Yesterday Mike Howell wrote Vancouver's first must-read opinion piece for 2016, published on the Courier's website. A "bummer of a rant" as he calls it, the title Incessant din of real estate talk has become tiresome spoke to me as a lifelong renter who on one hand dreams about owning in Vancouver's market but on the other feels like that ship has sailed and that dream might be exactly that; just a dream. Read Mike's piece for some well-informed opinions on the politics of affordability, and the state of it in our city.
We don't deal in pessimism around here but the reality is that one of the not-so-awesome things about our city is the price of real estate, which is why most of our stories that you'll see on that subject focus on people getting creative in this market. Like the people who split the rent on mansions and the guy who lives in a treehouse he built. I wish we were able to find and publish more stories like that, and about people who are doing creative things to increase the housing stock, so I was pretty happy to come across a good story on CTV News last night.
Results from our July 2015 reader survey
In our survey that we did in July 13% of you say that you own detached homes, so I imagine you'll be interested in checking out the feature mentioned above. It's about a local businessman who wants to put laneway homes in people's backyards, with little risk to them, as a way to get more of these built. The scheme is to lease the land off of them, place his laneway homes on that land, rent them out at affordable rates and then pay the property owner $200-$500 per month. Read all about it here.
Photos: CTV
Stories like this one are not only good news for land owners in Vancouver but for non-owners (like me) who dream of the price of housing maybe, just maybe, being positively affected by the stock getting increased and more options becoming available. As Mike put it in his Courier piece: "good luck, everyone".
