Vancouver Housing

Canada's West Coast has long been a point of refuge for South-East Asians. In recent years the housing market in Vancouver has become seen as a safe place to park Korean and Hong Kong Wealth. In recent years a weak Dollar has made the real estate market a bargain for these investors driving up housing prices until even modest homes sell for millions. This has served to make accommodation out of reach for ordinary Canadians and created a housing crisis for those on low incomes. Service workers for example cannot afford to live anywhere near the jobs they hold. Resentments grow.

Decades ago a fellow worker referred to the Niagara Region of Ontario as Vancouver East. A single female Korean investor bought up the three major Inns in Niagara on the Lake and suddenly the town sprouted three camera shops and souvenir guide books in Japanese picture writing plus Mandarin and Szechuan suddenly appeared in curio shoppes.

Red-haired Anne of Green Gables has long been popular with Japanese Tourists but in recent years a buying spree has ensued for ocean-front property engaged in by off-shore interests including Americans looking for summer properties that has threatened to make beaches inaccessible due to territorial foreign owners who believe they own the foreshore.

Some form of regulation is required to ensure that affordable housing remains available and that our beaches remain in the public domain. Locals can be forgiven for feeling nervous about the loss of their cultural heritage and way of life. Should we be so quick to point the finger at ordinary Europeans who fear the influx of millions of economic and other refugees. Immigrants desperate to find jobs will drive down wages for already poorly paid low-income workers. I don't justify xenophobia, I just recognize some of its causes.

In Texas labourers look at Hispanic immigrants with the same jaundiced view. It's the same type of sentiment that made po' white trash resent Black Slaves whose free labour made their own worthless.