You're absolutely correct. Vancouver is unlike SF in that it has no issues building new residential buildings.
At the moment housing starts in Vancouver are at all time highs, unprecedented for decades, and yet vacancy remains sub zero and housing is very unaffordable. This suggests that even these unprecedented levels of supply creation are unable to meet demand, and there are more issues at play than a lack of supply.
This is even more clear when you contrast housing supply to population growth. Population growth in Vancouver, Canada has been stable; almost linear, and relatively low. Meanwhile, housing supply has exploded across the region. Yet, housing remains unobtainable to the vast majority of residents. What is going on? It clearly is not a supply problem, and perhaps even worse, there could be a massive supply glut that for reasons I can only speculate has not become available for occupancy.
This is not necessarily indicative of anything; I don't if this applies to Vancouver, but a big portion of why DC and Manhattan have bustling residential demand despite having less population than their historical peaks is that there has been a general reduction in household size due to various factors. So you could have the same amount of people but a much higher amount of households.
Normally the news articles say its Chinese investors parking their money in Vancouver housing since it is likely to be stable compared to the yuan, etc.
Ah yes, the Chinese investor bogeyman. Apparently there are enough millionaires to cause problems in so many cities around the globe. Yet latest figures put foreign ownership at around 10% max. Let's ignore low interest rates and Canadians bidding against themselves in a hot market.
I also think the foreign investor thing is overblown, but it’s always the marginal demand that causes prices to go up. Take 10% of the property owners out of a market and prices will go down.
You can say that about any non-zero share of the market; take it out and it becomes cheaper! I believe the reason we even talk about foreign investors is that the collective mind would like to attribute the mess to "them" versus "us".
Exactly! I would guess that another driver of high prices is speculation by Canadians. Low interest rates and the "real estate always goes up" mentality has created a ton of panicked buyers who are willing to extend themselves financially in order to prevent being priced out of the market forever.
Let's also ignore that before the foreign investor tax over 20% of purchases were being made by foreign investors in places like Langley and Richmond. That is insane when you think that these people aren't selling at the same time, and is just pure demand.
Those figures are estimates. Blind trusts and proxy buyers are two ways to hide ownership.
Protest all you want, but with current available data, all the public can do is speculate, only the government has access to the data necessary to have a deeper understanding.
As long as residential units/person and square footage/person are both on the decline, you should expect housing prices to go up. AFAIK both of these metrics are still falling in all of the major West Coast cities.
We also have unprecedented immigration with no end in sight in fact, we are rapidly increasing it. As well, we are allowing more and more temporary foreign residents (students, TFWs, illegals, etc). We need drastically more supply.
At the moment housing starts in Vancouver are at all time highs, unprecedented for decades, and yet vacancy remains sub zero and housing is very unaffordable. This suggests that even these unprecedented levels of supply creation are unable to meet demand, and there are more issues at play than a lack of supply.