Saturday, October 19, 2013

Are you ready for Laneway House tours?



The Laneway house concept was launched in 2009 and Vancouver recently passed the 1,000 Laneway house permit mark.

On October 19th, 2013 the Vancouver Heritage Foundation is holding a Laneway House Tour.

That's right... we've now reached the truly sublime as the archaic is raised aloft.

The tour will take you to seven laneway homes, runs for approximately four hours, and can accommodate up to 500 people. Tickets are $30.

Incredibly this is the 2nd tour offered this year.  Supposedly the first one on June 2nd, 2013 was so successful this reprise tour has been scheduled rather than wait for Laneway House Tour 2014.


Presumably a mortgage broker will be on hand to perform sleight of hand and facilitate your technically illegal , zero down, CMHC insured, million dollar mortgage application.

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13 comments:

  1. anyone who pays $30 for a laneway house tour, has got to give their head a shake. If all you can afford to buy in Vancouver is an overpriced shed, you might as well continue renting or leave Vancouver and move to somewhere where there isn't so much insanity.

    ReplyDelete
  2. when a shed will set you back 1 million. are we just becoming more farcical?

    http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/02/06/vancouver-most-expensive-city-to-live-economist_n_2631806.html

    where are the high finance jobs, the tech jobs, economy to support this? Irrational exuberance

    ReplyDelete
  3. 1000 laneway homes since 2009. 500 new units per year. Metro's growing by 25-30,000 people per year, maybe needing 12-15,000 new units. All this effort, work and propaganda and it only provides for 3% of yearly growth. Big deal.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. where are you getting your numbers? I thought BC in general is losing people.
      http://www.vancouversun.com/business/2035/Barbara+Yaffe+Economy+jobs+wages+responsible+recent+migration/8875308/story.html

      Delete
    2. I said Metro, not BC.

      Metro demographic info located at Metro Van site, but also summarized here on Wikipedia;

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Vancouver

      00's averaged at 32k per year.

      That is less than the 90's at 38k per year, or 80's at 43k per year.

      Delete
  4. Remember earlier this yr when there was the "Vancouver Specials" tour? Again $30 to look at reno'd Vancouver Specials built in the 1970's. What a sick joke this city has become.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I think you guys are missing the point here. The tour isn't trying to SELL you a Laneway house, it's a tour for people who are interested in seeing how other people have made use of the concept. Same thing for the Vancouver Specials. I found that particularly interesting as I believe in the idea of renovating over tearing down perfectly usable spaces. Some of them were fantastic!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No one is missing any points. Only a real estate obsessed sucker would pay $30 for something like that.

      Delete
    2. Or, an architecture obsessed sucker, which I guess I am. :)

      Delete
  6. not a feng shui expertOctober 21, 2013 at 12:31 AM

    Here's something that looks very interesting. Haven't yet watched the whole video.

    "Martin Wolf on the contained depression

    Find attached a recent speech by the FT’s Martin Wolf on the evolving context of the post-GFC world and the lessons we have and haven’t learned. Essential weekend viewing."

    Martin Wolf, Associate Editor & Chief Economics Commentator, Financial Times (which is roughly the British/European equivalent of the Wall Street Journal). From a partial transcript in the site's comments:

    33.10
    ‘The financial sector in the modern western world does not lend for business – business lending is almost insignificant. Its principle job is to leverage up property assets – mostly household but also commercial property – and in the process generate, when you think about it, a massive rise in real prices of this stuff, and massive increases in household debt.’

    35.30
    ‘At this point intelligent economists would say ‘This wouldn’t have happened if they had used their money wisely.’ This is perfectly true. But as I have already told you, they didn’t, they put it into housing. And housing is really not a very good asset to back foreign borrowing against, because it’s completely non-tradable unless you intend to sell all the houses to Chinese people.’

    35.47
    ‘There is a simple solution for the US housing problem – allow a hundred million Chinese people to come to America and buy the houses. And since they paid for them anyway, why not?’

    36.38
    ‘And what we had was a situation in which the emerging world as a whole became huge net creditors of the developed world. We borrowed all this money – and we threw it away. Very very simple. Colossal wastage of this capital. And now they want their money back. And the answer of course is that they will get it back, in depreciated dollars.’

    41.03
    ‘My basic rule is when the government tells you there is nothing to worry about, the thing you do is you take your money out.’

    Much more here:
    http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2013/10/martin-wolf-on-the-contained-depression/#comment-289026

    ReplyDelete
  7. not a feng shui expertOctober 21, 2013 at 12:58 AM

    Skipping to near the end:

    1:27:25
    "that there's no large cost to having substantially more equity, though there is a very large cost, obviously, to bankers who pay themselves on the basis - their bonuses - on the basis of return on equity. But I have no interest on their earning 15% returns on equity as I've written on many occasions. These are very naive point, but it's pretty obvious, if an institution tells me that in order to get capital it has to pay a return on equity of 15%, in a world when the return on safe assets is ZERO, real, what the institution is telling me is that it's running a sensationally dangerous hedge fund, and I don't want that sensationally dangerous hedge fund to manage the entire financial structure of the world."

    ReplyDelete
  8. not a feng shui expert:

    Thanks for that stuff from Martin Wolf....was watching him talking about the "Debt Ceiling" shenanigans earlier on the Moyers program.

    ;-)

    I've finally realized that blowing up housing debt was Harper's "Economic Action Plan" from the get-go back in 2008...all the rest is just noise for the Plebes to fret about.

    ReplyDelete
  9. First of all, Vancouver does not have a supply problem. So much supply is being created that there is a glut of empty units being used as speculative investments without housing people who live here.

    ReplyDelete