I spend about 70% of my time in Vancouver. My rented house there is half the size of my place in Austin and costs 3x as much. My wife and I joke occassionally that we could leave Van for almost any other place on earth - including Manhattan - and see our COL go down.
They don't even have the building restrictions that san fran does. They're building like crazy in that city and the price per square foot just keeps going up because it's in high demand.
High demand for a place to offshore money != high demand for a place to live. The former is why the price per sqm is high. The latter would communicate that a place is actually nice to live in.
Maybe it should when the very future of that market is decided by those factors. If people aren't going to be living or utilizing those spaces the market value and actual demand will continue to deviate until at some point where it crashes and fucks over the people living there. Meanwhile the foreign investors, who likely won't be hurt by losing a property they didn't even use, won't give two shits.
It doesn't, but the question is about whether or not one wants to live in a location - which is only one of many market forces at play in determining rent prices.
Oh we love it there. It just happens to be very expensive. Thankfully the favorable exchange rate at the moment helps with other COL expenses (groceries).
