In Canada’s west coast port city of Vancouver, the housing market has been described as “super heated”. There has long been simmering anger over destruction of perfectly good homes in order to build bigger ones. The competition for houses, and often just the land they are on, has pushed prices skyward.
The recent sale and request for demolition of a lovely multi-million dollar house in Vancouver has sparked outrage.
Even though the mansion is less than 20 years old and underwent over 300,000 dollars in renovations just three years ago, the owner wants to tear it down to build a bigger house. This latest incident concerns a house originally thought to sold three years ago for 6 million dollars, now said to be worth 7.4 million. Often foreign investors from China are being blamed for both pushing the prices out of reach of Canadians, and for the practice of tearing down perfectly good houses, to build more ostentatious ones. Dozens of Vancouver residents appeared in front of the house to protest against its demolition this past Sunday.
Quoted by the CBC, Caroline Adderson who wrote Vancouver Vanishes: Narrative of Demolition and Revival and also attended Sunday’s rally, says demolishing homes like the one on Adera St. is wrong in several ways. “One it is not green, two it is not increasing affordability and it certainly doesn’t do anything for the city’s density.”
One of the protesters, Martha Cheney, speaking to Global news said, ““Look at it. It’s better than most of us could ever dream of living in, and yet it’s going to go to the dump.”
In addition to the building of monster homes at the expense of destruction of perfectly good homes, a British Columbia politician is concerned about another practice in the housing market there.
Member of the Legislative Assembly, David Eby, wants to stop the practice of “shadow flipping”. This is when sales contracts are reassigned, some times several times before a house sale is completed.
This allows speculators and those involved can flip, or resell the property before the final sale to a new owner, while they avoid the property transfer tax.
Critics say this is adding to the overheated market by pushing prices up, sometimes by millions of dollars.
Quoted by the CBC he says, “I think we need the provincial government to start waking up and having a look at the Metro Vancouver housing market which is increasingly out of control and including people who are participating in the market as realtors, as buyers, as sellers, all three roles in the same person (..) potentially evading property tax and deceiving homeowners who are trying to sell”.
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