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They're here for a good
time, not a long time
From wealthy foreign condo investors to broke international
students, nomads love Vancouver - and we should love them
Vancouver real estate appears not to have
taken the autumn dip many were expecting, despite the late-summer subprime
loan crunch south of the border. If you're in the market, it's actually hard
to tell anything happened.
The last time I wrote about real estate,
my wife and I had just started looking for a house with a suite that my
84-year-old father might use. We haven't found the right one, but I can
report that nothing has slowed down either. Days following that ominous
announcement of Citigroup writedowns, we tabled our first offer and it was
buried in a six-way bidding war.
There has been some notable ink on the
topic already. The Vancouver Sun flagged the record-breaking $18-million
preconstruction condo sale in the Hotel Georgia residential complex. Another
condo on Beach Avenue is listed at $18.2-million. Most recently our
"condo boom" hit The New York Times, which reported that the
average condo price in Vancouver is 75 per cent higher than the average in
Toronto.
All this is a dubious honour if you're
shopping, naturally. (Forget about subject-to-anything offers on the West
Side.) But it's occurred to me recently that my father's story may offer a
clue as to why Vancouver has shown such tremendous resilience.
He moved to West Vancouver in his early
forties, having spent his life in motion. He'd lived in Toronto, New York,
San Francisco, the Philippines. He'd travelled through Hong Kong, Vietnam,
Sri Lanka, France. He'd gone on to meet my mother in Ecuador and have five
kids between Jackson, Mich., and a little town called San Tome on the
Venezuelan savannah.
He was a nomad, in other words. And
nomads, I've come to realize, have a special affinity for Vancouver that to
this day drives our culture and our economy.
I'm speaking here both of nomad lives and
nomad dollars. The $18-million suite in the Georgia was purchased by a
Portland entrepreneur. But B.C. Real Estate Association chief economist
Cameron Muir tells me that fully half the condos sold in downtown Vancouver
go to investors. And you can reasonably anticipate that it will be
internationally mobile second- and third-home buyers who fill out the
$10-million-plus suites in such high-end, high-profile developments as the
Living Shangri-La, or the new Ritz-Carlton by Arthur Erickson, or the Norman
Foster-designed Jameson House.
You could criticize this kind of thing,
saying nomads come and go. The guy spending two weeks a year in 7,500 square
feet of five-star luxury in the clouds above Coal Harbour is paradoxically
divested of any stake in the goings on at street level. One overly rainy
winter and, sure, that condo might get dumped for some nicer waterfront in
Rio or wherever.
But the criticism is wrong-headed
ultimately, because Vancouver is defined and improved by the nomad economy
and culture that it attracts.
The simplest illustration of this may be
had by looking at another less glam, less newsworthy nomad group that has
profoundly shaped the downtown core and entirely for the better.
I'm referring to that amorphous
international mass of ESL studentry that crowd the streets and coffee shops
and mid-market restaurants of the West End and Gastown.
Fifty thousand of them wash through here
each year, about three quarters from either Korea, Japan or Latin America.
("Brazilians love Vancouver," Linda Auzins, of the Canadian
Association of Private Language Schools, tells me.)
But a key detail about this crew - beyond
the fact that they spend three quarters of a billion dollars in the city
annually - is that they are, in the vast majority, between the ages of 20
and 29.
Set aside the multimillion-dollar condo
buyers for a second, and consider how much more city-building, how much
atmosphere generation, how much spontaneous street-life germination gets
carried out by people who live in apartments too small to want to spend much
time in.
You can check out the 500 block of
Hastings or Pender any lunch hour to see this for yourself.
Here you will not only find the best
sushi in the city - I'll take Sushi Zero One or Sendai Sushi over our more
famous name brands any day - but also coffee shops that are full, sidewalks
that are jammed, air that is alive with conversation in many languages.
And does this scene link well with the
university campuses that have sprung up downtown and the new art zone
growing further east in Gastown?
Of course it does. They
all foster street life. Which fosters community. Which tends to reduce
crime. Which encourages entrepreneurship. Which contributes to people living
their lives and enacting their imaginations in public spaces. And when
people make you wince by referring to what is "world class" in a
given city, instead of Major League Baseball franchises and now-mandatory
Gehry clones, I believe it is to this rather more
ordinary string of causes and effects that they are pointing.
Bring on the nomad tribes, then: the
multimillion-dollar condo buyers and the six-month students with their
disposition to smoke in packs and cheek-kiss and inhale daily gallons of
kimchi udon.
Although, it seems my father may not be
offering his own contribution to the mix. In our last phone conversation, he
was musing about buying a camper van instead. So he could rove around, see
the province maybe. Keep on moving. - 2007 November 7
GLOBE
& MAIL
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