Let’s take a step back and consider the politics and media coverage surrounding our housing crisis. We have a Premier who, despite leading a province that is home to the second least affordable city in the world, only acknowledged our housing crisis after an explosion of grassroots anger; a Premier whose election campaign was buoyed by generous donations from the development and real estate industry; a Premier who tries to shut down the conversation on foreign capital in our real estate market by citing statistics provided by—you guessed it—the real estate industry; a Premier who, despite near universal demand from the media and public, shows no interest in collecting the kind of data on homeownership that would bring Vancouver in line with international norms. And most perplexing of all, we have a local media that shows equally little interest in taking the Premier to task. Many are satisfied to simply parrot the statistics provided by the Premier and developers. Better yet, the Vancouver Sun has been churning out a steady stream of thinly veiled public relations pieces penned by the real estate industry. To spare you the tedium of reading so many near-identical articles, allow me to summarize: “There is no problem with our real estate market, friends. But if there is a problem, it certainly isn’t foreign capital! It’s demographics and lack of space and other things we can’t control. And anyway, we don’t have data on foreign investment. But the problem definitely isn’t foreign investment, so let’s just stop talking about this, okay?” Such arguments always seem to fall back on the same statistic: foreign buyers account for less than 5% of the market. But where does this statistic come from, and how was it arrived at? Once again, it has been left to Ian Young, a journalist with the South China Morning Post, to investigate these claims. And investigate he did: “Bogus ‘analysis’ obscures the role of foreign money in Vancouver’s runaway housing market.” In the process of unraveling the junk science behind the 5% foreign ownership statistic, Mr. Young also points out that its entire premise is a distraction: “From an affordability perspective, it really matters not if a buyer is foreign - it matters if their money is foreign. But the BCREA [BC Real Estate Association] would much rather everyone stop looking at the money and focus on the official residency of the buyer.” http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1819499/exposing-bogus-analysis-ignores-role-foreign-money-vancouvers-housing And so, what can we as citizens do to push back against the distortions spread by special interest groups and their favourite politicians? First, let’s share Mr. Young’s latest article as widely as possible. The more the public is aware of the truth behind the “statistics” Premier Clark and the real estate lobby are peddling, the less effective such distortions will be. Second, let’s get behind Vancouverites for Affordable Housing. This grassroots organization is pressuring our politicians to find solutions to both the domestic and international causes of our housing crisis, starting with the collection of data on homeownership. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Vancouverites-for-Affordable-Housing/883148868417665 The globalization of our real estate market is of course only one of the factors underlying our housing crisis. However, to deny that foreign capital is of significance at the same time as refusing to collect data is simply disingenuous.