Archive for March, 2009

Foreclosures – Subprime mess comes home to B.C.

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

Hundreds of property owners hit by foreclosures as real estate slumps

Kent Spencer
Province

Tamara and Matt pirilio and family are moving out of their Port Alberni home after being unable to refinance the $140,000 they owe to a U.S.-based subprime lender. SHAYNE MORROW –CNS

Kap Hiroti operates the website foreclosurelist.ca and is one of B.C.’s foremost researchers into home forfeitures. Photograph by: Ric Ernst , The Province

Port Alberni‘s Matt Pirillo and his family are victims of an epidemic of foreclosures taking place in B.C.

“We got our foreclosure letter dropped on our doorstep on Christmas Eve — Merry Christmas,” he said yesterday while packing up his home in the 2700-block 5th Ave.

The Pirillos are among hundreds of B.C. property owners who have been caught by slumping real-estate prices and high-interest, subprime mortgages.

They bought their five-bedroom house five years ago for $114,000, but Pirillo owes Accredited Home Lenders, a U.S.-based subprime lender, $140,000 after borrowing against their house equity.

Their mortgage called for interest payments of 8.25 per cent, but when it came to renew recently, the company wouldn’t renew at any price because the bottom had fallen out of the housing market.

“My mortgage lenders evaporated. We couldn’t find anybody to lend us money,” said Pirillo.

In default, he put the house on the market but was unable to unload it for $215,000. It is currently listed at $169,000.

Pirillo, 40, figures all but $20,000 of his $90,000 equity will be lost.

His family is not wealthy; he is on disability pay and his wife works as a waitress to support their two children.

“It’s tough times. We’ll have to start all over again,” he said.

Foreclosure researcher Kap Hiroti said hundreds of B.C. properties are being sold to pay for subprime loans that are in default.

Hiroti said there have been more than 1,800 foreclosures in B.C. in the last 12 months. His figures show 42 per cent of them have subprime mortgages of the type that caused a financial meltdown in the U.S.

“Forty-two per cent of the foreclosures is pretty considerable when subprimes make up only seven per cent of the entire mortgage market,” said Hiroti, owner of Foreclosurelist.ca.

“Foreclosures in B.C. in 2008 were more than double those in 2007,” he said.

“In 2006, we were finding 10 new foreclosures a week. Now we’re finding 20 to 30 per week.” Hiroti said high interest rates –three percentage points or more above those charged by Canadian chartered banks — are one of the reasons that subprime loans are in default.

Vancouver lawyer Andrew Bury, who specializes in foreclosures, said he is handling “hundreds” of cases.

“Foreclosures are up dramatically. We’re being run off our feet,” said Bury, who is with the national law firm of Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP.

“Real-estate prices have dropped dramatically. It’s like a table full of glasses. The table is being shaken and the marginal players are falling off,” he said.

“Many people in B.C. were using their houses as piggy banks, just like in the U.S. They wanted to go to Hawaii or get a flat-screen TV, so they took out a mortgage on the equity of their houses,” he said. “When the market dropped, they ended up with massive negative equity. It is playing out all over the province.

“Process-servers tell me they’ve found another empty house. People are walking away and saying the heck with it,” Bury said.

Langley realtor Don Tebbutt said he has handled 20 foreclosures already this year. His yearly average is six or seven.

“I’m seeing failed economic planning. With the stress of the economy, there has been split-ups. There are also job losses and illnesses,” said Tebbutt, who is with Royal LePage.

Subprime background

Subprime mortgage companies eschewed the conservative approach of Canada‘s chartered banks by lending money at high-interest rates during the housing boom.

The loans were usually given to people with poor credit histories who couldn’t get funds elsewhere.

The rate of interest charged was often three or more percentage points above the rates charged by major banks.

Some subprime loans in B.C. charged up to 13-per-cent interest, leading to a collapse when housing prices fell.

Subprime companies included the Home Trust Company, Xceed Mortgage Corporation, Resmor Trust Company and Canadian Western Trust.

Currently, a one-year, fixed-rate charter bank mortgage can be had for 3.5 per cent.

© Copyright (c) The Province

 

Canpages launches “Streetview” in Canada – a direct competitor to Google Street View

Monday, March 16th, 2009

Kris Abel
Other

A pedestrian walkway in fullscreen mode within CanPages’ Street View

To access the technology you’ll need to first perform a basic search from Canpages.ca within Vancouver, Whistler, or Squamish in British Columbia, the only three areas that offer Street View at today’s launch. The company plans to expand to include Street Views of Toronto and Montreal next, followed by as much of Canada as possible.

On the accompanying map, a small cartoon figure appears for reference, showing not only the position of the view, but also the peripheral angle the camera is facing.

The shadow of a Street View vehicle and its roof-mounted camera system are captured within CanPages’ own imagery

Google’s Street View, expanded to its largest mode.

The fullscreen mode of CanPages’ Street View

All Canadians captured by CanPages’ Street View cameras will have their faces blurred

By contrast, CanPages has engaged in no such discussions before today’s launch, stating that they feel confident that their version of the technology will pass all of the major privacy concerns within Canada.

Street View, the mapping feature that gives online users a travelling, zooming, panoramic view of our own city streets, is launching today for the first time in Canada with a set of new tricks not available in other countries. That’s because it isn’t Google, the company most associated with the technology, who is behind this rollout, instead Burnaby, British Columbia-based Canpages.ca and San Francisco-based MapJack have together developed their own version, not only beating the search engine giant to the punch in this country, but also adding new features including a fullscreen mode and paths that explore pedestrian walkways as much as they do the streets ruled by cars and trucks.

Once the Street View option is selected from the menu bar at the top of the map (other options include access to city street cameras and satellite imagery), users can click on any of the blue highlighted streets to access virtual panoramas taken from street level at that exact spot. With additional panoramas captured every few metres, users can advance their view and travel virtually along the streets by clicking on blue dots, taking in the world around them with every step.

Here is a list of the some of the differences between CanPage’s and Google’s versions of Street View technology:

High Resolution Photography CanPages uses high resolution pictures with support for zoomed exploration. Of the many international cities given the Street View treatment by Google, only a handful including Seattle, San Francisco, and Paris have been captured with higher resolution cameras.

Panoramic Angles – While Google allows viewers to move the camera both straight up and down, taking in both the sky and ground as well the street around them, CanPages’ is more limited to a horizontal view of the world.

Fullscreen View CanPages’ basic Street View map window may be smaller than Google’s, but they offer an additional fullscreen mode that fills the entire screen.

Configuration Menu – Something Google doesn’t offer, CanPages has a setting menu where users can adjust image sharpness, brightness, quality, and projection or the curved effect given to panoramas to give them a more immersive feel.

Pedestrian View CanPages uses two different camera teams to capture their imagery. Like Google they begin with a fleet of vehicle-mounted cameras to capture city streets, but have added a second pedestrian team made up of a shoulder-mounted camera person, allowing them to leave the streets and explore pedestrian-only paths, such as those within the ski resorts in Whistler, B.C. The company hopes to use this additional camera set-up to extend their Street Views into the lobbies of hotels, retail stores, and inside shopping malls and parks.

Privacy – In reaction to voiced concerns over privacy, Google has recently begun to blur the faces and automotive license plates captured by their cameras in selected cities. CanPages has made the commitment to blur all faces captured by their cameras, but not automotive license plates. They have also added a link in the lower right-hand corner for users to submit any concerns over images captured in the selected view.

When Is Google’s StreetView Coming To Canada?

When Google first launched the technology in 2007, the company confirmed that Canadian streets would be captured by their cameras within the foreseeable future, but as of today do not have any further announcements to make. They have participated in discussions regarding potential privacy issues raised by the technology’s use here in this country, most notably with Canadian Federal Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart.

CanPages Voice Search

In addition to today’s Street View launch, CanPages will also be releasing an updated version of their free iPhone App that will include a voice search feature. Users can speak a chain of descriptive words into their iPhones and use the CanPages app to provide detailed results from their Canadian retail and commercial listings. Phrases such as “Pizza in Calgary” will yield a selection of pizza delivery companies within the city of Calgary. Users can refine their results with more descriptive phrases including exact street names and intersections and even using the word “near” such as “book stores near Bloor st.”. If users leave out a location altogether, the App simple accesses the iPhone’s GPS and finds locations in the local area based on your current position.

The Voice Search feature is similar to that introduced by Google through their own iPhone App, but with a focus toward providing Canadian results only.

How a small cabal of bankers controls the world

Monday, March 16th, 2009

… And what they must do to set it right

James Bagnall
Sun

Liaquat Ahamed, author of Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, finds comparisons with the Great Depression. Photograph by: Reuters, Canwest News Service

In September 2008, Liaquat Ahamed had just finished the manuscript for his first book, Lords of Finance.

He was 55, a former investment banker and economist with the World Bank. Ahamed had spent nearly a decade — the previous four years full time — studying the Great Depression through the eyes of the world’s top four central bankers.

It was history, obviously. But as Ahamed pulled together the various strands of research, he was struck by two simple, yet profound parallels with today’s economic mess.

The first was that the health of even very large economies depends on the actions of a small number of individuals. The central bankers of Britain, France, Germany and America in the late 1920s and early 1930s made decisions that unnecessarily consigned a generation to penury. There’s a distinct possibility that similar mistakes in policy could extend or deepen this year’s troubling economic contraction.

Ahamed’s second over-arching insight had to do with the fragility of the financial system itself. Since 1870, he learned, there have been more than 60 instances in which countries experienced at least a 15-per-cent drop in per capita GDP from peak to bottom. Many of these economic collapses resulted from failures of banks.

In the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, these financial spasms became fewer. Banks were tightly regulated institutions with a focus on taking deposits and lending money. Those deposits were insured, and the relationships between lenders and borrowers were clear and direct.

But Western financial markets seem predisposed to the formation of bubbles. It starts with what seems healthy optimism, which intensifies gradually into cockiness, then mania. The boom phase — in stocks, real estate or commodities — often stretches for years. Invariably it ends with a shock that seems to come out of the blue — at which point mania transforms overnight into panic.

Ahamed concludes that it is up to the small cabal of central bankers to stop bubbles from forming or, when that fails, to maintain faith in money.

“The goal of a central bank in a financial crisis is both very simple and very elusive,” Ahamed notes, “to re-establish trust in banks.”

Ahamed grew increasingly disturbed in the 1980s and 1990s by the frequency with which this trust was violated. There were currency meltdowns in Mexico, Asia, Russia and Latin America. Ahamed puzzled over many instances of failed financial institutions — from U.S. savings & loans firms to hedge funds.

“These crises had become endemic to capitalism,” Ahamed says. “So I began reading up on the mother of all crises, the Great Depression.”

Ahamed had completed most of his manuscript by August 2007, when the context for his book began to change dramatically.

BNP Paribas suspended withdrawals from three of its investment funds, which held financial products based on the health of America‘s mortgage industry. Later, the industry would come to see the BNP Paribas suspensions as the start of the great global credit crunch. Not at the time, though.

“Never in my wildest imagination did I think [US. mortgage] loans would threaten the whole Western financial system,” Ahamed says. His thinking, and that of many others, underwent an epiphany on Sept. 15, 2008, when Lehman Brothers, a mid-sized investment bank, filed for bankruptcy. This apocalyptic event ushered in an era of fear that has yet to abate. Ahamed likens it to the 1931 failure of the Credit Anstalt, the largest bank in Austria.

Like Lehman Brothers, the Austrian bank had invested directly in industry — borrowing short-term money to finance longer-term, riskier investments. Adding to the potential danger, Credit Anstalt’s balance sheet was stuffed with foreign borrowing. The bank’s failure prompted a run on all Austrian banks, creating a contagion of fear that destroyed financial institutions around the globe and extended the Great Depression for at least another two years.

Austria‘s experience in 1931 was very fresh in Ahamed’s mind last September, when former U.S. Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke declined to rescue Lehman Brothers. “It was astounding what a shock to the system it was and how much panic it caused,” Ahamed said. “Much more than anyone realized.”

Obviously a great deal more than either Henry Paulson or Bernanke had contemplated. For the past six months, top financial officials have moved aggressively to counter the loss of confidence in financial institutions. The effort continues today in Britain. Finance ministers from the world’s top 20 economies will try to agree on Saturday on a plan for infusing economies with enough liquidity to reverse the slide.

“I believe we have avoided another Great Depression,” says Ahamed. “In the 1930s the central bankers gave the patient the wrong medicine. Today we know what medicines to give, we just may not be giving high enough doses.”

Eighty years ago, the prevailing wisdom was that economies should be anchored by gold — the idea that paper money should be convertible into gold wherever people travelled and did business. The system was incredibly precise, and rigid. The British pound was worth 113 grains of pure gold while the U.S. dollar was valued at 23.22 grains. This meant the pound was worth exactly $4.86 as long as both countries agreed to back their currencies with the precious metal.

But Ahamed points out that imbalances in the supply of gold — with Britain and Germany relatively short of the stuff, and France and the U.S. holding generous quantities — proved unhealthy. Britain, for instance, was forced in the 1920s to keep interest rates high in order to keep gold supplies from dropping.

At the same time, the U.S. held its interest rates low. This action contributed to the 1920s stock boom in much the same way that Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan’s low interest rate policy helped to inflate Internet stocks in the 1990s, then housing prices after 2001.

In 1929, the real damage done by adherence to the gold standard was simply this: It prevented governments from implementing new spending that might have helped to offset the damage done by a contracting world economy.

Ahamed maintains that the beginning of the end for the Great Depression came as soon as countries took themselves off the gold standard. Britain made the break in 1931 and the U.S. and Canada followed suit.

The trouble was, these moves came only after years of exceptionally painful economic contraction. The value of America‘s gross domestic product slumped 26.5 per cent from 1929 to 1933; in Canada, the fall in economic output was an even deeper 27.7 per cent. From these depths, it required another half decade of real economic growth to return to the levels of 1929. However, the hard lesson that financial systems require determined oversight by central bankers or regulators did not take hold.

This much became clear as Greenspan and other central bankers allowed housing markets, and related financial products, to gather phenomenal heft.

Governments were unwilling to regulate the emergence of a virulent new financial industry — what became known as the shadow banking system. Investment banks, hedge funds and other unregulated institutions grew rapidly, fuelled by sales of financial products that depended on rising house prices and a healthy flow of mortgage payments.

Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for economics, frames the danger succinctly in The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008. “The crisis hasn’t involved problems with deregulated institutions that took new risks,” he wrote. “Instead, it involved risks taken by institutions that were never regulated in the first place.”

The shadow banking system, in other words. The fact that so many of these mortgage products were not insured contributed heavily to the panic of last September.

And so, the credit crisis leaked with surprising force from the financial sector into the regular economy. The assets attributed to the shadow banking sector plummeted, along with the value of the mortgages that underpinned them. Hundreds of billions of dollars were sucked out of the economy as the sector shrank. Regular banks — deposit-taking institutions such as Wells Fargo — could not make up the difference. The next stage came quickly. Regular businesses — manufacturers, retailers — were either starved of capital or cautiously shelved plans to expand.

Central bankers now are trying desperately to arrest their economies’ downward momentum.

Canada‘s $1.6-trillion economy contracted 0.8 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2008 (in real terms, after inflation, compared with annualized GDP in the third quarter). The consensus is that the rate of decline in GDP will pick up slightly in the first quarter of 2009, then gradually diminish.

A return to growth by the second half of this year is considered likely.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Gringo Gazette Current Online Issue

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

Other

The critical issue of vanishing cash

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

Here’s what you do to find out if they’re safe

Tony Gioventu
Province

Dear Condo Smarts: When our strata hired a new strata management company last year, we were told by the manager at our first meeting that it was best for the company to hold our trust funds because they were insured and bonded for the trust funds.

Based on the information we received and the fact that the company was licensed, we decided it was the best course of action. Now our management company has moved bank accounts and our trust funds without our knowledge or permission, and refused to tell us what banking institution our funds are being held in.

We are deeply concerned about the security of our funds, how they are being handled and what is being collected from owners, as we have received several complaints about double-dipping of monthly strata fees.

Where can we file a complaint regarding this company and how do we know if our funds are safe?

— D.V., Surrey.

Dear D.V.: The safe management and disclosure of strata trust funds is one of the most critical issues a strata council will have to address.

If a managing broker holds your operating, reserve or special levy funds, they must be held in a separate trust in your strata name: “In trust for the owners, strata plan (ABC1234).”

The location of those funds must be disclosed and the managing broker must provide to the strata corporation the actual monthly bank and investment statements of those accounts.

Those balances and expenses should then be cross-referenced each month by your treasurer and approved by the strata council as part of your financial process. If the information is not being disclosed as required by the real estate services act, regulations and rules of the Real Estate Council, you have a serious problem.

Request the documents from your broker. If they are not provided on request, the next step for your strata council is a complaint to the Real Estate Council. Ask to speak with a compliance officer at 604-683-9664.

There is a significant other issue here that every strata corporation should be aware of. Under the rules of the council, the duty of a brokerage is to disclose material information that may affect your contractual relationship with that party or may have an impact on your decision process.

For example, to state “the funds are insured” in itself is not sufficient and may be misleading.

Trust funds held by a brokerage have limited coverage under the compensation fund.

The brokerages are covered for a maximum of $350,000 per brokerage, and $100,000 per claimant. If several strata corporations were included in the same brokerage where there is a loss, then it’s only a share of a total of $350,000.

If a brokerage were to suffer a theft or fraud of funds, at best your strata corporation funds would only be covered for $100,000. (By comparison, funds held by your lawyer for special levies, are covered to a maximum of $300,000 per claimant, under the Law Society Trust protection.)

Whether you are self-managed or hire a brokerage, request backup documentation, review your bank statements every month, and scrutinize your financial statements on all accounts and investments.

Wosks put eight highrises up for sale – Beach Towers may be worth $400M

Saturday, March 14th, 2009

There’s no asking price, but they’re believed to worth up to $400 million

Bruce Constantineau
Sun

The four Beach Towers at 1600 Beach Ave. in the West End have been put up for sale by the Wosk family. They have 598 units, approximately 15 per cent of the West End’s apartment supply. Photograph by: Jenelle Schneider, Vancouver Sun

Vancouver‘s Wosk family has put eight city apartment highrises up for sale — including four towers with about 15 per cent of the West End‘s rental apartment supply.

There’s no asking price in the listing from Colliers International, but the total portfolio is believed to be worth from $350 million to $400 million.

The four Beach Towers in the West End — at 1600 Beach Ave. and 1651 Harwood St. — have 598 units and a zero-per-cent vacancy rate.

Four more highrises and an apartment/townhouse complex near 57th and Cambie, known as Langara Gardens, have 605 units and a vacancy rate of 0.2 per cent.

The properties are being sold by Liberty Investments Ltd., which is controlled by the Wosk family.

A marketing brochure describes the properties as “flagship assets” that will enhance the value of any portfolio. It says the units collectively represent about two per cent of private rental apartments in the city of Vancouver.

The West End properties sit on about one hectare of waterfront land, while the Langara Gardens complex lies on about eight hectares.

The listing agents for the properties are Colliers representatives Avtar Bains and Simon Lim.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

 

B.C. property sales half what they were a year ago

Saturday, March 14th, 2009

Recreation-oriented markets are seeing the steepest declines

Derrick Penner
Sun

Sales in British Columbia’s real estate market so far in 2009 are about half of what they were a year ago, although the pace has risen from a particularly dismal low point, according to the British Columbia Real Estate Association.

In February, B.C. recorded 3,653 sales through the Multiple Listing Service, down almost 47 per cent from February 2008. The average property price of $421,023 was down 12 per cent.

Over the first two months, B.C. saw 5,768 sales, down 51 per cent from the same period in 2008.

The pace of sales, however, increased 17 per cent in February, association economist Cameron Muir said in an interview, to a seasonally-adjusted annualized rate of 47,000 sales from the low of 40,200 units in January.

Recreation-oriented markets such as the Okanagan, Kamloops, Kootenays and Vancouver Island — which boomed in recent years with an influx of wealthy Alberta buyers — are seeing some of the steepest declines.

“That’s not surprising,” Muir said. “Recreational-property and investment buying decisions are much more easily put off.”

Alberta is suffering its own economic contraction with consequent job losses, and Muir said Albertans have seen their property markets and values decline, curbing their enthusiasm for discretionary purchases.

The Okanagan Mainline board, which includes Kelowna, saw 230 MLS sales in February, down 60 per cent from the same month a year ago. The region’s average price of $276,776 was down 28 per cent from February 2008.

In Kamloops, MLS sales plummeted by almost 60 per cent to 92 units compared with the same month a year ago. There, the average price was down almost 14 per cent to $277,088.

The South Okanagan board, which includes the summer hot spots of Osoyoos and Penticton, saw sales drop almost 59 per cent to 61 units in February. The average price dipped just over 10 per cent to $283,634.

Vancouver Island saw its sales dip almost 50 per cent to 328 units compared with February 2008. The average price was down just over 11 per cent to $291,085.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

25-year builder is selling new homes for less than used

Saturday, March 14th, 2009

‘This has never happened before’

Michael Sasges
Sun

Dale Barron of Morningstar Homes says new home prices have adjusted to the new realities of the market faster than used home prices. –RON JOYCE/MORNINGSTAR HOMES

During a quarter of a century building and selling homes Dale Barron has never been able to say, I can sell you a new home for less money than you can buy a comparable used home.

Until now.

“In my 25 years of experience as a home builder, a new home has never been less expensive than a comparable used home,” the founder of Morningstar Homes says.

”In fact, the price of a new home, in my experience, has been between $75,000 and $100,000 more than a comparable used home. That amount is the difference that I recollect as being the average difference over the past 25 years.”

The change is a sign of these times, of a world-turned-upside-down economic era.

”What’s different now is the price of a new home has adjusted to the market far faster than used homes have,” he said.

”This has never happened to me before. Because the real estate market started to slow, we needed to find ways to lower the cost of a single-family home.

”Together with our trades, suppliers and land owners, we worked to lower the cost of building a new home so that we could price our homes as low as humanly possible.”

Morningstar is selling in two new-home neighbourhoods,Belmont in The Foothills at Burke Mountain in Coquitlam and North Pointe in Sunstone in North Delta. It re-priced them this year, a decision that resulted in the sale of 21 homes in January and 23 homes in February, records for the 10-year-old tract-home builder.

The North Delta claim is this: Morningstar can build and sell a home there for almost $40,000 less than a comparable used home.

The Morningstar property is a 2,360-square-foot home on a 5,900-square-foot lot, with a new-home warranty and GST included. The comparable property is 20 years old without a warranty.

Morningstar is asking $566,728. The list on the comparable home is $606,600.The Coquitlam claim is this: Morningstar can build and sell a home there for about $98,000 less than a comparable home.

The Morningstar property is a 3,835-square-foot home on a 4,500-square-foot lot, with a new-home warranty and GST included. The comparable property is a 3,000-square-foot home on a 4,400-square-foot lot.

Morningstar is asking $671,839. The list on the comparable home is $770,229.

The dollar differences are subject to change and are not — not — based on just one home, Barron says. ”We didn’t just compare our new benchmark price with one home, but 10 comparable homes. I’ve never been able to sell a new home for less than a used home before.”

In circulating its comparisons of prices for new and used residences, Morningstar Homes is not making any claims about its ability to respond to market conditions (or the inability of property owners, and their brokers, to do so).

It needs a robust used-home market.

”We are anxious for the used-home market to realign its prices,” Barron said. ”Our weekly research shows that homeowners are starting to. When the prices really start to realign, more used homes will begin to sell, which will mean more customers for us.”

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Metro vancouver housing starts over the past 25 years

Saturday, March 14th, 2009

Sun

A reminder for builders and their customers: It was worse at the start of the decade

In the 25 years before this one, metropolitan Vancouver builders started about 16,000 homes on average and annually. (The average number of starts from 1984 to 2008 is 15,900; the median number, 15,950.)

Local builders will probably start about 13,000 residences this year, Canada‘s national housing agency said this week.

” . . . low starts data for the first two months of 2009 are an indication that developers are pulling back until some of the supply of new and resale homes on the market are absorbed,” the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation statement on February starts comments.

WHAT 13,000 HOUSING STARTS THIS YEAR WOULD MEAN:

– A 20-per-cent decline from the 25-year average and median numbers;

– A 33-per-cent decline from the actual 2008 number, of almost 19,600;

– A seven-per-cent decline from the previous nine years’ average. The decade started terribly for developers and builders and customers, with only 8,400 starts in each of 2000 and 2001.

NB: Money was dear in 1984, the start year for this chart. Interest on a five-year mortgage was 13.6 per cent that year, Bank of Canada records show. Money was not so dear last year. Interest on a five-year mortgage was seven per cent, Bank of Canada records show.

This year, as home builders’ advocate Peter Simpson comments in his column today, ”mortgage rates are approaching free-money territory.”

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Vancouver is ready for the Olympic spotlight

Friday, March 13th, 2009

Jayne Clark
USA Today

VANCOUVER, B.C. — As the Olympic countdown clock outside the Vancouver Art Gallery struck 6 p.m. on Feb. 12, exactly one year before the kickoff of the 2010 Winter Games, air horns blasted from the distinctive white-sails rooftop of Canada Place convention center. A squadron of celebratory torch-bearing skiers hurtled down Grouse Mountain above the city. Diners in restaurants laid down their forks and applauded. And a few hundred street protesters torched an Olympic flag.

Naysayers notwithstanding — after all, any civic bash with a price tag in the billions is bound to attract some critics — Canada‘s stunning glass city is ready for its close-up as host of the next Olympics.

The sporting venues already are up and running. An expanded road dubbed the Sea to Sky Highway leading 72 miles to Whistler, the host mountain resort, is nearing completion. So is an expanded waterfront convention center. A rapid-transit extension due in November will whisk visitors from the airport to downtown in 25 minutes. And commemorative T-shirts, hockey pucks and stuffed Migas (the odd-looking 2010 mascot) are flying off the shelves at the city’s landmark Hudson‘s Bay Co.

But while Vancouver may be enjoying the spotlight that inevitably shines on host cities even before the Games begin, this town has long been a perennial on top-destinations and livable-city rosters. Readers of Condé Nast Traveler, for instance, awarded it Best City in the Americas for three years running. And no wonder. With its dense forest of gleaming skyscrapers wedged between the Coast Mountains and the Pacific, it is a spectacular sight. In winter, the heart of downtown is just 30 minutes from the ski slopes. In summer, sun seekers crowd its beaches and seaside promenades. And despite a rain-prone climate, it displays a perpetually sunny disposition.

Consider it the supermodel of North American cities. In fact, given Vancouver‘s already considerable natural assets, can 17 days of Olympic Games really enhance its image?

“Can it ever hurt?” responds Suzanne Walters, spokeswoman for Vancouver‘s Olympic organizing committee. “I think Canada is still somewhat a mystery to many. People know it’s cold and the people are nice. But we can show that it’s cosmopolitan and that it’s diverse.”

Vancouver‘s previous highest-profile event, Expo ’86, changed what up till then had been a somewhat provincial city. After that, an influx of international newcomers flocked here, spawning a multicultural boomtown.

“The world came and saw that Vancouver was beautiful, and it put us on the map,” says John Evans, a real estate developer and hotelier. “For Vancouver, the Olympics are the next big step. There’s no question they are going to be significant. They can’t not be significant.”

Of course, 22 million attended the six-month ’86 World’s Fair and a mere 350,000 spectators are anticipated during the relatively brief Olympics. Still, civic movers and shakers hope the Games will boost winter tourism in years to come.

In reality, however, most visitors, including thousands who embark on Alaska-bound cruises from Vancouver‘s port, visit in summer. What they find is a compact, walkable city of about 600,000 that blends urban sophistication with a freewheeling outdoors sensibility. Even brisk winter days find Vancouverites out in droves strolling and cycling along the seawall in Stanley Park, a forested waterfront oasis at the edge of downtown.

The city’s ethnic diversity is dizzying. A short stroll along Commercial Drive, an area east of downtown once known as Little Italy, now presents a global pastiche of restaurants serving tandoori chicken, Japanese sushi, Greek tapas and so on, along with homegrown coffee shops that hold their own against the ubiquitous corner Starbucks.

Vancouver is really coming of age now. From all these groups, we’re creating our own identity,” says Mexico native Rossana Ascensio, a chef and tour guide with Edible British Columbia.

She is showing visitors around Granville Island‘s Public Market, where food stalls brimming with poblano chiles, fresh turmeric and Shanghai noodles also reflect the city’s cultural melting pot. The area is a former industrial zone rehabbed in the 1970s. Colorful water taxis ferry visitors on False Creek between downtown and Granville Island (really a sandbar). It retains the corrugated metal buildings of its gritty past, but has been re-imagined as a gathering spot with eateries, live theater and art galleries.

Nearby, the once down-and-out Yaletown neighborhood, Vancouver’s “little Soho,” has more recently undergone a transformation from warehouse district to hipsters’ enclave of trendy shops, restaurants and condos, also thanks, in part, to post-Expo ’86 development.

Even Gastown, the neighborhood where modern Vancouver took root in 1886, is gaining new momentum with one-of-a-kind design shops opening after decades of being primarily relegated to souvenir-seeking tourists posing for photos under its signature steam clock. Gastown gets its name from John “Gassy Jack” Deighton, a talkative Englishman and city father. It had fallen on hard times before preservationists rallied to save it in the 1970s. Similarly, activists have fought to save parts of Chinatown, North America‘s third largest.

“There was a time they were going to put a freeway through, and the people rose up and said, ‘No you won’t,’ ” says local historian Chuck Davis. But then, Vancouver has always had an activist streak, he adds, from the radical labor movements of the 1930s to the founding of environmental group Greenpeace in 1972.

Chinatown, one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, remains a bustling commercial hub, even though much of the huge influx of Chinese immigrants who arrived in the 1990s settled in suburban Richmond. But even this traditional neighborhood is gradually changing. Some condo construction, rehabs of old buildings and non-Chinese businesses are bringing new diversity. They include shops such as Funhauser Decor, where Peter Lisiecki stands amid rumpus-room-chic trappings and reflects on what the Olympics might mean for the city. Like some other Vancouverites, he has mixed feelings.

“We had the World’s Fair and it put Vancouver on the map, and certainly the Olympics are a great commercial,” he says. “But great as it is, there’s a lot of money being spent, and Vancouver has a lot of social problems that need to be fixed.”

Those problems are acutely visible a few blocks away on East Hastings Street, where drug addicts, the mentally ill and other walking wounded populate the sidewalks. Guides warn tourists against venturing there. The day after the one-year Olympics countdown, Canada‘s largest national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, published a front-page story dubbing it “Our Nation’s Slum.”

The Olympics won’t be a panacea for urban ills as grave as those, but it can be a unifying force. Down the street from Lisiecki at the design shop Peking Lounge, owner Michael Bennett has his own take on how the Games might play in Vancouver.

“This is a young city with a bunch of people from somewhere else. There’s been no defining moment, nothing to bring this city together,” he says. “Maybe the Olympics will do that. I mean, you can’t help but be inspired by something like this.”