The HongcouverVocal academic isn’t just an observer of Vancouver’s real estate industry – he’s part of it
Tsur Somerville’s institution has been sponsored by developers, and he’s done no peer-reviewed research into the city’s extreme unaffordability
Anyone hoping to get a handle on the mechanisms driving Vancouver’s eye-popping real estate market and the impact of Chinese money soon runs into the same problem: An apparent lack of data.
Data DOES exist (more on this later), but the supposed void has been filled with the opinions of a range of experts. And no pundit has been more enthusiastic than Dr Tsur Somerville, director of the UBC Centre for Urban Economics and Real Estate.
For years, Somerville, armed with a PhD in economics from Harvard, has been a driving force behind some key notions: That there is nothing terribly abnormal or bubbly about prices in Vancouver (where the average price of a detached house is about C$1.4million); that affordability is best addressed on the supply side with more development, and not by addressing demand; and that worrying about the impact of Chinese money is racist.
He added: “There's a long history on the West Coast of North America of worrying about some problem - whether it's low wages, venereal disease, the plague, whatever you want - and blaming it on the Chinese.”
WATCH: Vancouver’s unaffordability ranking 'unfair', says Somerville (2014)