Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
downtown condo market. The most expensive house in Whistler was bought
by a Silicon Valley CEO. There's lots of Americans in the market now, espe-
cially when $1US = $1.30 Canadian.
Inflation in the Housing Market: The Politics of Explanation
We have amassed consistent and cumulative evidence for the relationship
between immigration from East Asia and investment in Canadian real
estate. First, incorporation into a trans-Pacific region bound by capital
and immigration flows had been the purpose of Canada's Asia-Pacific
strategy, pressed by economic elites and implemented in policy and proce-
dures by government at all three levels. Second, the wealth of the tiger
economies and the geopolitical need to diversify the location of their
investment portfolio made them attentive to Canadian overtures. Third,
an orientation to real estate investment was over-determined among both
investors and immigrants from East Asia, because of a widely-recognized
cultural disposition toward property ownership, because of the critical role
of property appreciation in private and public capital accumulation in the
tiger economies, and because the lesson of economic success in Vancouver
among early arrivals seemed to reinforce the continuing viability of real
estate as a profitable and convenient investment choice. Fourth, property
prices in Vancouver and Toronto were low in the context of competing
international markets, while consultancies, lending institutions and tran-
snational real estate agencies facilitated property investment with advice
and sales offices in Hong Kong as well as Vancouver; weekend sales exhibi-
tions in the principal cities of East and Southeast Asia overcame the pen-
alty of distance for buyers. Fifth, the significant role of this offshore finance
in the Vancouver land market was evident not just from visible individual
projects - though several of these, including Pacific Place, Coal Harbour,
and Bayshore Gardens were large initiatives by any measure - but also
from the overall share of the market accounted for by East Asian immi-
grants and investors. This market, prominent downtown and in the expen-
sive Westside neighbourhoods, held even greater sway in the ethnoburb of
Richmond, and was a significant force in other suburban municipalities.
Sixth, the evidence of statistical analysis shows the tight bonding between
both annual immigration flows and MLS prices in Greater Vancouver, and
also, through census micro-data, the close linkage of changes in dwelling
values between census periods with immigration and Chinese ethnicity,
relations that hold in an analysis across the entire Vancouver metropolitan
area. Bringing all of these considerations together, the relationship between
immigration from East Asia and Vancouver residential prices offers a very
tight explanatory bundle.