City councillor offers $10 to the astute, waterfront condos to the poor

Want an easy $10?

In an e-mail to friends and supporters, Vancouver Coun. Peter Ladner has offered a crisp tenner to anyone who correctly answers a series of questions on Southeast False Creek and the Property Endowment Fund. They're listed here, conveniently with answers attached.

Send yours, in Jeopardy question/answer format, to: peter@peterladner.ca.

And in the 'Ironic Exaggeration' category, Ladner says in his e-mail:

"If I could get $10 for every mis-statement, exaggeration and uninformed accusation about the new council’s changes to the Southeast False Creek plan, I’d have enough to buy every low income person in Vancouver a waterfront suite."

If, like me, you're curious as to how many misstatements, exaggerations and/or uninformed accusations a city can hurl upon its esteemed councillors, here are a few quick calculations.

• Assuming a low-income rate in Vancouver of 19.1 per cent, as it was in 2000 according to Statscan (incidentally, a 3.3 percentage point increase since 1990)...
• ... and assuming a population of 560,000, according to the City of Vancouver website...
• ... there are 106,960 people in the city who qualify as low-income.
• Multiply that by $299,999, the price of the cheapest online MLS listing for a waterfront condo...
• ... and you get some $32 billion (rounded down $88 million or so).

That's the amount Peter Ladner might have in his bank account right now if someone gave him $10 for each "mis-statement, exaggeration and uninformed accusation" about SEFC.

Divide that by $10, then multiply that by the population of the city, and that means that Vancouverites have uttered such egregious statements to Ladner an average of 5,730 times each. Shame on you, Jim Green.

In other news, if I could somehow get $10 everytime a city councillor exaggerated the number of times people have exaggerated their facts on Southeast False Creek and then sent out a mass e-mail declaring it in the last day or so, I would have... $10. No exaggeration.

Related posts:
This just in: City council hates kids, poor people.
False Creek housing gets the chop.

Tags: peter ladner, vancouver, false creek, city hall, social housing, waterfront condos, vancouver real estate