withabix

That also describes every town, district or city in the Lower Mainland!

el_richo

Unfortunately yes

And for folks just moving over they need to understand areas before spending huge $'s buying a place.

bearfacts

Yes for sure. It really depends job location. As you say good to rent first and suss out the place fully. Can really only do that there on the ground.

Cheers.

bearfacts

Yes that's a bummer. No one knows just how sustainable that really is. When we lived on Vancouver Island, even then house prices were way too high. There was a point 3 years or so ago, when it stagnated. People wouldn't lower prices to sell, so just sat on their properties.
Some people were being offered good prices - way more than they paid to buy years ago, but wanted an even higher price. It's fuelled by greed I guess. Realtors and the Media seem to fixate on pricing and push things up in some respects.

Buying in January might help...?! Yes less choice but often people who really need/want to sell are on the market.

We've looked at houses here in the UK, and as you'll know prices are nuts too. Why so absurd just to get a roof over your head... Such is life.

dishwashing

I wish I had a house that is now equivalent to winning a million dollar plus lottery

Aviator

It has been like it for at least the past 20 years, more ups than downs, so seems to be holding out OK.

Obviously not as good as they want, why would someone selling not want as much as they can get? What you paid years ago has nothing to do with current selling prices. My dad paid £600 for his house, it is worth a tad more than that now. When we sell we want the market rate, not something proportional to what he paid.

If a house has been purchased on mortgage, the purchase price is only part of the cost, there are improvements as well as the borrowing costs to account for.

skilovernat

Hey there!
We've just come back from reconnaissance mission trying to find out where we wanted to move to - so here's my 2 pence worth.

- Stayed in Maple Ridge and then Fort Langley.

- 45 minutes to Abbotsford from MR which was a beautiful drive looking at the mountains. Depends on how much you want to be in the car.

- Maple Ridge is the only place that has anything approaching a town centre that we saw - which has the opportunity to grow into a nice little walkable area eventually... Some cute restaurants/shops in the area (European bakery, coffee, sushi, florist, English shop!)

-although MR has old malls (and people think it's backwards) - if you want those massive superstores/home depot etc... just drive to the next towns west and east...

- drove around MR with a realtor - and away from the highway - just some lovely neighbourhoods and "relatively" affordable.

- We also drove to Coquitlam - much more congested traffic, but certainly do-able, and closer than Abbotsford.

- Abbotsford has more problems with drugs/gangs/adolescent issues compared to MR (I visited a youth clinic there)

Good luck. We have settled on Maple Ridge and very happy with it. (And you get homeless/poor people everywhere - just a shame their social system doesn't seem to be as good as the UK's when it come to welfare to hiding the issues).

nativenewyorker

Congrats! You'll love it. As you rightly say there are homeless people everywhere and in Maple Ridge they tend to stay in the centre. The positives of living here far outweigh the negatives imo.

withabix

My morning rant...

Maple Ridge unfortunately has a current problem with a homeless camp (Tent City) on Cliff Avenue, which is also spreading to a park area across Haney Bypass, with smaller tent clusters in some of the other parks.

This is 100% the fault of the Mayor (Nicole Read) and the Council, who decided that it was a 'good idea' to relax the Bylaws and allow this 'protest camp' in April/May this year.

Unfortunately, this has now resulted in an influx of junkies and thieves from all across the Lower Mainland, with the total number of people now living in this 'protest camp' being over 100 and recent estimates by the unfortunate homeowners on the street make it upwards of 160.

They sleep or shoot up by day and spread out across Maple Ridge by night on their stolen bikes to steal anything that they can find.

Whenever anyone complains about it, the Council's standard response is that homelessness is a Provincial responsibility, as is Public Health, when it comes to the junkies' needles that are spread around everywhere.

Nothing, it seems, is Maple Ridge's responsibility, despite the fact that they made the bad decision of allowing this camp to proliferate.

When the problems with this camp increased in early August, the Mayor and the rest of the Councillors manned up to deal with the problem by going on holiday.

Maple Ridge council is effectively closed for the month of August. By the time they get their arses in gear in September, the problem will be beyond control.

The RCMP help by not arresting people for crime, because they can't pay the fines and they don't want smelly people in the back of their cars either.

Needless to say, the Mayor won't go near Cliff Avenue because it is now full of scary drug-crazed thieves. Not safe you see.

There are so many overdoses from Fentanyl that on some days, both of Maple Ridge's ambulances are in Cliff Avenue and if any tax-paying resident of Maple Ridge needs an ambulance, it has to come from Surrey! The junkies don't pay the $80 ambulance fee either...

/Rant over.

skilovernat

Yeah. I walked past the camp a couple of times up and down the highway when I was there. It seemed to be an issue (after speaking with people living in MR)/reading the MR news/FB groups. The fentanyl problem seems Vancouver wide though.

Are there no rehab units in the area?

dbd33

I haven't previously heard of Ms Read, is she very old?

I ask because visible homeless populations have been a striking feature of Canada since I've been here so I think to be 100% responsible for them she must have been at it quite a while.

skilovernat

She's a new mayor (elected on the basis of sorting out this problem I hear). She's young - in her late 30's/early 40's.

withabix

They relaxed the Bylaws and allowed the camp to grow in size. There used to be a handful of tents there on a bad day.

If they enforced the Bylaws, the camp wouldn't be there and there wouldn't have been an influx from other towns.

In April, Maple Ridge's resident street-living homeless population was though to be no more than 60, based on Sally Army customers (it's on Cliff Avenue) and counts by council staff. There are probably more than 200 now if you include the other 'satellite camps' and its growing by the day.

dbd33

And they're not a problem if they're in other towns. Got it.

withabix

Not what I meant.

Maple Ridge has become a destination of choice because the City has relaxed the Bylaws, whilst other municipalities continue to strengthen and enforce theirs.

The genuine homeless who mind their own business aren't the problem. Maple Ridge had a resident population whom many of the locals know by name.

The problem is the influx of thieves and junkies to the 'protest camp', who the RCMP apparently choose not to deal with, despite the increase in property crime this summer.



She's mainly only interested in schools and sports fields. Homelessness is the Province's responsibility, as she said just before she ran away for her summer holiday, which she should have postponed if she had any common sense or a spine.