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Nobody seems to even know where all these bigshot investors have gone. Surveys by the China Merchants Bank show that nearly a quarter of Mainland China’s millionaires had already emigrated by 2o13, but vacancy rates in Vancouver’s posh new condo districts are perhaps 30 per cent. The city doesn’t keep track, but University of British Columbia geography professor David Ley has been tracing the trend relationship between the rise in Vancouver residential property prices and the influx of immigrant investors over the years. The lines run in direct lockstep.

Last year, Macdonald Realty opened an office in Shanghai to directly market to Chinese buyers after finding that a third of its Vancouver house sales for the year had gone to buyers with “mainland Chinese names.” Ian Young reckons that, in dollar terms, near half of Vancouver’s detached housing market in 2014 probably went to Mainland Chinese buyers.

But the debate about these things has been so “suppressed,” to borrow Professor Ley’s term, that the subject barely came up during last year’s Vancouver civic elections. Given Vancouver’s first-place finish this week in StatsCan’s Unhappy City sweepstakes, it now seems awkward to mention that Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, before he got into politics, was most famous for having co-founded the Happy Planet Fruit Juice Company. In any case, Robertson was handily re-elected last November.

Among the accomplishments that put Robertson back in the mayor’s chair was his “green demolition bylaw.” Vancouver’s weirdly overheated property market has caused vulgar palaces to pop up in all the neighbourhoods where the city’s grand old houses used to be. The bylaw requires the recycling of up to 90 per cent of the demolition material from the city’ s old “character homes.”

I suppose Vancouverites can be happy at least about that.

Terry Glavin is an author and journalist.