EDITORIAL: A time when starter homes didn't face fees and taxes

I (Craig McInnes) have always been impressed with the personal accounts of pioneers. They would arrive in their new land with little more than their own two hands and a few crude tools and knock together a house in time for winter.

A home of their own, paid in full, in a few short months. What a concept.

Since I first became aware of such things, some 40 years ago, the acquisition of a house has always been as a life-long quest, defined in large measure by the 25-year amortization period of a mortgage.

The pioneer version of the mortgage was the drive to continually upgrade the place once you had it built. The novelty of a dirt floor wears off pretty quickly and air-conditioning provided by cracks between the logs never was a desirable feature when the icy wind was trying to force its way in during the long winter months.

But be it ever so humble, it was home and mortgage-free. Now we have a blanket of government regulations and taxation that ensures we won't have to endure what we would now consider to be such inadequate housing.

Unfortunately, those same protections have also become barriers in various shapes and sizes that get in the way as we try to obtain and maintain a roof over our heads.

The old log cabin was not much of a home, but it represented for what we would now call the first-time buyer a low threshold to get into the market.

For my generation, the low-threshold entry was what realtors like to call a fixer-upper or a handyman special. They still exist, but in a widening circle around Vancouver, they are now known as tear-downs, representing what would be the price of a vacant lot, if there were such a thing.

My version was a two-bedroom bungalow that was an eyesore in a neighbourhood where three bedrooms represented undreamed-of luxury.

I bought it with two other students, one of whom taught me the trick of creating a lawn of sorts by simply mowing the knee-high weeds.

There are still opportunities to create sweat equity, but not many that are affordable for first-time buyers with average income within a 90-minute drive of downtown Vancouver.

Still, if you are willing and able to move to Hope, you can pick up a three-bedroom fixer-upper on a decent-sized lot for only $124,000.

If price is the only object, how about the least expensive house with an MLS listing in British Columbia?

You'll find that in downtown Horsefly, a village of about 800 people an hour east of Williams Lake.

The property is described as an old-time log home on a sunny, level, acre lot with a nice mountain view. Very, very rustic. Note the two "very"s.

In fact, the listing agent candidly admits you might want to treat the property as a building lot, even though it was lived in until recently. The former owner, whose estate has put the house up for sale, was used to the outhouse and the lack of running water.

Still, for $21,000 it's a place to start, the kind of opportunity that simply doesn't exist in towns like ours where authorities frown on outhouses. In Vancouver, where you can pay half a million or more for a tear-down, $21,000 won't cover the fees and taxes.

Published: Thursday, March 30, 2006
Those same fees and taxes, which represent nearly 10 per cent of the purchase price, also make it harder for people who want to move up from their starter homes to afford something larger. They stifle ambition.

They also eat up a sizable portion of the equity empty nesters might otherwise hope to realize from the sale of a family home when they go to downsize.

You'll have to pay both for selling the old place and buying the new, a collection of real estate commissions, provincial property transfer taxes, lawyers' fees, the cost of a home inspector -- with GST on all the fees.

As an aside, the asking price for the most expensive MLS listing in B.C., which is described as 11,000 square feet of "World Class Living" in West Vancouver, is $21.8 million or 1,000 times the cost of the Horsefly property.

(prepared by Craig McInnes/Vancouver Sun)