Man those were the days. I was just barely old enough to be able to get into them before they died. Anyone remember the door games?
I remember it being pretty crazy that I could play BRE or LORD with people, even across BBSes in some cases.
And each BBS had a different setup for LORD. There were some that seemingly just tried to install every possible in game module, and it was the most broken thing ever...
I remember one place that had a "wall" plugin at login where you could leave public messages, and the BBS software also included some special escape sequences that would resolve to the current user's name, phone number, etc. Not a real security hole since you could only show someone their own information, but it was bags of laughs to post something like "Hey <firstname>, I've been trying to get hold of you all week! Isn't your home # <phonenumber>?"
The rental market has begun heating up lately (stories of rental auctions, renovictions, evictions for airBnB, etc) so although they may be comparatively reasonable, they may not stay absolutely reasonable for long.
Vancouver is currently a mess of low interest rates, FOMO, foreign buyers, and supply issues. Due to both the city & BC government having a large number of developer donors, it's also a very partisan issue.
For the longest time, the ruling provincial party was of the opinion that this was not a problem and high property prices was due to the strong economy (circular logic, as real estate & construction are the drivers of that.) They were getting pretty hammered in polls. On top of that, they cited a ~5% ish foreign purchaser number based on 19 days of data, only to then bump it to 10% conveniently on the release of new data a day or two after introducing this 15% tax...so yea. It's a disaster.
Residency tracking is hard. Actually, the city of Vancouver got permission from the provincial government to implement a vacant homes tax, but it's based on the home being unoccupied for a whole year. It probably won't work.
There are no shortcuts to solving brain drain. Find a compelling way to solve it (paying more, giving more opportunities to grow is a good start) and let's talk from there.
As someone living here, one big problem is that there is far too much noise - too many studies and bad articles (like the original one here.) There's obviously problems but everyone is running around chasing the hot topic of the day ("shadow flipping," for example) as the various governments either pretend it's not a problem, or sponsor yet another flawed study on it.
I remember it being pretty crazy that I could play BRE or LORD with people, even across BBSes in some cases.
And each BBS had a different setup for LORD. There were some that seemingly just tried to install every possible in game module, and it was the most broken thing ever...