Jeremy, a grizzled 30-something with an easy smile, stood next to his noticeably pregnant wife, Amanda, and their contagious laughter drew curious looks from around the bar. Jeremy and Amanda were at Field House Brewery in Abbotsford and I had met them that night, along with their four friends, by chance. I was standing nearby when something they said caught my attention, something that seemed to contrast the group’s joyful composer. All six had recently been forced to leave the city they grew up in due to an impossibly overpriced housing market.
Chinese foreign investors have egregiously inflated Vancouver real estate. I know this language may cause some unease, fearing accusations of stereotyping or racism, but facts are undeniable. Kerry Gold’s The Walrus article “The Highest Bidder” highlights how Chinese buyers accounted for 70 per cent of Vancouver’s Macdonald Realty Firm’s sales for houses above $3 million, and according to Andy Yan, an urban planner for Vancouver’s architectural firm Bing Thom Architects, Chinese buyers accounted for 66 per cent of all residential land purchases in Vancouver’s sought after westside. Of course, the issue is that B.C. real estate is desirable, and there were no laws protecting locals against this endless flow of foreign money. Wealthy people around the globe desire secure investments for their money, regardless of their race.
The price for an average home rose 30 per cent in the last year and nearly 175 per cent over the last 10 years. Between 2001 and 2014, average Vancouver salaries increased by 36 per cent while home values skyrocketed 63 per cent, and the city has recently been christened the third least affordable city in the world, according to Demographia’s Housing Affordability Survey.
This inflation has priced out thousands of Vancouver’s local aspiring homeowners. Young families, professionals, artists, and entrepreneurs have all been forced to look elsewhere and thrown up their hands at Vancouver. The result: a mass exodus of young dreamers towards the Fraser Valley, and with them their creativity, zeal, and culture.
“It’s a city solely for millionaires now,” Jeremy snickered as the six of us shuffled out of the long lineup, steadying our mason jars brimming with craft beer. “Vancouver has been overpriced for years,” he tells me, “but it just rocketed beyond possibility.” Jeremy and his wife had always dreamed of raising their children near the same Kitsilano neighbourhoods they grew up in. With those dreams dashed, I didn’t understand how they could still be so chipper.
Jeremy and Amanda moved to Chilliwack, lured by the “bang for buck” and seemingly endless outdoor activities. They view Chilliwack as B.C.’s pristine gateway to the outdoors. People who want to climb, hike, kayak, or paraglide, but don’t want to deal with the swelling crowds of Squamish, are turning towards the far side of the Fraser Valley. Jeremy is guiding kayak excursions down the Chilliwack River, with plans of starting his own outdoor adventure guiding company. Amanda is in the beginnings of opening a yoga studio in walking distance from their quaint, three-bedroom detached home. The other four friends had also recently moved from Vancouver to Chilliwack. One of them, Dawson, recently purchased a townhome in Chilliwack’s new riverside housing complex, The Current; a place directly marketed toward Vancouverite expats. (The website features the tagline, “The affordable dream: city slickers move to the country.”) Dawson hopes to open a brewery just like Field House in Chilliwack. “The market is there,” he said. “ People are looking for cool Vancouver-like spots, and with all of that natural beauty, boom. Chilliwack is undiscovered.”
Abbotsford has also seen a dramatic switch in the last few years, from young people drooling over the prospect of moving to Vancouver, to an influx of young adults coming from the big city. This trend has certainly peaked over the last eight months due to the extreme inflation in housing prices. All of this new blood is bringing forth a renaissance to our once drab city. For evidence of this, one has only to look at the gentrification of our previously derelict downtown district.
In a neighbourhood that was once known as the place to go if you fancied a gander at the local tent city and dive bar(s), or if you felt like that clear spring evening happened to have the precise weather ideal for getting jumped, a remarkable remodeling has taken place. The old hourly-rate Atangard Hotel has been renovated into a hipster’s paradise: a communal living apartment building with an age limit, daily home-cooked meals. and hallways that resemble modern art galleries. Downtown Abby now sports a café serving beer on tap, a bakery with a brick oven, and a fantastic brewery, each started within the last three years, and each owned by Vancouver exiles.
In August, Christy Clark and the B.C. Liberals introduced a new tax on foreign investors, hoping to slow the inflation of Vancouver’s housing prices. It is difficult and too early to say whether this line of action will ultimately balance the market. Many residents are relieved the government was willing to not only finally acknowledge the problem, but to take fairly strong action against it. It appears to be slowing things down and according to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver: “for the second straight month, home buyer demand in Metro Vancouver moved off of the record-breaking pace seen earlier this year and returned to more typical levels.”
Perhaps housing prices in Vancouver will level out, but what is “level” in a city that has always expected its citizens to be fine with living eternally mortgage poor? Perhaps the fiasco has reached its head, but the walls that have encapsulated Vancouver as B.C.’s epicenter have fallen, and the Fraser Valley has been revealed as a culturally blossoming and naturally beautiful alternative to six-figure debt.
Chilliwack is our province’s new playground, full of limitless possibilities and immense beauty while Abbotsford continues to move away from its contrasting titles of Canada’s “bible belt” and “murder capital” — out of its limbo of seedy boredom and into an era of embracing the fresh and exciting while retaining the honest and honourable parts of its roots. The Fraser Valley is no longer a place to get out of, it is the start of something new, the beginnings of a massive re-branding campaign, and it may all be thanks to those unwitting foreign investors.
