VANCOUVER -- The images of graffiti, boarded-up windows and overgrown brush would look at home on one of the many blogs dedicated to Detroit’s thousands of abandoned homes.

But these million-dollar houses strewn about Vancouver’s west side have been left to decay by absentee owners planning to cash in on a speculative real estate market now getting global attention, according to the contributors of a new crowdsourced blog.

Last month, a group of about 20 concerned west side residents began posting to Beautiful Empty Homes of Vancouver, intent on documenting the ghost towns they fear many of their neighbourhoods are becoming, blog contributor James Macdonald said. There are now dozens of homes documented on the site.

“The neighbours (of the abandoned homes) are often irate, some of these houses have often been empty for four years or five years,” said Macdonald, an urban planner who has worked in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.

“The only (homes) on the site are the ones you can ride by on a bicycle, or you can walk by, and say, ‘Wow, that’s an empty home,”’ he added. “If you speak to neighbours they’ll say, ‘Look, there are way more — there are lots where somebody’s paying a landscaping company to maintain (the appearance of a settled home).’”

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The most extreme case of decay involves a home in Shaughnessy that became a den for coyotes, according to a neighbour interviewed for the blog post. Macdonald said he and other blog contributors have talked to elderly residents who say the empty homes around them make them feel unsafe.

“Our concern is that people should be living in these homes,” Macdonald said. “If you let enough homes be empty, then you kill a community or what makes a city livable.

“People move to a city because there are other people living there that they want to interact with.”

Macdonald acknowledged the blog cheekily pushes for squatters to move from places like Oppenheimer Park into the homes because “the city hasn’t done anything, so that would be the next step.” (“Realistically, there’s no legal regime in Vancouver that would permit squatting,” Macdonald conceded.)

He and the group are, however, asking municipal political parties to adjust the Vancouver Charter and implement a punitive vacant property tax on these empty homes that is “high enough to motivate landowners to ensure the property was lived in up to the time of demolition/ redevelopment.”

So far, the left-leaning COPE and Green parties have supported such a tax.

The group is also asking the parties to back a 15-to-20-per-cent surcharge on the price of a home for a non-resident buyer, which Macdonald said may not curb speculative purchases from out of the country but will help pay for infrastructure and public services like transportation and education.

But it is hard to determine whether a home is owned by a Canadian resident and why it is sitting empty, according to Bing Thom Architects’ Andy Yan, whose analysis of “non-resident occupied units” in the 2011 Census found roughly 15 per cent of all downtown Vancouver condos were vacant.

The blog is “a documentation of what happens when Vancouver real estate enters the global real estate market,” but there may be factors other than absentee owners that contribute to the rubble-strewn yards and the decaying homes it showcases, Yan said.

As aging baby boomers begin downsizing to condos in other parts of the city “perhaps a good number” of their single-family homes are sitting empty between real estate deals, Yan said.

Still, this phenomenon could be the “edge of the new normal,” as Vancouver becomes a “resort city” where people from around the world invest their money in home ownership.

Regardless of why they are emptying, these neighbourhoods were centred around public schools and built for families, Yan said.

The planning of these neighbourhoods is part of “an incredible legacy that previous generations of Vancouverites have given us and the issue is how do we build upon that heritage and not squander it.

“It’s not something to be angry about, but to be considered and to really think about what you want in your city.”

mhager@postmedia.com

Follow me: @MikePHager

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