2 karma · joined February 20, 2015
The problem with Vancouver's system is they determine vacancies through a survey. If you lie, you pay a severe penalty. However, they have a track record of not enforcing anything.
For example, the city has a law preventing the use of a home for an AirBnB full-time without a B&B license. Only 56 B&B licenses have issued in the metro area, and there were more than 2,570 listings that violated that rule at last check. City's response to our article was they have no idea how to figure that out...we offered the bot that cross references it and they said no thanks.
Generally most of the local governments in the data sets used only consider homes vacant if it's not considered someone's primary address. It's normal to have some vacancies (especially in a global city), but usually not that many. To contrast what a normal-ish number is, Paris has half as many vacant units as all of England. New York City has more than all of England.
A large part of New York City's vacancies has to do with the last real estate crash there. I literally know people that can't remember where their place in New York City is, because they purchased it 15 years ago and didn't want to lose money. Now it just sits as a line item in their assets.
Note: I wrote the article, so I'm bias in defense here.
If you haven't, I'm a big fan of using a MongoDB, Express, Angular, and NodeJS (MEAN) stack. Angular has a huge number of libraries you can use for transitions, and you can always use CSS animations and jQuery to accomplish anything not in there.
Notably missing from all of the coverage is how much they're trying to charge Apple for their FRAND covered patent. Are they price gouging, or is Apple demanding a huge quantity discount?
The user perceives lag after 300ms, and switches thought in less than a 1000ms. If your screen doesn't engage the user while it's making the switch, you risk them starting something else. And where's the fun of building a product people don't engage with for as long as possible? :D