Science, technology, politics and dance
Update 6-Sep-2018: After I published my blog post, some of the hosts have obtained licences and Airbnb has deactivated the remaining listings. Airbnb is required to deactivate listings that don’t have a licence and keep them deactivated until such time the hosts get licences for them. But my Airbnb data scanner has picked up at […]
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The numbered company 1161137 B. C. LTD bought 7239 Oak Street in May 2015 for $1.9M. The company held onto the land the city upzoned the neighbourhood under the Cambie Corridor Project. Once that was done, they assembled it with another nearby property, and have relisted the properties at $5.7M each. This is just one […]
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City of Vancouver’s short term accommodation bylaw fully came into force today. There was much talk of “2,000” Airbnb units being deactivated. But did it really happen? It appears that Airbnb has deactivated approximately 5% of the listings that were active on August 31. I took a random sample 832 of City […]
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Someone’s been deleting sections of Vancouver developer Ian Gillespie’s Wikipedia page1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Gillespie_(developer). Gillespie owns Westbank of the “if the Chinese market doesn’t want it, I have no interest in it” fame. So who’s Wikiwashing Gillespie’s page? Wikipedia edits leave behind an audit trail. In this case, we know the person who edited Gillespie’s page had the […]
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I hear from my fellow Vancouverites everyday about how they’re being thrown out onto the streets to make way for luxury condos that remain empty as safety deposit boxes in the sky. I hear from friends and neighbours about being renovicted as their landlords turned entire rental towers into illegal Airbnb hotels. Vancouverites are fed […]
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My speech at the City of Vancouver Public Hearing on rezoning applications for a condo project where I asked the Vancouver City Council to limit pre-sales to local income taxpayers. Your council has been approving rezoning applications, just like the one before us, at a breakneck rate. Tens of thousands of new homes have been […]
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Fentanyl dealers launder their profits through Vancouver’s real estate market1)https://globalnews.ca/news/4149818/vancouver-cautionary-tale-money-laundering-drugs/ The influx of proceeds of transnational crime causes Vancouver’s home prices to soar causing a frenzy of speculation. This toxic demand then leads to eviction and homelessness. Eviction and homeless has been linked to increases in addiction2)William Damon, Ryan McNeil, M -J Milloy, Ekaterina Nosova, […]
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Right Honourable Justin Trudeau, Office of the Prime Minister 80 Wellington Street Ottawa, ON K1A 0A2 Dear Prime Minister, Please don’t hand over $14B of our tax dollars to Westbank’s Ian Gillespie I’m dismayed and distressed to hear that the Government of Canada is considering handing $14 billion in taxpayer dollars to real estate developer […]
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Problem City of Vancouver recently regulated Airbnb and other short term rentals. Hosts are required to obtain a licence from the city and platforms are required to deactivate hosts without a valid licence. Recent news reports indicate that hosts have been getting away with fake numbers as there’s currently no mechanism for platforms to validate […]
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Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson announced last week with much fanfare that the City of Vancouver has signed a memorandum of understanding with Airbnb to help the city crackdown on illegal short term rentals. I got a hold of the full text of the MOU1)https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fhQagqnZxXHX2DGmAysApgO5xYN0OSaa/view?usp=sharing through a Freedom of Information request. Buried inside the five pages […]
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