It is a good thing if you are a tenant in an area where housing prices are high. Landlords generally set rental prices at a point where they at least cover their expenses, if there is a tax break involved then they can set the rent a little lower.
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Vancouver has been a pan-Asian city for a long time. Probably more so than LA given the relative proportion and influence of the asian-background population. And even in the mid 1980s when I lived in Canada there were far more direct contacts with China than in the US at the same time
One major change happened around the Hong Kong handover to China in 1997; Canada has always been more transparent about the ability to purchase residence compared to the US ( though “business investment” visas) and their immigration authorities are somewhat less racist and inefficient than their equivalent in the USA. So many wealthy Hong Kong residents purchased property and residence in Vancouver as hedge against the uncertainty across the Pacific. This led to many HK families living in BC while the husbands worked during the week in HK and flew home for weekends (they were called Astronauts in the community).
In the following decade or so, the existing HK expat community was substantially added to by RoC Chinese “investors”, many of whom had dubious sources of sudden wealth and wanted to get it offshore ASAP. The fact that their kids could go to school in BC and that there was also an infrastructure of Cantonese/Mandarin-speaking services and social groups was a positive.
Auckland, Sydney and Melbourne have a somewhat similar story, but Australia’s more explicitly racist immigration policies up to and through the 1970s may have discouraged many older investors and Auckland is more isolated than the other larger cities.
In some ways it’s surprising that the US Real Estate industry didn’t try to get more of the pie in this boom and encourage changes to immigration laws.
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The rest of Canada, the weather is just fine… except for winter, which is easily the worst 5-7 months of the year.
Vancouver definitely has the warmest weather of the main cities in Canada – pretty similar to Seattle, except with more rain.
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