Edmonton or San Fran?

I spend a good deal of time reading Garth Turner's Greater Fool
blog where he has been sounding the alarm about Canada's unsustainable real
estate market. Recently, he compared what you could snap up for $600,000 in
Edmonton versus San Francisco and like all the stats surrounding Canadian real
estate, it makes you shake your head:

In Edmonton, six hundred buys a 1950s house that four years ago sold for less than $400,000. It’s a 1,400-square foot bung with all the curb appeal of a utility substation, a cheap suite downstairs and a jet tub imported from a garage sale.

In San Francisco, six hundred buys a house that was worth $866,000 at the end of 2007. It’s about the same size, and is now priced $25,000 less than it sold for in 2004. Built in 1928, it is a classic west coast villa, walking distance from Golden Gate Park. Kitchen to die for.

So, one home has risen in value by half, the other dropped by a third. One’s in a regional market dependent on volatile resource prices. The other’s in a hive tied to intellectual entrepreneurship. But in Edmonton you get a pine tree. Americans are total idiots without a clue how to value property and opportunity. After all, it couldn’t be us.

End Occupy Now

Only Vancouver's uber-liberal Mayor (as Bill O'Reilly calls him) Gregor Robertson could waste an opportunity like this. As if Occupy Vancouver's tents, permanent structures and open drug use wasn't enough reason to shut the protest down, there has also been an overdose, a death (!) and now Vancouver police officers are being bit by the protesters. It's time to end Occupy Vancouver now. Mayor Robertson should have had the place shut down the day after the woman was found dead in her tent. What better reasoning to end this than when people start to die?

Instead, the Mayor dithered and stalled, allowing the protesters to become more belligerent and entrenched, to the point that they claim to not recognize the city's authority and even declaring their own sovereignty. Vancouver's civic politicians need to find their backbone and shut this thing down. If the Occupy Vancouver sit-in doesn't recognize the government's authority, it's about time Vancouver shows them, up close and personal, who really runs the City.