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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

It would be delicious and terrible irony if Vancouver took over the role of startup capital, since it is the only place with a more unaffordable housing market than the SF bay.

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Vancouver's prices are high but they are not SF-high.

If you mean housing cost relative to salary, however, that's perhaps a different story.

The average software engineering salary is somewhere around $75k here though.

The average price of a detached home in Metro Vancouver (includes suburbs of Vancouver) in February was $1.76 million. That's down from $1.82 million a year earlier. 99.7% of properties in the City of Vancouver proper are valued at more than $1 million. The average price for a detached home in the City of Vancouver in 2016 was $2.77 million.

I've had some trouble finding closely comparable values but it seems like the median SF detached home price is ~$1 million. Even considering the exchange rate, it seems like Vancouver is more expensive.

Certainly when one compares typical incomes Vancouver is dramatically less affordable than San Francisco.

Are you only counting detached homes? There are very few of those in Vancouver proper. If there are any, they are mansions. Do the same comparison with condos? And apartments?

No you are very incorrect. 81% of the land area of the City of Vancouver is zoned for detached homes and most of these are simple, cheap post war houses or cheap 60s era "Vancouver Specials."

The houses in Vancouver are so crappy someone even made a joke quiz about it, in 2010, when the prices were a lot lower: http://www.crackshackormansion.com/

This is false. There are lots of small, old crappy houses in Vancouver. It's just that they cost a ridiculously large amount of money.

Here's a pretty typical example: https://www.realtor.ca/Residential/Single-Family/17409318/55...

Before you ask, no that's not even in a really desirable part of Vancouver.

That will cost you another million. See this as an example: https://www.realtor.ca/Residential/Single-Family/17850427/31...

Quick fact check returned this: "In all, 745 detached homes sold in Metro Vancouver last month, a massive 58.1 per cent drop from February 2016. The benchmark price for detached homes was $1,474,200, unchanged from the previous month but down 6.5 per cent from the past six months."[1]. Also [2].

And that's CAD, not USD. In USD it's $1,092,000. Still very expensive but not $1.76mln.

[1] http://news.buzzbuzzhome.com/2017/03/metro-vancouver-home-li... [2] http://www.vancourier.com/news/sales-average-detached-home-p...

Yeah those are "benchmark" prices, which is a special MLS measurement designed to value a "typical" home. I decided to ignore that valuation method and instead use average prices because I'm not sure if a similar or comparable measurement tool as the benchmark exists for SF home valuations.

http://www.rew.ca/news/benchmark-vs-average-vs-median-what-s...

The housing price has deflated substantially in the past year because of a one-two-punch of a foreign buyer's tax and the Chinese government cracking down on rich Chinese people smuggling their money out of the country into foreign real-estate systems.

Vancouver's market had a reputation of being driven by Chinese cash... and whether that's true or not, perception is reality when it comes to markets.

$600 CAD/month for a bedroom in a house that's close to frequent transit and in a low-crime area isn't hard to find if you don't have your heart set on living right in downtown Vancouver. I am not going to pay $2200/month to live in gangland-torn East Menlo Park.

Do you still live in the 1980's? Belle Haven is not gangland.

The area bordered by US 101, Willow Road and the Union Pacific tracks is an exception. However, the rest of EMP makes Vancouver's Downtown Eastside or even the neighbourhood of Whalley in Surrey look like the most peaceful, crime-free utopia that has ever existed. At least we don't have Nortenos and Surenos blowing each others' heads off like in adjacent East Palo Alto.

Dude, what are you talking about? That triangle you outlined is virtually all of East Menlo Park that isn't office space. Anything south of 101 is not EMP (and generally pretty nice).

Have you been in the area in the last 30 years? There hasn't been a homicide anywhere in Menlo Park since 2012.

I drive through EPA daily. It is nothing like the South Los Angeles type gang land that you are trying to portray.

I think you are totally wrong on this one.

Even EPA has come up in the world dramatically in the last few years. As of 2014, its violent crime rate was half that of SF, only 25% more than San Jose, and roughly double that of Mountain View. I'd consider Mountain View a very safe place; EPA is basically turning into just another Silicon Valley suburb.

And a salary that's a tiny fraction of SV (or anywhere in the US for that matter.) I recently had someone offering $35/hour for a "Lead Ruby Engineer" contract role in Vancouver. Salaries are ridiculously low there which even with cheaper housing, results in far less disposable income.

Yep, no options either, and our dollar is expected to plummet below $0.63 USD over next 3 years too so making $20-25/hr USD as a senior developer if anybody foolishly moves here.

"$600 CAD/month for a bedroom in a house that's close to frequent transit and in a low-crime area isn't hard to find if you don't have your heart set on living right in downtown Vancouver."

(Has not looked for an apartment in Vancouver in the last 10 years)

600 a month for a bedroom is definitely doable... I found two <$500/month vacancies within a year of moving to the vancouver area in 2014.. One was in Burnaby near SFU and the other was a steal in the commercial drive area with the catch of having a roommate who filled up the living room with bike parts.

You're right that it's not easy to come by though, and if you want to live within a 30 minute transit commute of downtown and have a single bedroom, it's unlikely you'll find anything for less than $750 that's not an SRO

Burnaby Heights is fairly cheap. Right on the 95 B-Line, 25-35 minutes to downtown.

If you're willing to convert a parking spot in an underground parking garage into a "bedroom", maybe you can swing that.

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