Can we please stop treating the Vancouver housing market like a property casino?

At this rate we're going to have a half empty city where only millionaires can afford to actually own a home. We're damn close to that, the average price in Vancouver right now is $825,000 for a townhouse. A TOWNHOUSE, not a full sized house / lot. And new developments are flipped multiple times before they're even finished building them. I see so many empty houses and townhouses, sold and resold over and over.

These are supposed to be homes. You know, the concept of shelter, a roof over your head. Places where we live, where we're supposed to get comfort sleeping in our beds at night.

It's insane how prices have quadrupled in less years than I can count on one hand, but even more insane is the bullshit our local financial 'experts' keep feeding us, as if it will continue forever even during a falling economy. They're complicit, after all. Who in Vancouver doesn't have their fingers into the property market? None of them want to ever cast a shadow on it.

It's inflationary gambling, the assumption that property pays for itself because it doubles every few years. It's bullshit. It's crooked. It's greed. It's not sustainable. It's not real supply and demand, it's artificial: Our population has barely budged in comparison to these prices and at this rate the middle class is pushed deep into the suburbs further and further away from their jobs. The daily commutes are getting absurd as everyone drives by a bunch of empty properties (which aren't even rented out while waiting for resale) on their way to work.

And development isn't slowing down, astonishingly it's increasing as the developers try to milk as much as they can out of the market. It's plain they're worried about a crash, but they talk as if they can avoid it by saying it will never happen. I don't know what's worse, the big burst of the bubble when it comes, or the ridiculous inflation before then.

I was born in Vancouver and grew up here too. It's depressing to see what a bunch of greedy investors have done to my hometown.

I'd hope for some heavy duty property resale regulation ASAP, but I doubt it'll happen, because even our crown corporations are in on it. There's too much me-first, get-rich-first attitude in this province. It'd take an economic disaster to wake everyone up.

The situation is already so far out of control. We need to stop gambling with the basics of living.

Image is everything right? Google has been the golden boy for a few years now, but the dogs were ready to jump on any scent of weakness. When analysts hinted that the souring economy might make Google slip, their stock plummeted for the first time since their great incline.

It's all turned out to be nonsense, hasn't it? Google's Q1 2008 profit report is in a word, exceptional.

This is an example that makes me feel our world has gone insane, that our economy and day-to-day well-being is based upon stock markets, corporate culture and trademark / logo appeal that are all just one step away from disfavour from the mob. It's not enough these days to be an upstanding business that maintains healthy sales and employs a solid workforce: Each and every quarter report must show leaps above the last, else stock tumbles.

Does anyone else not see this as insane and unsustainable? It's inflation at every step of the way, any hint of a ceiling = dropped stock.

It's not like our markets are filled with savvy economic engineers, instead it's become a culture-wide gambling addiction. This is the supposed great free market. And it has very real-world consequences. We even gamble on the very land that we live on.

We've created a very strange culture for ourselves, where the dictators are some sort of wagering mob playing with numbers that I'm more and more convinced they don't truly understand. Sure, they see and craft arcane patterns, but they clearly don't relate to reality, it's far more about perception.

I don't mean to pick on Google in particular, if anything they represent a possible change in business, where the directors of a company hold to values above the dictation of shareholder value. Or at least I hope so.

Yeah, I know... I'm in a heavy-handed mood.