Hedge City Blues
“See the little pair of shoes?” Kerry Starchuk brings her minivan to a halt before a sprawling manse with antebellum columns and a cast-iron fence and points to the front door. Sure enough, next to the welcome mat sits a solitary pair of clogs. Realtors do that, Starchuk tells me, “to make it look like someone is living there.” But a quick survey of the property spoils the ruse. The blinds are drawn. The lawn is overgrown and the capacious circular driveway is empty. Still, Starchuk credits the effort. “Some of the houses, you drive by and they haven’t even picked up their mail.”
It’s midmorning on a Saturday in Richmond, a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia, and this is maybe the 20th example we’ve seen of what locals call the “empty-house syndrome”—homes purchased by foreign nationals, many of them wealthy Chinese, and left to sit vacant. Some will eventually have occupants; Vancouver is a top destination for well-heeled emigrants. But often, the new owners treat the houses as little more than vehicles for spiriting capital out of China. By one recent estimate, 67,000 homes, condos, and apartments in the Vancouver metro area, or about 6.5 percent of the total, are either empty or “underused”—an appalling statistic, given a housing market so tight that rental vacancy rates are below 1 percent. Hence the shoes: To shield absentee owners from public opprobrium, niche firms specializing in “vacant-property maintenance” will arrange elaborate camouflages—everything from timed light switches and “garden staging” to artful props, like pumpkins at Halloween and wreaths at Christmas.
Yet such tactics can’t mask the emptiness of the houses or the ghost town vibe of entire neighborhoods. Here, for example, despite the sunny weekend weather, we’ve seen few pedestrians and no children—just contractors and realtor-looking types in late-model BMWs. Steering us around a contractor’s panel van lettered in Chinese, Starchuk tells me, not for the first time today, “I feel like a foreigner in my own country.”
Comments like that don’t always go over well in a city with a huge immigrant population and a proud self-image as a hub of progressive internationalism. But in fact, many members of Vancouver’s large Chinese Canadian community are just as resentful of the behavior of the city’s ultrawealthy Chinese newcomers and the way their presence has altered everyday life. If anything, both Starchuk’s impolitic complaints and the sharp reaction to them only serve to highlight the messy social realities of a city that has been turned inside out by the imperatives of global capital.
For wealthy Chinese, Vancouver has emerged as the perfect “hedge city”—scenic, cosmopolitan, with good schools, a long-standing Chinese community, and an undervalued (by global standards) real estate market where capital can be sheltered against mounting economic and political uncertainties back home. In 2015 alone, according to estimates by Canada’s National Bank Financial, Chinese purchases of real estate in the Vancouver metropolitan area amounted to nearly $10 billion, or a third of the total dollar amount spent on city real estate. (Figures are in US dollars unless otherwise noted.) So popular is Vancouver among hedgers that local real estate firms send Mandarin-speaking recruiters to Chinese cities to entice buyers to take bus tours of Vancouver’s upscale neighborhoods.
But for many longtime residents, Vancouver’s evolving role as a giant safety deposit box for
