Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 5.8
House prices, immigration and domestic migration, Greater Vancouver, 1977-2002
Vancouver - were all surprisingly ineffective predictors of house price trajec-
tories over the 1971-96 period (Table 5.1).
Instead house prices were being prised loose of these local, regional and
national economic drivers and were lining up with global factors. The house
price trend correlated predictably with measures of regional economic growth
- provincial GDP, the size of Vancouver's population, and the restructuring of
the provincial labour force toward professional and managerial white-collar
workers - but these in turn were tied to a larger constellation of global effects.
Levels of foreign direct investment in Canada, overseas visitors to British
Columbia, and several measures of net immigration to Vancouver, including
the annual share of business immigrants, were all part of this larger constella-
tion of growth stimuli that were tightly aligned with rising real estate prices.
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The role and variability of scale effects is an old shibboleth in geography.
Factors prominent at one spatial scale may be much less robust at another,
where their effects are masked by a number of contingencies specific to that
scale of analysis. So it is that immigration as a global effect upon real estate
prices at the metropolitan scale may be much less decisive when the scale
collapses to 'neighbourhoods' (usually census tracts) within cities. In Sydney,
a gateway metropolis where, like Vancouver and Toronto, immigration is
