Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
market, and about business failures as immigrant customers had left the
country.
29
In real estate circles the disclosure legislation was seen as a
serious deflator in the 'carriage trade' neighbourhoods. In 1997 an agent
identified a price discount of $500,000 on a Kerrisdale house sale so that
the owner could return to Hong Kong 'because of the overseas assets law.
Everybody's scared'. Even the doyenne of Vancouver's Westside sales,
Manyee Lui admitted, 'It's terrible. A good number of people are moving
back to Hong Kong. For those who want to get out, they will accept a
lower price' (Chow 1997e).
In a 1998 conversation, Michelle, a Hong Kong-born agent, saw
… Desperation for prices in the Westside [Vancouver] housing market. Prices
are below the assessed values and there are no takers. I have friends with 15
listings and nothing is selling…The Taiwanese are not buying big houses,
Hong Kong people are not coming over. I have no clients from Hong Kong
any more. Many sold and went back last year. It looked like the Chinese gov-
ernment was being more reasonable than expected. The assets tax was a big
killer and caused a big exodus last year.
Six months earlier I had heard a similar account from Sam, an Anglo-
Canadian agent who worked the same Westside territory:
You should have seen the change with that asset declaration law. In '94, '95,
first part of '96 it was all high-end sales. Our office is 50 percent Chinese
agents and there was nothing for us. Then in came the law, and bang! It's a
total reverse. All that's selling now is low end, 300, 400 thousand, and mainly
to Caucasians. The Chinese agents have lots of listings, 800 thousand, 1.2
million, but they're making no sales. I read recently that Hong Kong money is
moving into London where they don't have disclosure rules.
30
You know the
Chinese won't put up with that sort of thing. They don't want the taxman to
know they've got a factory with good cash flow in Taiwan. Mind you, it's the
same here. [Someone I know well] has millions of dollars of property in
Washington State. As far as he's concerned it's none of the government's busi-
ness. Apparently this law was intended to get at offshore trusts set up by
people in Toronto, but it's getting at the immigrants here as well.
The overlap in Michelle and Sam's observations carry us into the contro-
versial area of the metropolitan housing market, its stratified sub-markets,
and the effects of immigrant investment, issues to be analysed in detail in
Chapter 5. That will lead in Chapter 6 to the ethnically determined catego-
ries that are apparent in both testimonies, and which have led to charges of
racism, both from critical race theorists and from business elites. A theo-
retical question to examine there is, when do empirically justifiable gener-
alisations become racist categorizations?
