Real estate purchase prices and residential rental costs are escalating, and the supply of affordable housing is decreasing in Vancouver Again! In the summer and fall of 1989, real property purchase costs in the Vancouver metropoli tan area have increased by an average 22 percent.1 The cost of rentals has increased by an even greater percentage particu lary on the west side and in the West End.2 Residents of the Vancouver metropolitan area are exposed almost daily through the newspapers and television to the destruction of high qual ity rental properties. These properties are being demolished to make way for fewer and far more expensive luxury condomin iums.3 This research examines the role of foreign investment in the development of this situation. Specifically, the fore ign investment causing the most concern with respect to this situation is that from Asia.
1CTV, report on Vancouver real estate market on evening television news program, 20 October 1989.
2"Rental Picture A Disaster," The Province (Vancouver), 3 November 1989, 34.
3"Buyers Were Sold on These Condos After Only Seeing A Scale Model," The Vancouver Sun, 4 November 1989, H4; A. Bar ling, "Downsizing the West Side," The Vancouver Sun, 4 November 1989, H1.
THE UNIQUE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CONTEMPORARY
REAL ESTATE ENVIRONMENT IN VANCOUVER
As bad as the situation described above is, it is a mis take to think that it has no precedent in Vancouver. In fact,real estate environments with many similarities to the contem porary environment have prevailed in Vancouver previously in this same decade. In the 1982 1983 time period, real estate purchase prices and rental rates skyrocketed in the Vancouver area. These phenomena occurred because effects of the severe economic recession which hit Canada in the early 1980s were felt first in Ontario and Alberta. As a result, thousands of people from those and other provinces migrated to British Columbia, w...