Dear Editor,
Re: “Vacancy/non-resident tax too bureaucratic: Brodie,” News, July 22.
It seems Mayor Malcolm Brodie is following the same playbook as Finance Minister Mike de Jong and Premier Christy Clark. When it comes to the white-hot real estate market, that is totally out of sync with wages, they all pretend, “nothing to see here, we’ve seen this all before and it will sort itself out eventually.”
Mayor Brodie has presided over a city with a wild west development attitude, permitting the wholesale destruction of perfectly good homes and yards. Homes, some barely 10 years old, are torn down and replaced by 4,000 square-foot (or larger) mansions in neighbourhoods where homes half that size is normal.
The sky-high house prices and rents apparently are due to simple supply and demand economics. How many hundreds of condos have been added to the supply in Richmond in the last 10 years under Brodie’s watch? Has that quenched demand and lowered home prices? People are purchasing multi-million dollar homes yet have incomes below the poverty line. How is that possible? Some Richmond neighbourhoods are 50 per cent empty, where houses are used as an investment rather than as a home.
These are not symptoms of healthy, cyclical market forces. Mayor Brodie cannot pretend that he has seen this type of activity before. He also states, “It worries me when governments intervene in market forces.”
This out of control, reckless real estate market was created by government. The problems associated with it are exacerbated by governments pretending these activities are perfectly normal. It is about time Mayor Brodie looked out his office window. Or maybe he should take a walk around his neighbourhood.
Kris von Schalburg
Richmond
