal/possible/affordable to live in a VW bus in say south Vancouver? Renting in places like NYC, SF these days seems most people are lemmingly throwing money away in an unaffordable attempt to buy faux status while going into debt and gaining no balance sheet because "everyone else is doing it." Unless you've sold a series to HBO, living below one's means is smarter because hope isn't a strategy.
Sorry to be blunt, but why the f should anyone do that, especially if they have a job in tech (but even if they are not)
NYC and SF might be crammed, but there is a lot of space in the surroundings. In the topic we're talking about Canada, 2nd largest country in the world
And yes, working on nice companies is important, but quality of life is also important
Then you're a minority of one. Most people living in cities these days are irrationally pouring typically between 50% to sometimes as much as 75% of their income into rent, paying for the privilege of holding onto expensive real-estate they will never be able to afford rather than save money... they'll never be able to retire or have anything else more permanent.
You're making some very broad, self-centered assumptions about quality of life and perception of other people. Not everyone needs lattés or 3500 sq ft / 325 m^2.
No one cares to live in the Saskatchewan boondocks apart to get away from the city, so why did you bring that up irrelevant strawman?
Some people also value independence more than being perpetually-indebted to a company (non-single-payer health insurance / rent).
If I'm going to be living in a van (down by the river), I would at least drive it to a river in a warmer climate.
One with a higher exchange rate, lower taxes, and faster Internet, say.
Maybe he's single and has given up on the idea of finding a girlfriend. This is a site for programmers, is it not?
Just look at the Japanese: it's becoming popular over there with younger people to just not bother with relationships (or having families obviously), because they're too much trouble. Already in large cities here in the US, I'm noticing that a huge number of women in their 30s-40s are just bypassing the part about finding a husband and are becoming single moms on their own.
I predict that long-term relationships (including marriage) are going to become obsolete pretty soon in developed nations.
With online collaboration tools really taking off, especially with WebRTC currently on billions of devices, I have this unfounded belief that city centers will become less important over the next decade. There will always be work which is better suited to in-person setups.
Maybe it is more of a hope than a belief - but having a decentralized workforce has implications for cost of living and quality of life that are exciting. With (relatively) low-cost mortgages, home purchasing power increases at a non-linear rate, the more money you make. That is one reason why housing demand in cities can grow faster than wages.
Unfounded all right. Cyclical, more like it. People's tastes change over time. Grandparents liked cities, parents like suburbs, I like cities, and I can't imagine how my kids will feel. Maybe high housing costs will inspire people to live rurally or in exquisite mobile homes driven by computers. Or it will result in a global densification the likes of which we have never truly seen.
In Neuromancer, the Sprawl spanned the entire eastern seaboard and yet the only place with real distinction was Zion - the Rastafarian space station far away from the regular bustle. Things are always in flux.
To the Canadian tech industry: How are you ever going to become competitive with the US if you keep offering these humiliatingly low salaries and letting the best and brightest of our own talent get leeched away?