Vancouver: No Fixed Address

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Vancouver, often considered one of the most livable cities in the world, is facing a housing crisis, where there is insufficient supply to meet the demand by people who want to buy and/or live in the city, and the increasing housing prices, driven largely and often solely by market forces, is forcing many, including long time residents and people who were born and raised in the city and who would stay if they could, out. Much of the blame is often laid at the feet of wealthy offshore investors, generally identified as Chinese, many who use Vancouver as a nice place to live away from the less livable place where they made their money, while others only use it as a place to park their money, leaving their housing unit otherwise unused. A wide array of Vancouver residents talk about the issue, from born and bred Vancouverites to relatively new arrivals, from the poor to the wealthy, from millennials to seniors, from singles to people with families and others to consider, and from those who still aspire to home ownership despite the financial obstacles to those who have come up with other living solutions to fit their life priorities within the crisis. Vancouver based policy makers, academics, journalists and others who work directly in the housing business - all who obviously live in the city - provide their perspective of why the situation exists and some possible solutions. A unique perspective comes from the indigenous community, who sees what is happening now as just a larger and more publicly decried situation as what happened to the indigenous population when Vancouver was in its infancy as a political unit.