More than 2,000 condos sitting empty in Metro Vancouver amid housing crisis - BC | Globalnews.ca

Kind of ironic that as a Coal Harbour resident, the scariest person of the neighbourhood is a bald white dude that harasses any visibly vulnerable that passes by, also random people at times but he's a bully so he prefers harassing the homeless, delivery drivers and random minorities. He lives at the building right in front of mine and I'd trade him for getting as new neighbours 10 currently unhoused citizens undergoing treatment, because this bald fuck surely isn't treating whatever he has going on. Fucking "concerned citizens", much worse than whoever makes them clutch pearls.

I can imagine that being scary. But I'd also say that wellness checks should be made to struggling families for them to succeed.

We have the technology to switch from representative democracy to direct democracy. There would also need to be major changes to educate everyone on the topics being voted on. That would be a huge improvement if we can keep that education less corrupted by monied interests.

A true democracy would be incredibly easy to implement.

Our government could literally just make an app that sends us everything to individually vote on instead of our reps getting to vote.

I don't want true democracy, I want people to not starve to death because they have no money to buy food, I want people to not have to die by cold because they don't have money for buying clothes and a afford a place to live.

It's very funny you're asking for a perfect democracy when the problem is we don't even need a "true democracy" for things to get way better than they're right now, the worst socialism is hundreds of times better than any capitalism

He's still skirting around the real issue which is allowing property owners to keep increasing rents and buying up housing with no oversight.

Fees vary here in Vancouver Metro area. Some at $300, ours went up to $500. Part of the problem is your fees are supposed to build a contingency fund this cover prescribed maintenance, and emergency repairs, however you vote yearly to approve the budgets. Most owners don't want higher fees so vote to keep the fee low. This means the operating budget suffers and preventative work may be delayed or skipped. This turns into higher emergency repairs, or higher cost as delayed projects deal with vendor inflation. So at some point fees sky rocket to catch up.

The condo insurance premiums are going into the strata-sphere as well.

We are building equity rather than losing rent money monthly

This meme has to die, there's so much knowledge out there on how to properly do the math on this

Bit different. The condo is a legal company ,collects fees To operate the building maintenance and repair, insurance, snow removal, etc. All owners vote yearly on changes to bylaws, or projects to be done.
I.e.hypothetically there could be laws about no blue patio furniture, however if majority of owners vote for allowing blue, then it gets changed. Its an owner run corporation.

BC has strata corporations, which are kiiiiind of the same thing based on my shitty surface-level understanding of HOAs.

And basically all multi-family housing has a strata.

you usually get a lawn…

Fish don't need bicycles, and we don't need to hoard greenspace when it can be consolidated very well into something useful by so many more people.

At larger scale, consolidating greenspace surrounding clusters of effective dense mixed-use residential cuts land-use tremendously, re-wilds a lot of other space or returns it to agriculture, and achieves the density required for better transit and savings on infrastructure costs. The housing has to be effective, and I think the new "mixed-use consolidated over a transit stop" configuration is a definite winner ... as long as it's not wood (aka Fire's Favourite Food).