Local housing prices jumped soon after the Olympics: expert
Posted June 17, 2016 6:28 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Once upon a time, Main Street was a pretty significant divide when it came to the price of a home in Vancouver, but newly released maps show that the million-dollar line has virtually disappeared.
With Prime Minister Trudeau in town for a housing affordability roundtable discussion today, we’re taking a look at how much things have changed over the past few years.
And it appears prices slowly but surely started going up after the 2010 Olympics. That’s when things started to spiral upward according to Andy Yan, an urban planner and Acting Director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University.
He has created some interactive maps showing the $1 million single-family home pretty much disappeared over the past decade with availability of homes below that value creeping further east in the city and how significantly things have changed since 2010.
By 2014, only 41 per cent of properties in Vancouver were under $1 million and Yan points out that has dropped to only nine per cent now.
The prime minister will be joined by some local MPs for today’s roundtable. Meantime, the federal finance minister has already promised a major investigation into what is propelling the unreachable prices on the Lower Mainland and what can be done about it.
The provincial government has made some small adjustments including a specialized tax of homes sold for over $2 million.
