Leaky condos

Hrm, this Firefox nightly doesn't seem to like the Blogger compose thing!

I wrote an essay for my Canadian urban geography course about the impacts of the leaky condo crisis on the urban development of Vancouver and Victoria, and I got 25/25. Yippee!

Some background...

Due to some ill-thought-out changes to the building code and an economic boom that resulted in hurried construction, approximately 100,000 condo units were built in British Columbia from 1985 to 1999 that had severe problems with leakage. In many of these buildings, the exterior wood frame of the building literally rotted away. The cost to repair each unit is on average $25,000, so the total cost to repair all leaky condos is $2.5 billion. This ain't chump change.

And yet, there has been very little study done on the implications of the leaky condo crisis, as it is known. The ongoing saga was covered extensively in the local media, of course, but they did not focus on long-term implications at all.

I didn't expect this. When I chose the topic, I expected there would be a few books or at least academic articles that I could get my hands on for some ideas. Instead, there was very little written, and I actually had to think and analyse the situation myself. *gasp*

One very interesting thing that I noticed was that the leaky condo crisis caused different things to happen in Vancouver than it did in Victoria, due to unique conditions in the two cities. I'll modify and shorten the essay and post it here.