Episode
Vancouver Real Estate Horror Story: How Author Jesse Ferreras Turned a Broken Housing Market into Gothic Fiction
- Podcast
- The Bureau Podcast
- Published
- Nov 26, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 1569
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://www.thebureau.news/p/vancouver-real-estate-horror-story
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-bureau-podcast-6621098/episodes/vancouver-real-estate-horror-story-how-author-jesse-ferreras-turned-a-broken-housing-market-into-gothic-fiction/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-bureau-podcast-6621098/vancouver-real-estate-horror-story-how-author-jesse-ferreras-turned-a-broken-housing-market-into-gothic-fiction.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
In today’s Bureau Podcast, I reconnect with my former journalism colleague Jesse Ferreras. We both came of age as reporters in Vancouver and worked together at Global News, including on an investigation into some of the most significant figures in what became known as the Vancouver Model. We don’t walk through those cases in detail on the tape, but I’ve long believed some of the people we examined could and should be the focus of deportation orders from Canada — if Ottawa’s border and security agencies fully exercised their mandates. Quietly resolving those long-ignored files would, in my view, go a long way toward rebuilding trust with Washington, where officials remain deeply concerned about certain actors embedded in Vancouver’s financial and real-estate systems. Our conversation turns on two main threads. First, we explore Jesse’s new work of fiction — a gothic horror story set in Vancouver real estate, a kind of clash-of-civilizations tale rooted in the city’s housing market. Second, we talk about how both of us, as reporters, leaned heavily on the data and analysis of B.C. urban planner Andy Yan to understand how foreign capital has dominated and distorted Vancouver’s housing market. Yan’s work on glaring income-to-home-price “incongruities” helped me see that what I once called the Vancouver Model had grown into something much larger: the “Canada Model.” The podcast goes deeper into Jesse’s story. Here in the notes, I want to unpack a bit more of Andy Yan’s seminal research, and how it intersected with confidential datasets and banking disclosures I later obtained. Two years after my 2023 investigation, the U.S. Treasury has now identified the same global Chinese underground money-laundering typologies I reported on, in a major dataset that tracks roughly $300 b…