

Scott Peterson, reporter, on ‘Vancouver riot cost’ from cbc.ca 16 Jun 2011– “Another thing here that you can’t really put a price tag on is the damage to the City of Vancouver, and the goodwill as a place to do business, after all the goodwill that was built up after the Olympic Games, this is certainly going to return the reputation of a no fun city in the sense of this crack-down.

It doesn’t look good internationally because we’ve seen headlines from like ‘The Guardian’, to ‘Al Jazeera’, even, and, in Hong Kong, these headlines get around the world.

And, another caveat here, the Bank of Montreal waded in this morning with a report saying that after the 1994 loss, the first time around, Vancouver housing prices corrected by 26%… [first announcer “Really?”]… So, a little bit of a co-incidence here and maybe a little bit of foreshadowing, considering how Carney was out there last night talking about how overvalued Vancouver house prices were.”

It is interesting enough, from the ‘socionomics’ perspective, that a CBC report on the riots should include mention of property prices.

More interesting is the inevitability of the coming meme.

Vancouver’s speculative mania in real estate is ripe for implosion, and, at some point would have collapsed under its own massively over-bloated size. The mania is the cause of its own collapse; no other cause need be invoked.

There is now a very high chance that the coming collapse will be blamed on the 2011 riots. This is a fallacious logical link, but just watch people march it out. It serves a psychologically defensive purpose, too; a primitive attempt at protecting one’s own opinion of oneself. “If it were not for the unpredictable fluke of those damn riots, property would have continued up, and I would have been right” is easier to stomach than “I was wrong”. This is a sub-category of the “Hoocoodanode?” defence.

Any statement, in the coming months or years, attempting to link housing price collapse to the 2011 riots (in a causative rather than co-incidental fashion) will deserve scorn and ridicule. We’ll collect any such statements in the ‘Hoocoodanode?’ sidebar, and we may even start a separate category, if warranted. – vreaa