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一篇老文章，在卡尔加里最疯狂的时候文章来源：Wall Street Journal 0608309 z. a) ?$ x* p/ b, w1 h, W
7 l7 ~' `, l* V1 B9 S& VNorthern exposure: Oil-rich Calgary finds boom times have a downside
2 h9 P* c% Q2 s( | A hot real-estate market suffers big labor shortage; Office vacancies near zero --- A homeless spell for Mr. Blair
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+ D0 F- A0 f. G: V- i9 TBy Jennifer S. Forsyth A1
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CALGARY, Alberta -- In this Canadian city flush with new oil riches, residents drive 600 miles west to Vancouver to purchase Ferraris and Maseratis. At the upscale Living Room restaurant, patrons who two years ago ordered $80 bottles of wine have traded up to $300 vintages. This month, a two-bedroom house in the pastoral southwest part of town went on the market for $12 million -- by far the highest price ever sought for a home in the Calgary city limits.
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0 l: O1 i. b* s) U/ }But the oil boom is overwhelming Calgary, a city of one million famous for hosting the 1988 Winter Olympics. Amid an extreme labor shortage, a lack of affordable housing has increased the homeless population to about 3,500 -- a 32% jump in just two years. Companies are elbowing each other out of the way for office space. Developers, stung by higher costs, are planning few new buildings to ease the crunch.
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Josh White, president of Calgary Urban Initiative, an advocacy group, notes that while plenty of laborers have moved here to find work, some are forced into hotels and tents. "We're a prosperous city but we're growing shanty towns around us like a third-world country," he says.
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- I6 N! @0 }6 PPeter Blair lost his apartment lease in June, he says, when his landlord cashed out of her rental property investment after just one year. Mr. Blair, a busy 43-year-old painter and construction foreman, ended up homeless. Eventually, he pitched a tent at the KOA Kampground on Calgary's west side. k+ K/ `2 ?: s0 O. [4 k
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"Money isn't the problem," said Mr. Blair recently, showing off the $1,800 Canadian he carried around in hopes of finding a new lease. "Getting the place is the problem."
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8 \1 d& y, c" c, ^6 lIn the past year, 25,000 people moved here -- about 70 people a day. Demand for property, both residential and commercial, has far outstripped supply. + k& W* T$ k4 b: e& b9 @
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But even with all the newcomers streaming in, the city still doesn't have all the workers that it needs -- and won't for many years to come. The Conference Board of Canada recently estimated that Alberta will face a shortfall of 332,000 workers by 2025.
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3 m4 v, ^, Q" X0 n4 AAs the front-office headquarters for Canada's oil and gas industry, Calgary is the gateway to one of the world's greatest petroleum troves: the tar sands of Alberta Province. Companies have only recently begun to tap these oil-rich mineral deposits in earnest, as the tripling of crude to above $70 a barrel in recent years has set off a black-gold rush here. The city is being swept up in what is expected to be one of the energy industry's largest capital-investment blitzes ever, joining the likes of Moscow and Riyadh.
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6 p2 Z% l+ x- VShell, Chevron, Petro-Canada Centre and BP are just a few of the big names that adorn the city's skyscrapers. On a clear day, oil executives can look out their windows on the west side and see the Canadian Rockies looming just beyond the prairie.
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Oil-sands extraction is an expensive process and can only be justified if prices remain relatively high. The industry's investment in the oil fields is expected to total about $100 billion over the next decade, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. 0 v# z2 N h, w3 V0 `2 x
! x6 B. Y& ?; y, C3 CThe surging economy, along with relatively low interest rates, has made Calgary one of the hottest real-estate markets in the world. While many first-time homebuyers have been boxed out of the market, they're outnumbered by oil-industry newcomers who don't flinch at the higher prices.
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; {2 W# B: h \ T1 D, f/ ^. G& eWhen Marla Nystrom-Smith, 30, and her husband Tyler Smith, 29, an actuary, put their three-bedroom condominium on the market in February, 40 potential buyers materialized in a day. Five, they say, made offers -- all above the $234,900 asking price. , j8 `* r1 q. Z
' R5 J+ z+ E; ?: r5 ?"It could have sold in a day but we were out of town," said Mrs. Nystrom-Smith, who stays home with the couple's baby son.
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Ryan Ockey, chief executive of the Cardel Group, a large homebuilder, says escalating new-house costs -- for materials, land, and subcontractors -- help to explain the higher prices. A 2,000-square foot, three-bedroom, two-bath Cardel home in July 2005 would have sold for between $285,000 and $295,000. A year later, that same home fetched between $395,000 and $415,000. % R1 i' c$ I/ {) w' _; o% W( F
* l- a X% F+ i NCommercial office space is also tight. Calgary's office vacancy rate, at about one-half percent, is among the lowest of any city in the world, according to CB Richard Ellis, a real-estate-services firm. The city currently has about 46 million square-feet of commercial space. That dwarfs the 14 million square-feet in Oklahoma City, which has a comparable metro-area population. While four office towers are scheduled to open next year, all of that space is already leased. The offices those tenants are vacating are also already spoken for.
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# E7 X! A+ c4 C$ h3 NWith a dearth of construction workers and a slow permitting process, it can take three years to put up a new building in downtown Calgary. Workers across Canada often snub traditional construction gigs in favor of jobs in the oil sands 400 miles north of Calgary. Jobs there pay more and offer incentives such as free flights home each month. @0 l3 l. j$ {0 T; b
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The labor that is available is becoming more expensive. Construction supervisors in Calgary who made $65,000 last year can now command $95,000 from rival construction companies desperate for experienced managers. Even unskilled workers have seen their wages jump in similar proportions, Mr. Ockey and others say. ! V" t* N" l0 y( Y V7 O
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Developers have applied for permits on 12 additional office buildings downtown, though only six projects are moving forward so far. "Not soon enough," says Greg Kwong, a Calgary-based regional managing director for CB Richard Ellis. "We're playing catch-up now. Everything happened so quickly."
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1 v7 W) Z; d6 d, L: qBecause most commercial space is signed for long-term lease, usually five or 10 years, a company looking for an office in 1994 could have found top-quality space for $6 to $8 a foot. Ten years later, in 2004, those same digs would have cost around $20 per square foot. But if a prospective tenant dallied and waited until mid-2005, Mr. Kwong says, the sticker shock would have been greater still: about $30 per square foot. / r! _) T6 G7 _# ]7 V. D! ^
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Labor shortages in Calgary are evident beyond construction. Tim Hortons, a venerable Canada doughnut chain, has closed its dining rooms in the evenings and is offering only drive-through service at some Alberta locations, due to a lack of workers. Avocado Fresh Mexican Grill, a new restaurant on the west side of Calgary, offered a $500 retention bonus to employees who stayed three months. Calgary's building and planning department is struggling to fill 66 new positions -- a staffing hole that has delayed construction on some bigger projects. 7 M, p; r" N3 @2 o/ d0 s
# e5 h6 b4 f4 Z, w: UA labor crunch could also end up affecting the oil-sands investment, slowing what has been an accelerated development schedule. Shell Canada and its partners recently announced that the expansion of their Athabasca Oil Sands Project would go forward, despite an estimated jump in costs of as much as 60% since last fall. Adding to the tab: prices for labor, materials and equipment. 4 I" E4 B8 P$ j2 Z9 T# U& j
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If this were a classic boom, the demand for space would cause developers to throw up new office buildings, even with no tenants lined up. That happened in the 1970s. But by 1986, the world market price for a barrel of oil dropped to about $14 per barrel -- leaving Calgary with an office glut that lasted almost 20 years. # \. z S( L; V& w2 [. U! @# H! G( N
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"For two decades, 'developer' was a dirty word," says Scott Hutcheson, chief executive of Aspen Properties Ltd., a Calgary-based real-estate investment firm. $ @, P5 S. p" _
0 K+ ~) p+ p w; {* Y$ L& |+ H; tThis time, cautious developers didn't dive in until very late. Those who were inclined to build found a more-rigorous permit process and conservative lending environment. Then suddenly, caught short by the rapid economic upturn, developers couldn't react fast enough. That helps to explain why Calgary's office vacancy rate is even lower than San Francisco's during the tech frenzy of the 1990s.
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6 B5 ^* @7 S* mBuilders across the US also have seen construction costs rise. China was sopping up concrete for a while. The Gulf Coast was corralling wood and drywall after Hurricane Katrina. Calgary's problems are in a different league. A commercial building that would have cost $250 a square-foot to erect in 2004 costs $510 a square-foot today. Such inflation makes some developers wonder whether they will make the returns needed to justify construction.
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+ n2 ~9 T: q9 r, ~8 bDave Sharpe, a project coordinator and estimator for Total Commercial Construction Inc. in Calgary, says the company will carefully monitor cost increases over the next five years as it evaluates projects. 8 Q; Y$ z* \( N _
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In the home market, demand has been so great that several large builders have limited the number of contracts they will accept after getting behind on construction last summer. Others are turning away business as rising costs eat into profits.
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In January, AlanRidge Homes was faced with the prospect of losing $1 million on the 38 new luxury homes it had under contract, amid increasing costs and delays. The company refunded deposits on the contracts and called a hiatus on building until prices stabilized. "We just decided this is insane," says Don Howie, the company's chief executive.
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- d- J& {- @: p3 S8 i) O! _0 mMr. Kwong of CB Richard Ellis made a deposit for his own new condominium in June of 2005. He recently got a letter from the developer, who said he couldn't afford to build the complex for the contracted prices. Mr. Kwong was asked to cancel his contract or agree to pay a higher price for the unit. He canceled. "I don't have faith that there won't be another cost increase," he says.
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% K$ `( M0 M" Q4 w0 T$ R5 L1 aMemories of the bust that followed Calgary's last big boom in the late 1970s still loom for developers. The Alberta economy slammed to a halt in 1981, in part due to a federal national energy policy that kept the price of oil in Canada below world market rates in an effort to promote self-sufficiency. The policy ended up mainly benefiting Toronto- and Montreal-based companies, hurting oil-dependent Alberta. ; w) e& [) G& [* w
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Housing prices in Calgary that had increased 400% from 1971 to 1980 tumbled 35% in three years. To Calgary old-timers, the recent run-up in prices, the cry for workers and the new wealth all look frighteningly familiar. "The question I've been hearing a lot is: 'Will it be 1981 again?'" says Kevin Clark, president of the Calgary Real Estate Board, a cooperative of local real-estate agents. ; \$ H% g9 n- O& C9 X
9 V& e* m6 t$ g2 tThis time, a bust may not be inevitable. Many people say that the investment in the oil sands is long-term, based on the bet that the world's thirst for oil will continue to prop up prices, even if the current per-barrel price drops somewhat. : @ M I: ], B# u. R' C# ?9 q
$ D! t" O& n6 ?Tom Farley, president and chief operating officer of Brookfield Properties Corp.'s Canadian Commercial Operations, says his company predicts that it will take another four years for Calgary to return to a "balanced" market: one where neither tenants nor landlords have an undue advantage. That forecast, however, assumes that all 12 planned office buildings actually go up. ; [) p" {) S" B
5 O1 |! `- r) O9 r" C' [$ T5 [! MMeanwhile, Shell Canada Ltd., which is 78%-owned by Royal Dutch Shell, is doubling up employees -- two per office. It has leased new space, but some of it is in a building that won't be completed until next year. 8 K% Q' A5 b* p! _. I* _. ?& x }
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As for Mr. Blair, the painting foreman living in a tent, he finally secured an apartment for $835 a month. His new lease begins on Sept. 1, after three months of homelessness. He's leaving behind many others in tents who continue to look for better shelter before the start of another Calgary winter, where temperatures can drop to 33 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. |
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发表于 2007-2-24 20:22
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