<i>The suburbs?</i><p>There&#x27;s a lot of this, yes.  And the suburbs aren&#x27;t necessarily very suburban: I live in a 30 floor condo tower in Burnaby, and within 2 block radius there&#x27;s a dozen similar towers and twenty more 30-60 floor towers in various stages of zoning hearings (8) &#x2F; building approval (7) &#x2F; digging big holes (2) &#x2F; towers going up (3).<p>There are two major phenomena at play in Vancouver:<p>1. Across Metro Vancouver, the supply of land for single family detached houses is very constrained; this is pushing prices of <i>detached</i> houses up dramatically.<p>2. The City of Vancouver proper is very hostile to development, due to a toxic combination of NIMBYism, height restrictions to maintain &quot;view corridors&quot; of the nearby mountains, and social activists who think that building more housing will somehow make housing <i>less</i> affordable.<p>But if you&#x27;re willing to live in a condo and you don&#x27;t mind living a 20 minute train ride away from downtown, the cost of housing is far more reasonable than hysterical media reports would have you believe; and unlike detached houses, prices of condos have barely kept up with inflation over the past decade.