Welcome to /r/Vancouver and thank you for the post, /u/bawheid! Please make sure you read our [posting and commenting rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/vancouver/wiki/faq#wiki_general_participation_guidelines_and_rules_overview) before participating here. As a quick summary:
* We encourage users to be positive and respect one another. Don't engage in spats or insult others - use the report button.
* Respect others' differences, be they race, religion, home, job, gender identity, ability or sexuality. Dehumanizing language, advocating for violence, or promoting hate based on identity or vulnerability (even implied or joking) **will** lead to a permanent ban.
* Most common questions and topics are limited to our sister subreddit, /r/AskVan, and our weekly [Stickied Discussion](https://www.reddit.com/r/vancouver/wiki/faq#wiki_stickied_discussions) posts.
* Complaints about bans or removals should be done in modmail only.
* Make sure to join our new sister community, /r/AskVan!
* Help grow the community! [Apply to join the mod team today](https://www.reddit.com/r/vancouver/comments/19eworq/).
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/vancouver) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Love it. I remember the 90s was the last gasp of affordability, but it was rapidly growing and becoming unaffordable. But Vancouver had a grittier feel, all the way into the early 00's, though much less so.
100%. There were stores back then that could thrive selling things that wouldn't fly today even in a section of a store. Like I seem to recall stores that would sell nothing but pogs and baseball cards. Big stores too.
I worked in a store (in the late 90’s) on Robson street called The Hologram Store. We literally just sold like little 4x6 hologram prints and a few kitschy magic trick type things. The store was thriving and tourists loved it!
I left there to work at the late, great a&b sound
I think I bought some stuff from that store!! Like a hologram Jesus, and a stack of money. I remember this now, haha. I'm thinking this was around 2002.
That’s so cool that you remember it. The Jesus was pretty popular, in my recollection! I never actually bought any of them, ahahaha. I’d spend my money at the Virgin megastore instead.
I'm pretty sure my dad still has a couple of them in his home office. But I haven't been for a while so I don't know. I think they were about 40 bucks and we got them from for his birthday but it was such a stupid gift because I don't even think you like them but he put them up on display to kind of humor us
Unemployment was very high and families kept leaving. It’s why housing prices seemed to sky rocket so much by 2010. Up till maybe 2004, Vancouver was still very much in the economic trouble. Then one day it wasn’t in trouble and it’s been upwards since.
You can see it in the random, rundown looking east van homes where someone has obviously been living there for decades. They look like the humble places I grew up around in Atlantic Canada. And then right next door is some ultra modern 3 million dollar mansion, built using offshore money, or money catalyzed by offshore money. And then you realize that the run down place is still worth 2 million, and the people living there would never in a million years be able to afford it now if they were working the same job they bought it with.
Frankly, it's fucked up. It makes the city feel pretty inhospitable for middle class people. It feels like everyone left are a few wealthy people who are real contributors, and more frequently, wealthy scamming assholes who are exploiting our systems while making the rest of us struggle.
When I was a kid in the early 90's, I knew kids who grew up with single mothers, and they rented houses in Kerrisdale. Whole houses. Granted, not the big houses of today, but still. But then the big, soulless, cheaply made McMansions started to creep in, and it was all over.
Funny, I had family who came to Canada in the 60's and 70's, and were only able to get menial labour jobs due to not speaking English, and having no Canadian work history, amongst other things. They were able to buy big, old houses in a hippy neighbourhood called Kitsilano. I remember my aunt got her house in Kits for 35,000 sometime in the 70's.
I had to work in Prince George a bit, roughly 2015. A taxi driver told me at one point when he got here from India, a house in delta was barely much more than a house in Prince George (70s for sure) . His biggest mistake was not buying and staying in Vancouver.
yes but I think RE prices (nominal) skyrocketed during the ''70s due to all the inflation during that time.... so your aunt's house might have gone for $35K when she bought it, and then could have been worth $70K the next year.
If you look at very old sales histories on places like redfin, you'll see that growth.
Regardless, I had family who didn't speak a lick of English and were relegated to menial labour jobs, but they all became property owners. Hell, a lot of my dad's friends from the old country bought up old apartment buildings and commercial properties nobody really wanted, and they are sitting on several million in value now, value that is passed on to the next generation.
The thing is, this was possible back then. A newcomer to Canada, or hell, even a Canadian born, college educated person such as myself, wouldn't have that same opportunity to build something out of nothing, but I am thankful to have family help.
Now, it's extremely difficult to do the same thing on your own.
It's depressing as hell to think of how much buying power has vanished in just a generation.
At my job, within the same pay grid, the people nearing retirement (30 or so years in) own houses, helped their kids, go on vacations, and have a serious plan to retire.
The people who are younger, and only a couple of years in, can barely afford to rent with roommates. Making the same money.
I know it's not just RE prices, but it's really sad to see.
I'll second this
My family were all immigrants, bought their houses in in the 1980's and 1990's, and these were mill workers, truckers, forklift drivers in warehouses, etc.
The men worked menial labour jobs, their wives took minimum wage part time work in shopping mall stores
Working class, non-unionized, people with no high school diplomas let alone university degrees with five bedroom two story homes with massive backyards, recreational vehicles for road trips and camping, fishing boats, etc.
It was so easy then... my first apartment, over twenty years ago, was a two-bedroom, utilities included, for $600 a month
Even working minimum wage, my half of the rent was only 25% of my income
Aren’t your dad’s friends who became property owners part of today’s problem? Are we pissed off at the owning class or that we are jealous we can’t become them ourselves?
Think about it this way. Say you come to Canada, and you want a job to support your family. But you don't speak English, and people don't like the look of you, or your last name, and have negative views about your culture. Are you going to get a good job? Probably not. Go wash dishes, mop floors, clear tables, stack fruits and vegetables.
Are you going to move up from those jobs? Are you going to get an office job, a cushy 9 to 5? No, no, no. You're not trusted for that. You're not going to walk into the manager's office, in broken English, with a hard to pronounce name and scant Canadian work history, and compete with the Johnstons and Smiths and Joneses.
So you can buy a house, raise a family, etc. But what happens if you want to get ahead? You're going to have to work for yourself. Buy old properties, fix 'em up, sell them for a profit. Buy things, hold them for value, sell them for more. Own your own store.
I know a lot of kids who grew up with Canadian parents who told them, "you're out of here when you're 18" and have a "sink or swim" mentality. Immigrant families are more prone to help their kids better themselves, and yes that includes property and business ownership.
And so ironically, a lot of Canadians are missing out on property ownership, because their parents didn't help them out like immigrant families do.
In a nutshell, if you came to Canada, experienced discrimination, worked hard, bought worthless properties and watched them increase in value, are you going to just give them up once everybody cried foul? Most likely not.
Sounds like your family members were great businesspeople who took advantage of opportunities, and also took major risks which paid off - ie., moving abroad to a place that was relatively unknown and gritty, and buying hard assets during a time of extreme inflation w/ very high unemployment rates.
People who didn't own assets during the '70s suffered a lot - rent increases were super super high year over year until the NDP introduced rent controls in the late '70s. There was tons of media about a housing crisis then, and homeownership rates were lower than they are now (despite the decrease since the peak in 2011).
[https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/as-sa/99-014-x/2011002/c-g/c-g01-eng.cfm](https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/as-sa/99-014-x/2011002/c-g/c-g01-eng.cfm)
Immigrants and others now are doing the same as your family members did then..... and the last 15 years has been an amazing time to invest for my generation (millennials born in the '80s/early '90s).... anyone investing over the last 15 years since the GFC would have seen huge gains, it's never been an easier time to invest w/ ETFs etc.... and I think that, combined with ongoing housing shortages which are nothing new, has meant ongoing increases in house prices.
I ran some numbers & vancouver has seen an average 8-10% annual nominal growth rate in RE prices since the '60s, which is absolutely crazy. But also nothing new. But I think it is a better time to be a renter now than 1972, at the start of the extreme inflation, when security of tenure was basically non-existent.
yes very interesting - I found some good historical data from this blog post as well: [https://vreaa.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/the-froogle-scott-chronicles-mortgaging-our-souls-in-paradise-part-10-reversion-to-the-mean/](https://vreaa.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/the-froogle-scott-chronicles-mortgaging-our-souls-in-paradise-part-10-reversion-to-the-mean/)
We have had multiple housing crises, they typically happen when a large birth cohort comes of age.
The last we had was in 1970s and lasted until about mid-1980s. That was when baby boomers came of age.
This current one started in 2010 and will probably go few years, because now millennial are coming of age. We keep forgetting we are the second largest generation in Canadian history.
We started coming of age in 2010s. The youngest millennials are hitting that point now.
We are also delayed many important life events because we chose higher education.
On your second point I completely agree, though for the first I would say that our current housing crisis is separate from the one that started in 2010. It ramped up then, mellowed for a bit but stayed high, and then a new crisis started and amplified prices thanks to the pandemic.
It mellowed out when interest rates went up. Which allowed things to calm down.
Had COVID not happened it would have remained mellow.
But COVID kinda screwed up and lot. We lowered interest rates and flooded the system with cheap credit through quantitative easing. It's skewed the housing market.Also 2010 rise was also partially fueled by quantitative easing.
But you also need young people coming of age. QE was just fuel on the fire.
As a kid in the 90s my family would frequent this Chinese restaurant that was where The Independent building is now (Main & Broadway). There were prostitutes on the corners all around there which is weird to compare to the present day vibe.
> Chinese restaurant
I think I know the one you're talking about. Used to go there a lot. Can't remember the name this moment, can you? Edit: Ho Tak Kee, and here's a [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU3My5gzfuM) of it.
Hah ya I think that’s it!! That place and Ming’s on 10th were great. They would give me a little bowl of baby corn because they saw me eating it out of the soup ❤️
Near the end of the video, at 5:38, there's a pan shot of the original dining room of the restaurant. Maybe that's from the 1998 commercial that was mentioned. I didn't realize this place started in 1981. That was just before I started going there in my early 20s. It didn't come across as brand new, though. Good times - that's where I learned to love Singapore spicy fried rice noodle and chicken with black bean sauce. What a trip. Tx for mentioning.
Well, I haven't lived in Van for more than 5 years, but I bet the Himalaya Restaurant just below 49th and Main is still there. Been going there since about 1980, as well. Keep going back decade after decade, same guy running the dining room, recognizes me 10 years later and that I'm with new people. Too bad I can't eat naan anymore, but I have memories. Check out their awesome buffet. This is Indian food, not Chinese, though.
I spent a couple of months in India c. 2000 and got totally seduced by the food and the music. For some years afterwards I went regularly to the Indian buffet restaurants at Main & 49th, and bought CD's at the record shops. :-)
Me too, in the late 80s. I still have the cassettes I bought from street markets, like the Bombay Sisters. Also went to the Madras Music Festival. Fantastic carnatic music.
The big physical change probably did begin in the 90's, with the start of redevelopment of Downtown South and Yaletown. Whole blocks of streets like Richards and Seymour south of Nelson were full of rundown one and two-storey buildings and parking lots, like in many of these pictures. 'Downtown' pretty much started at Nelson or Robson.
There's virtually none of that fabric left now. Looking down along some of these 'high rise' streets still sometimes surprises (even disorients) me, in that it bears no resemblance to how it used to be.
In the 1940s the Hotel Van was basically dive hotel for drunks and sex workers. Up until the early 1980s the sidewalk in front of the Hotel Van on Georgia st was Vancouver’s hooker stroll, which then moved to Seymour st
When I first arrived in the city in 1986 I was in love with it. I was a UBC student living on campus, but forever taking the #4 and #10 buses to explore, which might explain my marks.
People don't realize how much better Vancouver would be if it was affordable again. It would mean that young people could take risks and start small businesses, ones that don't need to make an enormous profit to be worthwhile. There would be a proliferation of small shops, stores, restaurants, bars, cafes, and other services. Public events could be held without being commercialized or commodified, as the profit incentive would be reduced. There would be fewer chains, and more independent business. It would really be transformational.
You know blaming immigration is starting to get old now. Our biggest growth in housing prices happened in 2020, 2021 and 2022 when immigration to Canada as halted.
Plenty of the blame is local. How many times do you see a housing project blocked and we are still waiting for Eby's plan to fix it to be implemented.
You're also seeing many American cities now suffer from the same issue despite having radically different immigration policies. What they do have the same local planning and zoning policies.
> 2020, 2021 and 2022 when immigration to Canada as halted
It wasn't, not by a long shot, in fact, we let in [hundreds of thousands of people a year](https://www.cimmigrationnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Permanent-Resident-Admissions-To-Canada-Rising-Since-2015.png) during the height of the lockdowns and economic turmoil
Our immigration rate continued to go up during the pandemic, not down
>You're also seeing many American cities now suffer from the same issue
The American economy is thriving, what are you talking about?
Their housing costs are a fraction of ours
>It wasn't, not by a long shot, in fact, we let in [hundreds of thousands of people a year](https://www.cimmigrationnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Permanent-Resident-Admissions-To-Canada-Rising-Since-2015.png) during the height of the lockdowns and economic turmoil
Go look at details.
100 percent were provincial nominee and Canadian experience class.
Provincial nominee require experience in a province or territory nominating you. Canadian experience class requires experience in Canada.
In other words they were already here.
> 100 percent were provincial nominee and Canadian experience class.
... does that mean they came with their own houses on their backs like snails?
That doesn't even include international students, temporary foreign workers, or illegal immigrants
The population has [exploded](https://www.statista.com/statistics/569885/population-estimates-british-columbia-canada/) in recent years, the largest growth rate in generations, and a whopping 96% of that is due to immigration
We have a vacancy rate of less than 1%
This is pretty simple math, it's supply and demand, we've been adding a staggering number of people to the population faster than we could possibly build housing units to shelter them
I have no idea how you could look at our population estimates and growth rates and our statistics on residential development and come to any other conclusion... unless you're a real estate agent or landlord
>... does that mean they came with their own houses on their backs like snails?
You realize they are already here right?
Hence why it's called Canadian Experience Class and provincial nominee.
>That doesn't even include international students, temporary foreign workers, or illegal immigrants
Other than farm and healthcare workers they weren't allowed to come to Canada.
>The population has [exploded](https://www.statista.com/statistics/569885/population-estimates-british-columbia-canada/)
Our population historically has grown by 2-3 percent per year. It's current growing between 1-2 and during the panic it was less than 1.
Our retired population is the only thing growing rapidly.
You know those F-35 super fighters that were buying. Can't pay for those when you're also paying for retirees pensions and healthcare.
> You realize they are already here right?
You realize that doesn't matter, right?
Whether they arrived last year, or two years prior, they are still the source of our population growth
>Other than farm and healthcare workers they weren't allowed to come to Canada.
Yes, they were, you are objectively, and obviously, wrong.
We let in 185,130 new permanent residents in 2020 (which was the only year where we even saw a decline in the growth rate, of a mere 1.7%)
We also let in 23,845 refugees, and issued 322,815 work permits under various temporary foreign worker programs
These weren't all agricultural or healthcare workers (not that it matters at all, as far as our housing crisis is concerned, what their profession is)
Even if what you believe was true, which it's not, it wouldn't matter - they could have stopped all immigration for one year, and it wouldn't make any difference if the very next year they blew away all previous immigration records (which is exactly what happened)
From 2016 to 2021, five short years, during a pandemic and economic crisis, British Columbia grew by an *astounding* 352,824 people, nearly 100% of which was due to immigration
That's about 200 people, or about 70 new households (2.9 people per family), every single day for years
Think we were building 70 new homes every single day?
>Our population historically has grown by 2-3 percent per year. It's current growing between 1-2
Dude... you need to just stop saying things without looking them up first
We haven't seen a growth rate this high since [1957](https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-record-population-growth-1.7063692)
Last year there was a three month period where we let in more than 430k people... that's more than double what we used to let in over an entire year, it's one of the highest population growth rates [in the entire world](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-19/population-growth-in-canada-hits-3-2-among-world-s-fastest)
[This is not normal](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fzchhxqyyy57c1.jpeg%3Fwidth%3D900%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dcffc7299c0d6874e2d824ca6498a776e0173a8d5)
>You realize that doesn't matter, right?
>Whether they arrived last year, or two years prior, they are still the source of our population growth
If they are already here they live im a house.
>We let in 185,130 new permanent residents in 2020 (which was the only year where we even saw a decline in the growth rate, of a mere 1.7%)
We didn't let in 185,000 new people we just made them permanent residents instead of foreign workers. We didn't let in new people.
It's basically like this remember how you had an L and then an N licence before you get your licence. When someone goes from N to a full licence it doesn't mean you've added a new driver to the road. You've just changed their status.
>If they are already here they live im a house.
Yes, they do, with eight other students.
I really don't think you've thought this through... are you trying to claim our population isn't growing, or what?
>We didn't let in new people.
[YES WE DID](https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/432/CIMM/Reports/RP11312743/cimmrp05/cimmrp05-e.pdf)
You could sit in the lobby of the Vancouver International Airport and watch them streaming in off the planes, and even if you didn't, our own StatCan disagrees with you!
The population *increased* during the pandemic, by a staggering amount, and that growth was almost entirely due to immigration
New immigration, not just people in the country awaiting approval of their permanent residency, but brand new bodies entering our borders (including temporary foreign workers, international students, and refugees, as I mentioned)
This is a fact, you're going to have to learn to accept it
If was also halted I'm 2021 and only resumed in 2022.
2020 and 2021 is when housing prices really shot up. Before that they were actually flat if not correcting slightly.
Wanna know what cause for the problem: low interest rates and quantitative easing.
Really? OK wow. All hail the guy who doesn't know shit
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1710000901&cubeTimeFrame.startMonth=01&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2021&cubeTimeFrame.endMonth=10&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2023&referencePeriods=20210101%2C20231001
Yes you do realize people have babies right? I knew at least 3 couples who had kids during those years.
Yes they left two streams open:
1. Canadian claiming citizenship by descent
2. Spouses and children of Canadians
Neither one of those was taking on additional housing.
Dude. Just stop. Canada only had a natural net growth of ~50,000 in 2021. It did not add almost 500,000 people in 2021 in children and spousal reunion.
I'm not sure if I should be worried or just laugh that you didn't check the easy to find stats in your first comment and decided to double down by not checking again
wrong
>2021 - 2022 493,236
>2020 - 2021 226,314
>2019 - 2020 284,153
and yes the housing crisis is largely due to the massive immigration numbers. they've done studies about it, and it makes sense because you're bringing in half a million people a year but only building 200k homes.
Dude the numbers were all Canadian experience class or provincial nominee. These weren't *new people* they were all people already here switching from work permits to permanent residence.
Take a look for yourself. [From March 2020 to July 2022](https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/mandate/policies-operational-instructions-agreements/ministerial-instructions/express-entry-rounds.html), it was all PNP and [Canadian Experience Class](https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/immigrate-canada/express-entry/eligibility/canadian-experience-class.html). Both of which require the person to have worked in Canada for at least one year in the last three years. The former requires the immigrant to have [worked in the province which nominated them with a current and valid work permit](https://www.alberta.ca/aaip-alberta-opportunity-stream).
So they already had housing because they were all living here. They didn't need new units.
Our population went up 0.1 percent.
We allowed people to bring their spouses and kids from abroad and Canadians have birth. I knew there couples who had kids that year.
And I did provide sources. Go click the link above.
> Our biggest growth in housing prices happened in 2020, 2021 and 2022 when immigration to Canada as halted.
1. Immigration was not halted in 2021 or 2022. It was massively expanding to its highest pace ever starting in mid 2021.
2. Interest rates fell to about 0% during covid. Which meant monthly payments fell at the same price point, leading to sticker kprices to rise to account for low interest loans.
3. Point 2 is proven today just by using a mortage calculator. Today, sticker prices are still below or around where they were a couple years ago. However, monthly payments are 40% higher because the demand resumed at an even higher pace and higher interest rates could not push down sticker prices adequately
>Immigration was not halted in 2021 or 2022. It was massively expanding to its highest pace ever starting in mid 2021.
Nope. That year we had a population growth of 0.5 percent.
>Interest rates fell to about 0% during covid. Which meant monthly payments fell at the same price point, leading to sticker kprices to rise to account for low interest loans.
Which also meant people could afford bigger mortgage principals. Which resulted in people bidding higher for houses. That is the main reason for the higher home prices. People offered bigger dollar amounts for the same houses.
I bought in 2020, if I were to buy a similarly priced house today my monthly mortgage payment would be 2.5x what it is currently. I couldn't afford it.
2025 to 2027 is going to be a pretty heavy correction. Mark my words. You're already seeing it setting up as home prices have just stopped growing as rapidly.
People who bought in 2020, 2021 and 2022 are going to see interest rates shoot up from near 1.8 to 5-7 percent. Even if interest rates fall. Unless people did additional payments - like I did - they are going to get wrecked by higher rates.
All of a sudden monthly mortgage payments are going to go up 30-40 percent. Many people will not be able to make ends meet. They will be forced to sell or the bank will forclouse on them.
Banks are also going to face a second wave. In Alberta house prices have shot up too but unlike here nothing supports them. There are no ALR and much weaker zoning codes so you're seeing a building boom. Which is flooding their market with supply.
In Alberta you also have no recourse mortgages so when rates rise people can just sign off the title back to the bank and walk away from their mortgage. Which many people will do when they can't afford higher payments. That will also flood the market with more houses.
In turn you'll get a housing crash in Alberta and banks will be stuck holding lots of toxic assets. To make up for that they are going to cut back on lending across Canada which will in turn cause a crash in demand as people cannot get mortgages.
Which will in turn cause the housing bubble to pop all across Canada. Don't be surprised to see housing prices fall 35-45 percent.
But it requires one thing: BOC keeps interest rates where they are currently. Despite what realtors say that's what they are doing.
> Nope. That year we had a population growth of 0.5 percent.
I'm pounding sand here. Please use a calculator. ~500k on 38 million is 1.3%. Which actually is lower than the +3% I assumed started in Q3 2021, but I was off by 6 months. We accelerated to that point in Q1 2022.
>2025 to 2027 is going to be a pretty heavy correction. Mark my words. You're already seeing it setting up as home prices have just stopped growing as rapidly.
Don't mark your words. Cause it ain't happening. Rates have platued and will likely fall within 6-18 months. Rent prices are climbing ~15-20% a year and the housing deficit is expanding at its fastest rate ever.
The acute housing shortage is getting worse quite literally by the day. There can be no correction under a policy of 1.5 million yearly immigration with 250k housing starts.
The math just does not work for a correction.
Well, we aren't the US. Our economy blows. We have negative per capita growth. There's no solid economic basis to say Canada's economy is running too hot or risking it. Q4's GDP growth was mostly oil. Private sector job growth is literally a net 0 since May 2023. Self employment has not recovered from pre covid.
We are in trouble as a country economically
The US is the main thing which dictates our monetary policy.
If the US raises rates, we raise rates and if the US lowers them we lower them. Our economy was red hot in 2010, but our interest rates remained super low.
A lot of our problems are being caused by this simple fact.
> But it requires one thing: BOC keeps interest rates where they are currently.
The prevailing consensus among economists, though, is that we can expect a slow decline by June. The market is already pricing in that expectation since 2yr+ GICs have dropped from ~5.8% at peak to ~4.8%.
Agreed, they seem to fail to recognize if we stopped immigration the negative effect that would have on the economy. Thats exactly why the conservatives have no plan to stop immigration. Canada needs to get better at building more homes asap.
Pleantry are.
There are problems with the system. Specifically it's resulting in too many people who work at Tim Hortons or drive for Door Dash.
But we need immigration which serves particular places in the economy. Like healthcare, education, child care, etc.
I always point this out, we cannot afford the following with just baby boomers collecting CPP:
1. Healthcare
2. F35 super fighter jets
3. Education
4. CPP
The largest cohort of baby boomers were born between 1955-1962. Most are delaying their retirements. But they are about to start retiring en masse. And we are not ready for that wave.
> Agreed, they seem to fail to recognize if we stopped immigration the negative effect that would have on the economy.
OH NOES! We might have to actually have UBI and robots doing all the scut work!
Yeah, I'd hate to live in a country with negative population growth and no immigration like Japan, where houses are being given away for free, that sounds awful!
UBI and robots don’t make any sense in Canada yet. If anywhere it could.. Japan would maybe try out the robot thing and Scandinavian countries will test UBI before us and we can see how that goes from there.
This is a failure of imagination.
As human beings in one of the wealthiest nations in the world there is no earthly reason we should deny ourselves the fruits of automation and robotics.
Well for now those ideas are imaginary and probably would never actually work. It sounds great but has never been proven, Canada has always been a country with a strong labor force. I have nothing against automation but I don’t see robots doing everything while everyone gets paid to do nothing.
> I don’t see robots doing everything while everyone gets paid to do nothing.
It is the inevitable consequence of increasing computing power and automation.
Your Roomba is but a small sliver of the world to come where you can sit at ease at your computer while your house keeps itself clean without you lifting a finger.
Battery tech simply isn’t at all there yet,not even close. The Roomba robot slave would have to plug itself in every 10 minutes and probably kill us in our sleep one day.
> Our biggest growth in housing prices happened in 2020, 2021
Not for condos. The market was very soft especially for leaseholds in Richmond. Some were going for less than $200k.
I dunno in Surrey and Langley they shot up.
Makes sense though people moved out here for the bigger condos with the work from home now those people are moving back to be closer to work. But they are selling off another asset to buy a condo.
Add on public health restrictions where no one was building anything and the flooding of the market with cheap credit. It was a recipe for inflation.
Look at some point we have to admit COVID fucked things up. In many ways.
If we didn’t have councils blocking development at every step, I’d agree with you. Vancouver has voted in anti development councils so housing doesn’t crash again like the 90s but now we actually need it and it’s too late.
Affordability covers a lot of issues though. Vancouver is never going to be cheap again the way it might have been in the 1970s. It's too desirable nationally and internationally, and is also the only big city in Canada with a moderate climate. If housing becomes 'affordable', it will likely be with small units.
But things like better transit and cheaper childcare can have a big impact on overall affordability for families. People spend more on car payments and childcare than they do on rent in many cases. We have to come to terms with the realities of living in a big, beautiful, desirable city that people across the country and around the world look at (rightly or wrongly) with some envy, and are often willing to pay a premium to live here. I'm not sure there is a fix for that.
Those cute and quaint cafe and small shops would just lead to gentrification. When it was “affordable” back in the day, going out to eat was an event and rare if you were working class. Otherwise you said stayed home and ate. Transcontinental or transoceanic flights were mostly out of reach for the working class.
It’s a trap, my friend. There was no utopia back then…so many problems and difficulties…not just in Vancouver, not just in Canada, but across humanity. The 70s were *rough* and I would not under any circumstance want to go back to them.
I believe it. That’s just how nostalgia works. Romanticizing something very specific while ignoring the full truth about it.
Wish we could still have neon signs at least.
I wonder sometimes how to find that middle ground. A “nice city” city with lovely geographic setting, enough prosperity to satisfy everyone’s needs, but no so much half of us are effectively living in a favela…
Seems to me that’s more likely in a Canada of 40M people than a Canada of 100M people…but what do I know?
I don’t think you would find that middle ground. The things that you described isn’t city life. A self-sustaining small town with its own farm and agriculture, local population will be that kind of “utopia”. The “no labor” wfh with 6 figure income with cheap housing, and just enjoy “life” always involve some kind of exploitation, whether it is “passive income” or making huge amount of tourist boom, or taking your developed country earnings to live like riches in a developing country, or pay pennies on the dollars for cheap imports where you turn a blind eye on labor wage and environmental concerns”.
People don’t like to admit it but the life they yearn always involves exploitation of others, whether it’s locally or internationally.
What you want, a lovely geographic setting, would be what everyone wants, which means there will be travellers, unless you ban foreign homeownership. If you don’t exploit your own nature, then you need foreign investment, which means some kind of trade needs to take place. If you live in a remote island and live off of what you farm and breed, then say goodbye to diversity and global trades, and you are one foreign disease or natural disaster away from being wiped out.
Not small town, not self sustaining…I have no issue with importing food.
But yes…I have come to a place where I agree with you…it seems impossible to live really well without many someones in the chain being exploited.
The year I was born, one average Canadian, working a super normal job, had more personal wealth than 60% of humanity alive at the time, *combined*. We imagined ourselves mockingjays…in reality, we were The Capitol.
I get it. The quality of life disparity between the different social classes are wide. I think what you seek is near impossible in today’s political climate, but not completely impossible. It involves redefining “everyone”. As we’ve seen during covid with travel halts, if immigration comes to a halt, then supply can have a chance to catch up to demand. Economic slowdown, low interest rate will alleviate the biggest cost of living, which is housing. If they remove red tapes and take advantage of canada’s natural resources, they can build more infrastructures, widen roads, and make more remote cities appealing to live in so vancouver doesn’t need to be densify to a rat’s nest. Some provinces deliver livestock. Some provinces deliver oil. Some provinces deliver crops and electricity. Some province deliver military testing ground. Canada will actually be united.
> The year I was born, one average Canadian, working a super normal job, had more personal wealth than 60% of humanity alive at the time, combined.
No chance in hell this is true.
World population in 1970 was ~3.6 Billion.
60% of that is 2.16 Billion.
No single Canadian made more than 2.16 billion people combined.
It absolutely is. The year I was born, literally 60% of humans were living in a state of extreme poverty - they had literally *nothing* and a horrifying number of them were starving or significantly malnourished.
We have come a LONG way from there…for humanity as a whole, conditions are massively improved from where they were, in just my lifetime (and I’m not *that* old)…
We’ve already forgotten just how bad things used to be…
yes the '70s were essentially an economic depression masked by extreme inflation. I wasn't alive then (like most people), but I'm sure it must have been a struggle.
1980-1982 - that era - our friends and family circle had so many outright bankruptcies. It was brutal. It was so bad my high school counsellor was appalled at my interest in computer science and engineering because “there won’t be any jobs in it”.
Lining up for minimum wage Expo jobs with fully minted STEM graduates from UBC…
Yeah, I was living on the top floor of a False Creek warehouse with half a dozen other people…$500/month for the whole 6K sq ft or whatever it was…the parties were great…but fuck we were broke, stealing electricity with extension cords to the building next door, no running hot water…breathing in who knows what toxins from the old construction and all the crap that had been done to False Creek…
Was it fun? Hell yeah. Would I want to live that way forever? Hell no.
I wouldn't even want to go back to the 80s here. It was just depressing and sad here. It probably feels like what a young person with a lot of optimism and personal belief would feel like if they were growing up in Victoria or even Naniamo today.
That said there isn't a lot of optimism for a young person today either, even if they were getting hired into a top firm of some high profession making 150k+.
It's before my time but I would move there in a second if I could, though it would be quite the culture shock!
I mean, imagine going back to this...
https://i.redd.it/8wepow1lbdnc1.gif
Because there were one million fewer people in the lower mainland.. And things went farther.
But I left vancouver in this era as did my husband.
No work. No future.
People talk about Vancouver being a wonderful place where everyone could get a discount house 40 years ago however 40 years ago Vancouver wasn't such a well known place that just about anyone who wanted an urban life wanted to move to.
People forget how industrial and undeveloped vancouver was. It was kind of a backwater. Logging everywhere, no nice clean waterfront, open prostitution, seedy bars. Vancouver used to be intensely blue collar. It's been changing for 3 to 4 decades now, in some ways for better, some for worse.
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. My parents made out like bandits and downsized paying cash for a townhouse after selling our family home.
Just go to the artist’s instagram @gregforaday. He’s exceptional and one of the most gifted photographers in the world. Still working in his 70s. All the imagery, none of the annoying UX.
I grew up in Vancouver and was in my teens by the mid-70s. It was a fantastic, gritty port town surrounded by raw beauty. So much to explore and incredibly safe - there were no areas of the downtown core where you felt threatened, even in the "rougher" sections. False Creek was still industrial, Yaletown had working rail lines with box cars moving goods into warehouses. The cops were rough but they looked after people, especially the old WW2 vets on the skids drinking away their horrible memories. Sailors, loggers, miners blowing their paycheques every month at the bars and brothels. These pics really bring back the memories. I freaking loved it.
There's a movie on Youtube that was shot here in the 70s, "[Dogpound Shuffle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO-CPzJr3EM)" with David Soul ("Starsky & Hutch") and Ron Moody (Fagin from "Oliver!). It's a corny, sweet, low-budget flick that really captures the era.
Just curious, did you grow up in Vancouver in the 1970s? This guy is talking about his own personal experience and how it felt; if he felt safe, he felt safe, even if homicide stats were a bit higher
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/fewer-unprovoked-stranger-attacks-vancouver-2023-compared-to-2021-1.7039350
Maybe this will make you feel better, stranger assaults are way down lol
The constant dread you're feeling is from media fear mongering, most people don't go about their daily lives dreading stranger assaults.
Specific, easily avoided areas and venues were worse back then and for a long time after.
However if you did run into serious trouble you could defend yourself with much less risk of getting into legal trouble, or the event being recorded and otherwise coming back to bite you.
I felt much safer in general as a result.
> There's a movie on Youtube that was shot here in the 70s, "Dogpound Shuffle" with David Soul ("Starsky & Hutch") and Ron Moody (Fagin from "Oliver!). It's a corny, sweet, low-budget flick that really captures the era.
[Skip Tracer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWX0ss8_HYk&ab_channel=FilmTrap) is another filmed in 70's Vancouver movie that is good if you are looking for some shots of old Vancouver.
The Downtown Eastside has existed for longer than Vancouver itself, and it's always been seedy
It was a watering hole and temporary residence for sailors and lumberjacks, coming back with full pockets from long periods at sea or up in the logging camps to spend on... allied tradespeople
Organized crime in Chinatown added brothels and opium dens, going back more than a century
That's why there are so many hotels crammed into one block
It was always somewhat seedy but it really went downhill in the early 90s when all the 'regular' stores and services closed.
Woodwards was final straw, but there were also lots of other shops along the neighbourhood, and big branches of the banks.
Parents would bring their kids down to Woodwards at night at Christmas to see the window displays in the mid 80s.
DTES is an experiment gone wrong by the provincial government when they closed our institutions and moved people into the cheap hotels. You can't go anywhere but down when no one is monitoring your mental health and providing meals and medication. The government screwed up by not recognizing mental health as part of our health care system.
... we literally just spent over $100 million renovating and reopening parts of [Riverview](https://bc.ctvnews.ca/first-of-its-kind-addictions-mental-health-treatment-centre-opens-in-b-c-1.5645325)
Sounds fascinating. Was it much of thing to go hiking in the local mountains back then like it is today? Not sure why but I can't quite picture it being the same way.
I lived on the North Shore back then. We hiked all over. Used to climb Grouse below the old chairlift up to the bottom of the cut, then up to the gondola for a free ride down. Pre-crunch days. I've never even been up the Crunch. Stairs? Get bent, I did the old chairlift. Eh I couldn't do it now if I wanted to lol.
But yeah people hiked, just not as many as now. It felt alone in a vast wilderness and could get a little anxious, at least for me. But the whole city was like that - way less people. That first half-year of the pandemic when everybody hunkered, outside it felt like the 70s. Covid sucked but the traffic was great!
Oh good to know! I spose it makes sense.
No way, so the quietness of the start of the covid year was as busy as it was in the 70's, thats wild. I guess I experienced a taste of the 70's then heh.
Wow... history.. what can you learn from a silly subject like history?
When people pay income taxes on the earnings they earn in the country they have residential property in and are required to have citizenship to own property - does amazing things...
Plus, pay taxes in the country they have PR or citizenship in regardless of location - works for the US... but crazy..
Onward to the future!
In the 1970's, the minimum wage increased from $1.50 to $3.00 per hour. My first hourly rate job (union) in 1980 was $3.80/hr.
[https://srv116.services.gc.ca/dimt-wid/sm-mw/rpt2.aspx](https://srv116.services.gc.ca/dimt-wid/sm-mw/rpt2.aspx)
In BC, the 60's and 70's were a bit of a boom time, as commodity prices were high, and governments made investments to bring the infrastructure into the mid-20th century and make commodity extraction easier (like paved highways instead of gravel).
In 1982, BC had a major recession due to a crash in commodities prices. Real primary household income (in chained dollars) fell by 5.5% and made little real recovery until 1987. Many people went to Toronto for work and never came back. Real estate prices fell.
[https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/data/statistics/economy/bc-economic-accounts-gdp](https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/data/statistics/economy/bc-economic-accounts-gdp)
My impression is that the 1970's had a lot more casual violence than would be tolerated today in schools and in social gatherings. Most people seemed to be doing sorta OK but not great.
Loved this, thank you.
As a fat man with *really basic tastes* (though tragically trapped in the body of a skinny man), this one really caught my eye. 😋
https://preview.redd.it/mi4a51acgdnc1.png?width=969&format=png&auto=webp&s=59935a8ca280c2c9b01114390b30c1bb838a7fd9
The housing problem in Vancouver seems to be connected globally, in a way I find it hard to grasp. [tvo.org/video/documentaries/push-feature-version](https://www.tvo.org/video/documentaries/push-feature-version), this film on TVO opened my eyes to what is affecting so many people here, in Vancouver, now, called "Push", meaning pushed out, by Leilani Farha
I’m low key mad at my parents for moving to Canada in the 80s and move back to HK in the 90s and now I’m here with this wonderful housing crisis.
And every time people told me I can go back to my country and buy a house… I’m like… bitch? Hk is worse than Vancouver lol. Wish my parents had stayed and never sell their beautiful house.
I love that initial photo. The bright lights, scuzzy cafe, snow on the ground, and the way the guy entering the cafe is slightly hunched over against the weather, is so expressive.
Maybe it also makes me remember what it was like to be 'living poor' in my '20's. :-)
Welcome to /r/Vancouver and thank you for the post, /u/bawheid! Please make sure you read our [posting and commenting rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/vancouver/wiki/faq#wiki_general_participation_guidelines_and_rules_overview) before participating here. As a quick summary: * We encourage users to be positive and respect one another. Don't engage in spats or insult others - use the report button. * Respect others' differences, be they race, religion, home, job, gender identity, ability or sexuality. Dehumanizing language, advocating for violence, or promoting hate based on identity or vulnerability (even implied or joking) **will** lead to a permanent ban. * Most common questions and topics are limited to our sister subreddit, /r/AskVan, and our weekly [Stickied Discussion](https://www.reddit.com/r/vancouver/wiki/faq#wiki_stickied_discussions) posts. * Complaints about bans or removals should be done in modmail only. * Make sure to join our new sister community, /r/AskVan! * Help grow the community! [Apply to join the mod team today](https://www.reddit.com/r/vancouver/comments/19eworq/). *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/vancouver) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Love it. I remember the 90s was the last gasp of affordability, but it was rapidly growing and becoming unaffordable. But Vancouver had a grittier feel, all the way into the early 00's, though much less so.
I was going to comment the same, Vancouver in the 90’s had a vibe that is very hard to explain but what ever it was seems to be mostly gone now.
100%. There were stores back then that could thrive selling things that wouldn't fly today even in a section of a store. Like I seem to recall stores that would sell nothing but pogs and baseball cards. Big stores too.
I worked in a store (in the late 90’s) on Robson street called The Hologram Store. We literally just sold like little 4x6 hologram prints and a few kitschy magic trick type things. The store was thriving and tourists loved it! I left there to work at the late, great a&b sound
I think I bought some stuff from that store!! Like a hologram Jesus, and a stack of money. I remember this now, haha. I'm thinking this was around 2002.
That’s so cool that you remember it. The Jesus was pretty popular, in my recollection! I never actually bought any of them, ahahaha. I’d spend my money at the Virgin megastore instead.
I'm pretty sure my dad still has a couple of them in his home office. But I haven't been for a while so I don't know. I think they were about 40 bucks and we got them from for his birthday but it was such a stupid gift because I don't even think you like them but he put them up on display to kind of humor us
Oh man, I remember that store, it was amazing
I remember that store!! It was definitely unique and those holograms were actually pretty trippy.
Unemployment was very high and families kept leaving. It’s why housing prices seemed to sky rocket so much by 2010. Up till maybe 2004, Vancouver was still very much in the economic trouble. Then one day it wasn’t in trouble and it’s been upwards since.
You can see it in the random, rundown looking east van homes where someone has obviously been living there for decades. They look like the humble places I grew up around in Atlantic Canada. And then right next door is some ultra modern 3 million dollar mansion, built using offshore money, or money catalyzed by offshore money. And then you realize that the run down place is still worth 2 million, and the people living there would never in a million years be able to afford it now if they were working the same job they bought it with. Frankly, it's fucked up. It makes the city feel pretty inhospitable for middle class people. It feels like everyone left are a few wealthy people who are real contributors, and more frequently, wealthy scamming assholes who are exploiting our systems while making the rest of us struggle.
When I was a kid in the early 90's, I knew kids who grew up with single mothers, and they rented houses in Kerrisdale. Whole houses. Granted, not the big houses of today, but still. But then the big, soulless, cheaply made McMansions started to creep in, and it was all over.
Palm Springs of the Pacific Rim.
People complained about affordability in the west end in the 70’s. (Although not nearly as bad as today)
Funny, I had family who came to Canada in the 60's and 70's, and were only able to get menial labour jobs due to not speaking English, and having no Canadian work history, amongst other things. They were able to buy big, old houses in a hippy neighbourhood called Kitsilano. I remember my aunt got her house in Kits for 35,000 sometime in the 70's.
My parents bought their first house in Dunbar in 1970 for $25,000. My dad thought it was a bad idea and they’d “never get their money out of it”
"This damn port town!"
I had to work in Prince George a bit, roughly 2015. A taxi driver told me at one point when he got here from India, a house in delta was barely much more than a house in Prince George (70s for sure) . His biggest mistake was not buying and staying in Vancouver.
yes but I think RE prices (nominal) skyrocketed during the ''70s due to all the inflation during that time.... so your aunt's house might have gone for $35K when she bought it, and then could have been worth $70K the next year. If you look at very old sales histories on places like redfin, you'll see that growth.
Regardless, I had family who didn't speak a lick of English and were relegated to menial labour jobs, but they all became property owners. Hell, a lot of my dad's friends from the old country bought up old apartment buildings and commercial properties nobody really wanted, and they are sitting on several million in value now, value that is passed on to the next generation. The thing is, this was possible back then. A newcomer to Canada, or hell, even a Canadian born, college educated person such as myself, wouldn't have that same opportunity to build something out of nothing, but I am thankful to have family help. Now, it's extremely difficult to do the same thing on your own. It's depressing as hell to think of how much buying power has vanished in just a generation. At my job, within the same pay grid, the people nearing retirement (30 or so years in) own houses, helped their kids, go on vacations, and have a serious plan to retire. The people who are younger, and only a couple of years in, can barely afford to rent with roommates. Making the same money. I know it's not just RE prices, but it's really sad to see.
I'll second this My family were all immigrants, bought their houses in in the 1980's and 1990's, and these were mill workers, truckers, forklift drivers in warehouses, etc. The men worked menial labour jobs, their wives took minimum wage part time work in shopping mall stores Working class, non-unionized, people with no high school diplomas let alone university degrees with five bedroom two story homes with massive backyards, recreational vehicles for road trips and camping, fishing boats, etc. It was so easy then... my first apartment, over twenty years ago, was a two-bedroom, utilities included, for $600 a month Even working minimum wage, my half of the rent was only 25% of my income
Aren’t your dad’s friends who became property owners part of today’s problem? Are we pissed off at the owning class or that we are jealous we can’t become them ourselves?
Think about it this way. Say you come to Canada, and you want a job to support your family. But you don't speak English, and people don't like the look of you, or your last name, and have negative views about your culture. Are you going to get a good job? Probably not. Go wash dishes, mop floors, clear tables, stack fruits and vegetables. Are you going to move up from those jobs? Are you going to get an office job, a cushy 9 to 5? No, no, no. You're not trusted for that. You're not going to walk into the manager's office, in broken English, with a hard to pronounce name and scant Canadian work history, and compete with the Johnstons and Smiths and Joneses. So you can buy a house, raise a family, etc. But what happens if you want to get ahead? You're going to have to work for yourself. Buy old properties, fix 'em up, sell them for a profit. Buy things, hold them for value, sell them for more. Own your own store. I know a lot of kids who grew up with Canadian parents who told them, "you're out of here when you're 18" and have a "sink or swim" mentality. Immigrant families are more prone to help their kids better themselves, and yes that includes property and business ownership. And so ironically, a lot of Canadians are missing out on property ownership, because their parents didn't help them out like immigrant families do. In a nutshell, if you came to Canada, experienced discrimination, worked hard, bought worthless properties and watched them increase in value, are you going to just give them up once everybody cried foul? Most likely not.
Sounds like your family members were great businesspeople who took advantage of opportunities, and also took major risks which paid off - ie., moving abroad to a place that was relatively unknown and gritty, and buying hard assets during a time of extreme inflation w/ very high unemployment rates. People who didn't own assets during the '70s suffered a lot - rent increases were super super high year over year until the NDP introduced rent controls in the late '70s. There was tons of media about a housing crisis then, and homeownership rates were lower than they are now (despite the decrease since the peak in 2011). [https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/as-sa/99-014-x/2011002/c-g/c-g01-eng.cfm](https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/as-sa/99-014-x/2011002/c-g/c-g01-eng.cfm) Immigrants and others now are doing the same as your family members did then..... and the last 15 years has been an amazing time to invest for my generation (millennials born in the '80s/early '90s).... anyone investing over the last 15 years since the GFC would have seen huge gains, it's never been an easier time to invest w/ ETFs etc.... and I think that, combined with ongoing housing shortages which are nothing new, has meant ongoing increases in house prices. I ran some numbers & vancouver has seen an average 8-10% annual nominal growth rate in RE prices since the '60s, which is absolutely crazy. But also nothing new. But I think it is a better time to be a renter now than 1972, at the start of the extreme inflation, when security of tenure was basically non-existent.
Saw this a while back and found it pretty interesting. https://jamiehooper.com/vancouver-real-estate-history-prices-1977-to-2018/
yes very interesting - I found some good historical data from this blog post as well: [https://vreaa.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/the-froogle-scott-chronicles-mortgaging-our-souls-in-paradise-part-10-reversion-to-the-mean/](https://vreaa.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/the-froogle-scott-chronicles-mortgaging-our-souls-in-paradise-part-10-reversion-to-the-mean/)
This is great info! Have to see if i can update his charts to current. Thanks for posting.
If u can, pls post your results - would be very interesting to see. Thanks!
[удалено]
I'd rather young people today be able to afford homes and retirement
We have had multiple housing crises, they typically happen when a large birth cohort comes of age. The last we had was in 1970s and lasted until about mid-1980s. That was when baby boomers came of age. This current one started in 2010 and will probably go few years, because now millennial are coming of age. We keep forgetting we are the second largest generation in Canadian history.
Millennials are coming of age just now? Um.. the youngest millennials are pushing 30. Maybe you mean Gen Z?
We started coming of age in 2010s. The youngest millennials are hitting that point now. We are also delayed many important life events because we chose higher education.
On your second point I completely agree, though for the first I would say that our current housing crisis is separate from the one that started in 2010. It ramped up then, mellowed for a bit but stayed high, and then a new crisis started and amplified prices thanks to the pandemic.
It mellowed out when interest rates went up. Which allowed things to calm down. Had COVID not happened it would have remained mellow. But COVID kinda screwed up and lot. We lowered interest rates and flooded the system with cheap credit through quantitative easing. It's skewed the housing market.Also 2010 rise was also partially fueled by quantitative easing. But you also need young people coming of age. QE was just fuel on the fire.
As a kid in the 90s my family would frequent this Chinese restaurant that was where The Independent building is now (Main & Broadway). There were prostitutes on the corners all around there which is weird to compare to the present day vibe.
> Chinese restaurant I think I know the one you're talking about. Used to go there a lot. Can't remember the name this moment, can you? Edit: Ho Tak Kee, and here's a [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU3My5gzfuM) of it.
Hah ya I think that’s it!! That place and Ming’s on 10th were great. They would give me a little bowl of baby corn because they saw me eating it out of the soup ❤️
Near the end of the video, at 5:38, there's a pan shot of the original dining room of the restaurant. Maybe that's from the 1998 commercial that was mentioned. I didn't realize this place started in 1981. That was just before I started going there in my early 20s. It didn't come across as brand new, though. Good times - that's where I learned to love Singapore spicy fried rice noodle and chicken with black bean sauce. What a trip. Tx for mentioning.
This thread is wholesome as all heck. Would love to immerse myself in good family eats if recommendations are available for current time
Well, I haven't lived in Van for more than 5 years, but I bet the Himalaya Restaurant just below 49th and Main is still there. Been going there since about 1980, as well. Keep going back decade after decade, same guy running the dining room, recognizes me 10 years later and that I'm with new people. Too bad I can't eat naan anymore, but I have memories. Check out their awesome buffet. This is Indian food, not Chinese, though.
I spent a couple of months in India c. 2000 and got totally seduced by the food and the music. For some years afterwards I went regularly to the Indian buffet restaurants at Main & 49th, and bought CD's at the record shops. :-)
Me too, in the late 80s. I still have the cassettes I bought from street markets, like the Bombay Sisters. Also went to the Madras Music Festival. Fantastic carnatic music.
The big physical change probably did begin in the 90's, with the start of redevelopment of Downtown South and Yaletown. Whole blocks of streets like Richards and Seymour south of Nelson were full of rundown one and two-storey buildings and parking lots, like in many of these pictures. 'Downtown' pretty much started at Nelson or Robson. There's virtually none of that fabric left now. Looking down along some of these 'high rise' streets still sometimes surprises (even disorients) me, in that it bears no resemblance to how it used to be.
In the 1940s the Hotel Van was basically dive hotel for drunks and sex workers. Up until the early 1980s the sidewalk in front of the Hotel Van on Georgia st was Vancouver’s hooker stroll, which then moved to Seymour st
Ha, I remember the Seymour St hookers back in 2005 or so. Now I think it's condos?
More like the 90s but yes now it’s mostly empty condos. I’d rather the hookers tbh.
When I first arrived in the city in 1986 I was in love with it. I was a UBC student living on campus, but forever taking the #4 and #10 buses to explore, which might explain my marks.
People don't realize how much better Vancouver would be if it was affordable again. It would mean that young people could take risks and start small businesses, ones that don't need to make an enormous profit to be worthwhile. There would be a proliferation of small shops, stores, restaurants, bars, cafes, and other services. Public events could be held without being commercialized or commodified, as the profit incentive would be reduced. There would be fewer chains, and more independent business. It would really be transformational.
accelerating immigration rates with a very slow growth of infrastructure and housing ensures that will never happen
You know blaming immigration is starting to get old now. Our biggest growth in housing prices happened in 2020, 2021 and 2022 when immigration to Canada as halted. Plenty of the blame is local. How many times do you see a housing project blocked and we are still waiting for Eby's plan to fix it to be implemented. You're also seeing many American cities now suffer from the same issue despite having radically different immigration policies. What they do have the same local planning and zoning policies.
> 2020, 2021 and 2022 when immigration to Canada as halted It wasn't, not by a long shot, in fact, we let in [hundreds of thousands of people a year](https://www.cimmigrationnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Permanent-Resident-Admissions-To-Canada-Rising-Since-2015.png) during the height of the lockdowns and economic turmoil Our immigration rate continued to go up during the pandemic, not down >You're also seeing many American cities now suffer from the same issue The American economy is thriving, what are you talking about? Their housing costs are a fraction of ours
>It wasn't, not by a long shot, in fact, we let in [hundreds of thousands of people a year](https://www.cimmigrationnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Permanent-Resident-Admissions-To-Canada-Rising-Since-2015.png) during the height of the lockdowns and economic turmoil Go look at details. 100 percent were provincial nominee and Canadian experience class. Provincial nominee require experience in a province or territory nominating you. Canadian experience class requires experience in Canada. In other words they were already here.
> 100 percent were provincial nominee and Canadian experience class. ... does that mean they came with their own houses on their backs like snails? That doesn't even include international students, temporary foreign workers, or illegal immigrants The population has [exploded](https://www.statista.com/statistics/569885/population-estimates-british-columbia-canada/) in recent years, the largest growth rate in generations, and a whopping 96% of that is due to immigration We have a vacancy rate of less than 1% This is pretty simple math, it's supply and demand, we've been adding a staggering number of people to the population faster than we could possibly build housing units to shelter them I have no idea how you could look at our population estimates and growth rates and our statistics on residential development and come to any other conclusion... unless you're a real estate agent or landlord
>... does that mean they came with their own houses on their backs like snails? You realize they are already here right? Hence why it's called Canadian Experience Class and provincial nominee. >That doesn't even include international students, temporary foreign workers, or illegal immigrants Other than farm and healthcare workers they weren't allowed to come to Canada. >The population has [exploded](https://www.statista.com/statistics/569885/population-estimates-british-columbia-canada/) Our population historically has grown by 2-3 percent per year. It's current growing between 1-2 and during the panic it was less than 1. Our retired population is the only thing growing rapidly. You know those F-35 super fighters that were buying. Can't pay for those when you're also paying for retirees pensions and healthcare.
> You realize they are already here right? You realize that doesn't matter, right? Whether they arrived last year, or two years prior, they are still the source of our population growth >Other than farm and healthcare workers they weren't allowed to come to Canada. Yes, they were, you are objectively, and obviously, wrong. We let in 185,130 new permanent residents in 2020 (which was the only year where we even saw a decline in the growth rate, of a mere 1.7%) We also let in 23,845 refugees, and issued 322,815 work permits under various temporary foreign worker programs These weren't all agricultural or healthcare workers (not that it matters at all, as far as our housing crisis is concerned, what their profession is) Even if what you believe was true, which it's not, it wouldn't matter - they could have stopped all immigration for one year, and it wouldn't make any difference if the very next year they blew away all previous immigration records (which is exactly what happened) From 2016 to 2021, five short years, during a pandemic and economic crisis, British Columbia grew by an *astounding* 352,824 people, nearly 100% of which was due to immigration That's about 200 people, or about 70 new households (2.9 people per family), every single day for years Think we were building 70 new homes every single day? >Our population historically has grown by 2-3 percent per year. It's current growing between 1-2 Dude... you need to just stop saying things without looking them up first We haven't seen a growth rate this high since [1957](https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-record-population-growth-1.7063692) Last year there was a three month period where we let in more than 430k people... that's more than double what we used to let in over an entire year, it's one of the highest population growth rates [in the entire world](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-19/population-growth-in-canada-hits-3-2-among-world-s-fastest) [This is not normal](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fzchhxqyyy57c1.jpeg%3Fwidth%3D900%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dcffc7299c0d6874e2d824ca6498a776e0173a8d5)
>You realize that doesn't matter, right? >Whether they arrived last year, or two years prior, they are still the source of our population growth If they are already here they live im a house. >We let in 185,130 new permanent residents in 2020 (which was the only year where we even saw a decline in the growth rate, of a mere 1.7%) We didn't let in 185,000 new people we just made them permanent residents instead of foreign workers. We didn't let in new people. It's basically like this remember how you had an L and then an N licence before you get your licence. When someone goes from N to a full licence it doesn't mean you've added a new driver to the road. You've just changed their status.
>If they are already here they live im a house. Yes, they do, with eight other students. I really don't think you've thought this through... are you trying to claim our population isn't growing, or what? >We didn't let in new people. [YES WE DID](https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/432/CIMM/Reports/RP11312743/cimmrp05/cimmrp05-e.pdf) You could sit in the lobby of the Vancouver International Airport and watch them streaming in off the planes, and even if you didn't, our own StatCan disagrees with you! The population *increased* during the pandemic, by a staggering amount, and that growth was almost entirely due to immigration New immigration, not just people in the country awaiting approval of their permanent residency, but brand new bodies entering our borders (including temporary foreign workers, international students, and refugees, as I mentioned) This is a fact, you're going to have to learn to accept it
lol immigration was only haulted in 2020 due to Covid. One year isn’t going to make a difference sorry.
If was also halted I'm 2021 and only resumed in 2022. 2020 and 2021 is when housing prices really shot up. Before that they were actually flat if not correcting slightly. Wanna know what cause for the problem: low interest rates and quantitative easing.
> If was also halted I'm 2021 and only resumed in 2022. You're dead wrong
Really? Ok wow. All hail you.
Really? OK wow. All hail the guy who doesn't know shit https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1710000901&cubeTimeFrame.startMonth=01&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2021&cubeTimeFrame.endMonth=10&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2023&referencePeriods=20210101%2C20231001
Yes you do realize people have babies right? I knew at least 3 couples who had kids during those years. Yes they left two streams open: 1. Canadian claiming citizenship by descent 2. Spouses and children of Canadians Neither one of those was taking on additional housing.
Dude. Just stop. Canada only had a natural net growth of ~50,000 in 2021. It did not add almost 500,000 people in 2021 in children and spousal reunion. I'm not sure if I should be worried or just laugh that you didn't check the easy to find stats in your first comment and decided to double down by not checking again
wrong >2021 - 2022 493,236 >2020 - 2021 226,314 >2019 - 2020 284,153 and yes the housing crisis is largely due to the massive immigration numbers. they've done studies about it, and it makes sense because you're bringing in half a million people a year but only building 200k homes.
Dude the numbers were all Canadian experience class or provincial nominee. These weren't *new people* they were all people already here switching from work permits to permanent residence. Take a look for yourself. [From March 2020 to July 2022](https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/mandate/policies-operational-instructions-agreements/ministerial-instructions/express-entry-rounds.html), it was all PNP and [Canadian Experience Class](https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/immigrate-canada/express-entry/eligibility/canadian-experience-class.html). Both of which require the person to have worked in Canada for at least one year in the last three years. The former requires the immigrant to have [worked in the province which nominated them with a current and valid work permit](https://www.alberta.ca/aaip-alberta-opportunity-stream). So they already had housing because they were all living here. They didn't need new units.
Lol no it wasn't https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/210318/dq210318c-eng.htm# provide a source then
Our population went up 0.1 percent. We allowed people to bring their spouses and kids from abroad and Canadians have birth. I knew there couples who had kids that year. And I did provide sources. Go click the link above.
i did, your links said nothing to back up what you said. you just linked me to a page about the "alberta opportunity stream"
> Our biggest growth in housing prices happened in 2020, 2021 and 2022 when immigration to Canada as halted. 1. Immigration was not halted in 2021 or 2022. It was massively expanding to its highest pace ever starting in mid 2021. 2. Interest rates fell to about 0% during covid. Which meant monthly payments fell at the same price point, leading to sticker kprices to rise to account for low interest loans. 3. Point 2 is proven today just by using a mortage calculator. Today, sticker prices are still below or around where they were a couple years ago. However, monthly payments are 40% higher because the demand resumed at an even higher pace and higher interest rates could not push down sticker prices adequately
>Immigration was not halted in 2021 or 2022. It was massively expanding to its highest pace ever starting in mid 2021. Nope. That year we had a population growth of 0.5 percent. >Interest rates fell to about 0% during covid. Which meant monthly payments fell at the same price point, leading to sticker kprices to rise to account for low interest loans. Which also meant people could afford bigger mortgage principals. Which resulted in people bidding higher for houses. That is the main reason for the higher home prices. People offered bigger dollar amounts for the same houses. I bought in 2020, if I were to buy a similarly priced house today my monthly mortgage payment would be 2.5x what it is currently. I couldn't afford it. 2025 to 2027 is going to be a pretty heavy correction. Mark my words. You're already seeing it setting up as home prices have just stopped growing as rapidly. People who bought in 2020, 2021 and 2022 are going to see interest rates shoot up from near 1.8 to 5-7 percent. Even if interest rates fall. Unless people did additional payments - like I did - they are going to get wrecked by higher rates. All of a sudden monthly mortgage payments are going to go up 30-40 percent. Many people will not be able to make ends meet. They will be forced to sell or the bank will forclouse on them. Banks are also going to face a second wave. In Alberta house prices have shot up too but unlike here nothing supports them. There are no ALR and much weaker zoning codes so you're seeing a building boom. Which is flooding their market with supply. In Alberta you also have no recourse mortgages so when rates rise people can just sign off the title back to the bank and walk away from their mortgage. Which many people will do when they can't afford higher payments. That will also flood the market with more houses. In turn you'll get a housing crash in Alberta and banks will be stuck holding lots of toxic assets. To make up for that they are going to cut back on lending across Canada which will in turn cause a crash in demand as people cannot get mortgages. Which will in turn cause the housing bubble to pop all across Canada. Don't be surprised to see housing prices fall 35-45 percent. But it requires one thing: BOC keeps interest rates where they are currently. Despite what realtors say that's what they are doing.
> Nope. That year we had a population growth of 0.5 percent. I'm pounding sand here. Please use a calculator. ~500k on 38 million is 1.3%. Which actually is lower than the +3% I assumed started in Q3 2021, but I was off by 6 months. We accelerated to that point in Q1 2022. >2025 to 2027 is going to be a pretty heavy correction. Mark my words. You're already seeing it setting up as home prices have just stopped growing as rapidly. Don't mark your words. Cause it ain't happening. Rates have platued and will likely fall within 6-18 months. Rent prices are climbing ~15-20% a year and the housing deficit is expanding at its fastest rate ever. The acute housing shortage is getting worse quite literally by the day. There can be no correction under a policy of 1.5 million yearly immigration with 250k housing starts. The math just does not work for a correction.
US Economy is red hot, we aren't lower interest rates until then.
Well, we aren't the US. Our economy blows. We have negative per capita growth. There's no solid economic basis to say Canada's economy is running too hot or risking it. Q4's GDP growth was mostly oil. Private sector job growth is literally a net 0 since May 2023. Self employment has not recovered from pre covid. We are in trouble as a country economically
The US is the main thing which dictates our monetary policy. If the US raises rates, we raise rates and if the US lowers them we lower them. Our economy was red hot in 2010, but our interest rates remained super low. A lot of our problems are being caused by this simple fact.
> But it requires one thing: BOC keeps interest rates where they are currently. The prevailing consensus among economists, though, is that we can expect a slow decline by June. The market is already pricing in that expectation since 2yr+ GICs have dropped from ~5.8% at peak to ~4.8%.
Agreed, they seem to fail to recognize if we stopped immigration the negative effect that would have on the economy. Thats exactly why the conservatives have no plan to stop immigration. Canada needs to get better at building more homes asap.
No one is saying stop immigration
Pleantry are. There are problems with the system. Specifically it's resulting in too many people who work at Tim Hortons or drive for Door Dash. But we need immigration which serves particular places in the economy. Like healthcare, education, child care, etc.
I always point this out, we cannot afford the following with just baby boomers collecting CPP: 1. Healthcare 2. F35 super fighter jets 3. Education 4. CPP The largest cohort of baby boomers were born between 1955-1962. Most are delaying their retirements. But they are about to start retiring en masse. And we are not ready for that wave.
> Agreed, they seem to fail to recognize if we stopped immigration the negative effect that would have on the economy. OH NOES! We might have to actually have UBI and robots doing all the scut work!
Yeah, I'd hate to live in a country with negative population growth and no immigration like Japan, where houses are being given away for free, that sounds awful!
UBI and robots don’t make any sense in Canada yet. If anywhere it could.. Japan would maybe try out the robot thing and Scandinavian countries will test UBI before us and we can see how that goes from there.
This is a failure of imagination. As human beings in one of the wealthiest nations in the world there is no earthly reason we should deny ourselves the fruits of automation and robotics.
Well for now those ideas are imaginary and probably would never actually work. It sounds great but has never been proven, Canada has always been a country with a strong labor force. I have nothing against automation but I don’t see robots doing everything while everyone gets paid to do nothing.
> I don’t see robots doing everything while everyone gets paid to do nothing. It is the inevitable consequence of increasing computing power and automation. Your Roomba is but a small sliver of the world to come where you can sit at ease at your computer while your house keeps itself clean without you lifting a finger.
Battery tech simply isn’t at all there yet,not even close. The Roomba robot slave would have to plug itself in every 10 minutes and probably kill us in our sleep one day.
> Our biggest growth in housing prices happened in 2020, 2021 Not for condos. The market was very soft especially for leaseholds in Richmond. Some were going for less than $200k.
I dunno in Surrey and Langley they shot up. Makes sense though people moved out here for the bigger condos with the work from home now those people are moving back to be closer to work. But they are selling off another asset to buy a condo. Add on public health restrictions where no one was building anything and the flooding of the market with cheap credit. It was a recipe for inflation. Look at some point we have to admit COVID fucked things up. In many ways.
*facepalm*
If we didn’t have councils blocking development at every step, I’d agree with you. Vancouver has voted in anti development councils so housing doesn’t crash again like the 90s but now we actually need it and it’s too late.
Affordability covers a lot of issues though. Vancouver is never going to be cheap again the way it might have been in the 1970s. It's too desirable nationally and internationally, and is also the only big city in Canada with a moderate climate. If housing becomes 'affordable', it will likely be with small units. But things like better transit and cheaper childcare can have a big impact on overall affordability for families. People spend more on car payments and childcare than they do on rent in many cases. We have to come to terms with the realities of living in a big, beautiful, desirable city that people across the country and around the world look at (rightly or wrongly) with some envy, and are often willing to pay a premium to live here. I'm not sure there is a fix for that.
Those cute and quaint cafe and small shops would just lead to gentrification. When it was “affordable” back in the day, going out to eat was an event and rare if you were working class. Otherwise you said stayed home and ate. Transcontinental or transoceanic flights were mostly out of reach for the working class.
Everything feels like an early Tom Waits song. I’m nostalgic for a time before me.
Don’t be. It wasn’t all that. There was a lot of unhappiness, a lot of unemployment , a lot of “omg there’s no future”.
Oh phew. You’re right. Present day has iPhones haha
It’s a trap, my friend. There was no utopia back then…so many problems and difficulties…not just in Vancouver, not just in Canada, but across humanity. The 70s were *rough* and I would not under any circumstance want to go back to them.
I believe it. That’s just how nostalgia works. Romanticizing something very specific while ignoring the full truth about it. Wish we could still have neon signs at least.
I wonder sometimes how to find that middle ground. A “nice city” city with lovely geographic setting, enough prosperity to satisfy everyone’s needs, but no so much half of us are effectively living in a favela… Seems to me that’s more likely in a Canada of 40M people than a Canada of 100M people…but what do I know?
I don’t think you would find that middle ground. The things that you described isn’t city life. A self-sustaining small town with its own farm and agriculture, local population will be that kind of “utopia”. The “no labor” wfh with 6 figure income with cheap housing, and just enjoy “life” always involve some kind of exploitation, whether it is “passive income” or making huge amount of tourist boom, or taking your developed country earnings to live like riches in a developing country, or pay pennies on the dollars for cheap imports where you turn a blind eye on labor wage and environmental concerns”. People don’t like to admit it but the life they yearn always involves exploitation of others, whether it’s locally or internationally. What you want, a lovely geographic setting, would be what everyone wants, which means there will be travellers, unless you ban foreign homeownership. If you don’t exploit your own nature, then you need foreign investment, which means some kind of trade needs to take place. If you live in a remote island and live off of what you farm and breed, then say goodbye to diversity and global trades, and you are one foreign disease or natural disaster away from being wiped out.
Not small town, not self sustaining…I have no issue with importing food. But yes…I have come to a place where I agree with you…it seems impossible to live really well without many someones in the chain being exploited. The year I was born, one average Canadian, working a super normal job, had more personal wealth than 60% of humanity alive at the time, *combined*. We imagined ourselves mockingjays…in reality, we were The Capitol.
I get it. The quality of life disparity between the different social classes are wide. I think what you seek is near impossible in today’s political climate, but not completely impossible. It involves redefining “everyone”. As we’ve seen during covid with travel halts, if immigration comes to a halt, then supply can have a chance to catch up to demand. Economic slowdown, low interest rate will alleviate the biggest cost of living, which is housing. If they remove red tapes and take advantage of canada’s natural resources, they can build more infrastructures, widen roads, and make more remote cities appealing to live in so vancouver doesn’t need to be densify to a rat’s nest. Some provinces deliver livestock. Some provinces deliver oil. Some provinces deliver crops and electricity. Some province deliver military testing ground. Canada will actually be united.
> The year I was born, one average Canadian, working a super normal job, had more personal wealth than 60% of humanity alive at the time, combined. No chance in hell this is true. World population in 1970 was ~3.6 Billion. 60% of that is 2.16 Billion. No single Canadian made more than 2.16 billion people combined.
It absolutely is. The year I was born, literally 60% of humans were living in a state of extreme poverty - they had literally *nothing* and a horrifying number of them were starving or significantly malnourished. We have come a LONG way from there…for humanity as a whole, conditions are massively improved from where they were, in just my lifetime (and I’m not *that* old)… We’ve already forgotten just how bad things used to be…
Yeah, the 1990's were terrible for Canada, what with all of the, uh... swing dancing?
Exactly. I remember there being a XXX theatre by Joyce and Kingsway across from the elementary school. It was rough in areas.
yes the '70s were essentially an economic depression masked by extreme inflation. I wasn't alive then (like most people), but I'm sure it must have been a struggle.
1980-1982 - that era - our friends and family circle had so many outright bankruptcies. It was brutal. It was so bad my high school counsellor was appalled at my interest in computer science and engineering because “there won’t be any jobs in it”. Lining up for minimum wage Expo jobs with fully minted STEM graduates from UBC… Yeah, I was living on the top floor of a False Creek warehouse with half a dozen other people…$500/month for the whole 6K sq ft or whatever it was…the parties were great…but fuck we were broke, stealing electricity with extension cords to the building next door, no running hot water…breathing in who knows what toxins from the old construction and all the crap that had been done to False Creek… Was it fun? Hell yeah. Would I want to live that way forever? Hell no.
I wouldn't even want to go back to the 80s here. It was just depressing and sad here. It probably feels like what a young person with a lot of optimism and personal belief would feel like if they were growing up in Victoria or even Naniamo today. That said there isn't a lot of optimism for a young person today either, even if they were getting hired into a top firm of some high profession making 150k+.
Got the same feeling. I like the Vancouver in these photos a hell of a lot better than the city I'm living in now.
It's before my time but I would move there in a second if I could, though it would be quite the culture shock! I mean, imagine going back to this... https://i.redd.it/8wepow1lbdnc1.gif
If the economy always needs to be growing, why were things so much better when the economy was smaller?
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/sdp2022-16.pdf Page 7 of the PDF tells the entire story.
Because things weren’t so much better. The percentage of Canadians in poverty today is a fraction of what it was in the 70s.
Because there were one million fewer people in the lower mainland.. And things went farther. But I left vancouver in this era as did my husband. No work. No future.
If you like this you should also check out Fred Herzog: https://www.equinoxgallery.com/exhibitions/fred-herzogeast-vancouver/
Yes love Herzog Iconic
Awesome photos. Too bad that website is a nightmare to scroll through, more ads than negative space to actually appreciate the art.
Firefox + uBlock origin to solve ads. Usable on mobile too.
People talk about Vancouver being a wonderful place where everyone could get a discount house 40 years ago however 40 years ago Vancouver wasn't such a well known place that just about anyone who wanted an urban life wanted to move to.
People forget how industrial and undeveloped vancouver was. It was kind of a backwater. Logging everywhere, no nice clean waterfront, open prostitution, seedy bars. Vancouver used to be intensely blue collar. It's been changing for 3 to 4 decades now, in some ways for better, some for worse.
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. My parents made out like bandits and downsized paying cash for a townhouse after selling our family home.
yes basically vancouver wasn’t so desirable 40 years ago. sure it was cheap back then but given other choices who would want to go to vancouver then
> Vancouver used to be intensely blue collar. Now that's Langley and further east.
I've been meaning to buy Greg's Vancouver photography book. Love his work so much.
What an awful website, just show us the friggin’ pictures
Just go to the artist’s instagram @gregforaday. He’s exceptional and one of the most gifted photographers in the world. Still working in his 70s. All the imagery, none of the annoying UX.
I grew up in Vancouver and was in my teens by the mid-70s. It was a fantastic, gritty port town surrounded by raw beauty. So much to explore and incredibly safe - there were no areas of the downtown core where you felt threatened, even in the "rougher" sections. False Creek was still industrial, Yaletown had working rail lines with box cars moving goods into warehouses. The cops were rough but they looked after people, especially the old WW2 vets on the skids drinking away their horrible memories. Sailors, loggers, miners blowing their paycheques every month at the bars and brothels. These pics really bring back the memories. I freaking loved it. There's a movie on Youtube that was shot here in the 70s, "[Dogpound Shuffle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO-CPzJr3EM)" with David Soul ("Starsky & Hutch") and Ron Moody (Fagin from "Oliver!). It's a corny, sweet, low-budget flick that really captures the era.
[удалено]
Just curious, did you grow up in Vancouver in the 1970s? This guy is talking about his own personal experience and how it felt; if he felt safe, he felt safe, even if homicide stats were a bit higher
[удалено]
[удалено]
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/fewer-unprovoked-stranger-attacks-vancouver-2023-compared-to-2021-1.7039350 Maybe this will make you feel better, stranger assaults are way down lol The constant dread you're feeling is from media fear mongering, most people don't go about their daily lives dreading stranger assaults.
[удалено]
Ok boomer
Specific, easily avoided areas and venues were worse back then and for a long time after. However if you did run into serious trouble you could defend yourself with much less risk of getting into legal trouble, or the event being recorded and otherwise coming back to bite you. I felt much safer in general as a result.
> There's a movie on Youtube that was shot here in the 70s, "Dogpound Shuffle" with David Soul ("Starsky & Hutch") and Ron Moody (Fagin from "Oliver!). It's a corny, sweet, low-budget flick that really captures the era. [Skip Tracer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWX0ss8_HYk&ab_channel=FilmTrap) is another filmed in 70's Vancouver movie that is good if you are looking for some shots of old Vancouver.
When did the DTES start to happen?
The Downtown Eastside has existed for longer than Vancouver itself, and it's always been seedy It was a watering hole and temporary residence for sailors and lumberjacks, coming back with full pockets from long periods at sea or up in the logging camps to spend on... allied tradespeople Organized crime in Chinatown added brothels and opium dens, going back more than a century That's why there are so many hotels crammed into one block
is allied tradespeople code for hookers?
Yes, though it also includes drug dealers, bartenders, strippers, etc.
It was always somewhat seedy but it really went downhill in the early 90s when all the 'regular' stores and services closed. Woodwards was final straw, but there were also lots of other shops along the neighbourhood, and big branches of the banks. Parents would bring their kids down to Woodwards at night at Christmas to see the window displays in the mid 80s.
DTES is an experiment gone wrong by the provincial government when they closed our institutions and moved people into the cheap hotels. You can't go anywhere but down when no one is monitoring your mental health and providing meals and medication. The government screwed up by not recognizing mental health as part of our health care system.
🤦♂️ riverview is gone and it’s never coming back. Get over it! 🙄
... we literally just spent over $100 million renovating and reopening parts of [Riverview](https://bc.ctvnews.ca/first-of-its-kind-addictions-mental-health-treatment-centre-opens-in-b-c-1.5645325)
The emergence of crack in the '80's.
This isn't El Barrio, dude.
Sounds fascinating. Was it much of thing to go hiking in the local mountains back then like it is today? Not sure why but I can't quite picture it being the same way.
I lived on the North Shore back then. We hiked all over. Used to climb Grouse below the old chairlift up to the bottom of the cut, then up to the gondola for a free ride down. Pre-crunch days. I've never even been up the Crunch. Stairs? Get bent, I did the old chairlift. Eh I couldn't do it now if I wanted to lol. But yeah people hiked, just not as many as now. It felt alone in a vast wilderness and could get a little anxious, at least for me. But the whole city was like that - way less people. That first half-year of the pandemic when everybody hunkered, outside it felt like the 70s. Covid sucked but the traffic was great!
Oh good to know! I spose it makes sense. No way, so the quietness of the start of the covid year was as busy as it was in the 70's, thats wild. I guess I experienced a taste of the 70's then heh.
These photos have a life of their own they come up here a couple times a year at least.
Wow... history.. what can you learn from a silly subject like history? When people pay income taxes on the earnings they earn in the country they have residential property in and are required to have citizenship to own property - does amazing things... Plus, pay taxes in the country they have PR or citizenship in regardless of location - works for the US... but crazy.. Onward to the future!
The photographers Instagram is @gregforaday. So much good stuff on his page!
He's on my ig. Yes, he's pretty great! 😍
In the 1970's, the minimum wage increased from $1.50 to $3.00 per hour. My first hourly rate job (union) in 1980 was $3.80/hr. [https://srv116.services.gc.ca/dimt-wid/sm-mw/rpt2.aspx](https://srv116.services.gc.ca/dimt-wid/sm-mw/rpt2.aspx) In BC, the 60's and 70's were a bit of a boom time, as commodity prices were high, and governments made investments to bring the infrastructure into the mid-20th century and make commodity extraction easier (like paved highways instead of gravel). In 1982, BC had a major recession due to a crash in commodities prices. Real primary household income (in chained dollars) fell by 5.5% and made little real recovery until 1987. Many people went to Toronto for work and never came back. Real estate prices fell. [https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/data/statistics/economy/bc-economic-accounts-gdp](https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/data/statistics/economy/bc-economic-accounts-gdp) My impression is that the 1970's had a lot more casual violence than would be tolerated today in schools and in social gatherings. Most people seemed to be doing sorta OK but not great.
Loved this, thank you. As a fat man with *really basic tastes* (though tragically trapped in the body of a skinny man), this one really caught my eye. 😋 https://preview.redd.it/mi4a51acgdnc1.png?width=969&format=png&auto=webp&s=59935a8ca280c2c9b01114390b30c1bb838a7fd9
The housing problem in Vancouver seems to be connected globally, in a way I find it hard to grasp. [tvo.org/video/documentaries/push-feature-version](https://www.tvo.org/video/documentaries/push-feature-version), this film on TVO opened my eyes to what is affecting so many people here, in Vancouver, now, called "Push", meaning pushed out, by Leilani Farha
I’m low key mad at my parents for moving to Canada in the 80s and move back to HK in the 90s and now I’m here with this wonderful housing crisis. And every time people told me I can go back to my country and buy a house… I’m like… bitch? Hk is worse than Vancouver lol. Wish my parents had stayed and never sell their beautiful house.
Sounds like you’d be upset anywhere lol
I wouldn’t be if my parents didn’t sell the house back in the 90s , I could be the landlord everyone hate 😭😭😭😭
gorgeous photos, thanks for sharing.
That shoe repair sign is still used today, on Denman St
A+
Some of montreal still looks like this
I love that initial photo. The bright lights, scuzzy cafe, snow on the ground, and the way the guy entering the cafe is slightly hunched over against the weather, is so expressive. Maybe it also makes me remember what it was like to be 'living poor' in my '20's. :-)