Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
A Global Property Market: 'Long Live the Global City'
Vancouver real estate has entered a global market, part of a 'space of flows'
comprising capital, people, goods and information across the Pacific, flows
actively promoted by Canada's Asia-Pacific economic and immigration
strategy articulated in the 1980s. Proponents of this policy have seen only
the mutual advantages of open borders in these developments. In interviews
and presentations, Michael Goldberg, for one, has effectively and tirelessly
put the case for Vancouver's integration in a global space of flows.
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To an
OECD policy audience he forecast, 'to prosper in the 21st century, a city
will unavoidably have to be global in outlook, planning and outreach…
Going with the flow (typically a capital and population flow) will be the
order of the day, the decade, and the century. The helpless city is dead: long
live the global city' (Goldberg 1994). Globalization changes the terms of
reference for urban property markets. As Goldberg (1994) correctly noted,
'As economic and demographic pressures move around the world, global
cities and their property markets can be expected to be particularly sensitive
to these ebbs and flows because of their centrality in the international flow
of people, capital and information'. In other words, volatility will accom-
pany globalization in strategic nodes within global networks. So it has
proved in Vancouver and Toronto.
According to John Logan (1993), in the past 'real estate has traditionally
been a mostly local business'. Local or regional population growth, unem-
ployment rates, domestic migration, and national credit policy affecting
mortgage-lending rates - these formed the set of nationally contained vari-
ables that could be expected to shape price movements in urban housing
and property markets. However, the de-regulation of Western economies in
the neo-liberal policy regimes of the 1980s and 1990s aided a broader set of
geographical scales to bear upon local real estate trajectories. In the housing
markets of large Australian cities, Maher (1994) observed how 'empirical
results are complex amalgams of global trends, national policies and proc-
esses, and local factors, all interacting to bring about a highly differentiated
set of outcomes at a variety of spatial scales'. A broader review concluded
that in the post-1980 period, 'the international dimension has major causal
relevance' in property market gyrations in globally connected metropolitan
areas (Dehesh and Pugh 1999).
The geographically differentiated behaviour of housing markets was dis-
played by price trends in Australia's major cities in the 1980s (Maher 1994).
Two conclusions are pertinent for our discussion: first, during this period,
Sydney, Australia's foremost window on the world, experienced price rises
above other cities, and second, Sydney experienced exaggerated price oscilla-
tions, with rapid inflation accompanied by a sharp correction. Such gyrations
