In the city [$3.40 an hour] bought you a house. We did, we went out and bought houses. In 1977 when I bought my house in Dunbar, it took one bus driver’s salary to buy a house in the city, even on the west side. And now it takes eight bus driver’s salaries to buy the same house. And that’s a huge change, in the city and the job and everything, the affordability of housing has massively changed.
I just did a quick search of Dunbar on MLS. Zero single-family houses under $1 million. Fourteen under $1.5 million.
The lowest priced house, at $1.195 million, was built in 1925 and has 7 bedrooms and 3 baths. The fact that there are no interior photos and the blurb includes the word “redevelop” means that it’s being sold for land value. The house may be perfectly fine to live in, but inevitably it’ll be torn down to the studs and re-built as a two- or three-unit “craftsman-style” condominium (never a proper duplex or triplex, always a condo). In a year or so, each of those units will be sold for about $1 million each.
I try to be Zen about real estate in Vancouver, but sometimes it really grates.
The Remainder Table 