Top 10 signs your city is being "peacefully occupied" by foreign interests

Have you noticed any of the following in your neighborhood and city or town? It might be a sign of foreign money buying everything and pricing locals out of their own cities. Think of it as peaceful occupation of entire cities, towns etc.....

10) Someone knocks on your door and offers to buy your home site unseen for a tempting amount - no questions asked. Or someone calls you and makes an offer over the phone. If you're paying attention you might wonder how they got your number and address.

9) You start noticing that people around you are selling for nice profits and the houses are either immediately ripped down to build a tacky monstrous house with no yard or left unoccupied.

8) You start noticing that there are no kids playing ball or hockey in the back alleys, riding their bikes. No families in the backyard or grandpa and his tomato plants.

7) Demoviction takes hold, forcing long time residents on fixed incomes out of older buildings so they can demolish and build ridiculous towers of condos and office space that you can't afford to rent or buy.

6) You see houses where the snow never gets shoveled, you never see lights on and there are flyers stacked on the doorstep. New cars parked in the driveway that never move. The only people you ever see are landscapers to keep the grass mowed and the leaves picked up.

5) There are no plants on the balconies of apartments, if the outdoor furniture gets blown around nobody does anything about it.

4) You see tour buses of "investors" in unlikely areas, such as working class neighborhoods with older homes and run down commercial and industrial areas.

3) You try buying one of those tacky new condos and learn that they were all sold offshore, maybe even before the project was completed. You might also learn that there have been 3 or 4 buyers and they all flipped for a nice profit when they sold, sometimes just days later. Its called shadow flipping.

2) Suddenly nobody you know can afford to buy in the local market, or the prices are so stupidly high that you don't want to. We aren't talking luxury condos, just cramped little boxes barely built to code.

1) Rental properties are scarce and subject to bidding wars. The people that were displaced can't afford to rent anything near their low income job. This despite visible evidence that there is a lot of unoccupied housing not on the rental market.

All of these things happened over the past 15 years in Vancouver. People saw it happening and didn't say anything and now it's too late to turn back. Don't let it happen in your neck of the woods.