This week, more additions and subtractions on the local housing front. First to Gregor Robertson?s Happy Planet campsite, where, aside from tribal drum lessons and Survivorman tarp seminars, the Occupy Vancouver collective was running low last week on public education value. Solidarity with the rest of the 99% was also fast evaporating as more members of that percentage ask who at the art gallery shantytown represents them.
Meanwhile, it?s not surprising that the vision for the local Occupy collective appears muddy to onlookers.
In conversation with Business in Vancouver, Kalle Lasn, co-founder of Adbusters magazine, the originator of the Occupy Wall Street movement, advised that the protest sired in the heat of the 21st century?s social media milieu is not your father?s traditional protest. Its structure is ?horizontal? – no leaders, no manifesto, no list of demands, just protesters pursuing ?a deep down transformation of the existing order.??
Taking roll call at the art gallery campsite would inspire little confidence that the new order would be much of an improvement over the old order for the vertical majority.
Besides, the real new order has long since been moving into our town, and, boy, is it changing things fast. Not bychanting and waving hand-painted protest signs, however. Its members are more reliant on that dull old concept of hard work and thrift. They are hungry buyers from the Far East. They have real money to invest, and they know a good thing when they see it.
Providing insight on that reality recently was John Geha. The president of Coldwell Banker Canada and new chairman of the Asian Real Estate Association of America?s first Canadian chapter was in town to flog CB?s new affiliation with the Legend Real Estate Group and offer his insights into the impact of Asian buyers in the local real estate market.
That issue is of growing interest to Metro Vancouverites, as the incoming tide of Asian money skews house prices and, in some cases, hollows out neighbourhoods with absentee owners displacing older residents fleeing with cash in hand.
But the upside of this Chinese real estate investment is all that east-west cash flow – something that many less geographically endowed areas would be happy to tap.
As Geha pointed out to Public Offerings, every home sale creates 1.2 jobs and kick-starts an average of $60,000 in additional consumer spending.
Down Seattle way, even though the city has home prices that are roughly half of what they are in Vancouver and many of the geographic and education attributes Asian buyers value, the real estate market is far less buoyant.
The Emerald City, a Puget Sound Business Journal story pointed out earlier this year, lacks Vancouver?s level of Chinese culture, and the U.S.A., in general, has far less China-friendly immigration policies than does Canada.
Vancouver is fast becoming the city of choice for Asian real estate investment in North America. Regardless of what that might mean for traditional Vancouver neighbourhoods, in John Geha?s world it?s good for the economy.
The demographic shift also provides an interesting contrast in competing economic philosophies: an incoming population that has built wealth by working and saving and a resident population showcasing Occupy?s horizontal revolution, which appears to believe that the masses are entitled to wealth even if someone else has to work for it. ?
