Internet game, Crack Shack or Mansion?, may be the best indicator of a city’s out-of-control prices.
Petr Pospisil, a frustrated Vancouver teacher, and his girlfriend Ola Rugula have scored a viral Internet hit with their homemade game Crack Shack or Mansion? The object of the exercise is to click through a series of house photos and decide if they are North American drug dens that police have seized and shut down, or if they’re Vancouver “mansions,” which is to say a house listed this April at over $1 million. Good luck spotting the difference.
“It’s scary. I couldn’t believe what I was finding,” Pospisil, who has resigned himself to renting, told Vancouver’s Province newspaper. “I have no hope of owning anything for now.” Vancouver’s housing market has roared back. Prices are at, or above, pre-recession levels. There are any number of reasons for this: a mini post-Olympic boom, fears that low mortgage rates will soon disappear and the desire to escape cost increases July 1, when the 12-per-cent HST, the combined federal-provincial sales tax, adds to the price of new homes and real estate fees.
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