Heather Conn Blogs

Can you tell the difference between a mansion and a “crack shack”, a run-down home to crack addicts? Most people would picture the latter as a boarded-up hovel with broken windows in a dangerous neighborhood. Don’t be so sure.

A quick visit through the website www.crackshackormansion.com will undoubtedly change your mind. This site, a tongue-in-cheek creation by two Vancouverites, gives web users a scary– not risky scary but pricey scary — introduction to this coastal city’s real estate market in British Columbia, Canada. What a million bucks buys for habitable property in Vancouver these days ain’t much.

To emphasize this point, the site offers a questionnaire with photos, asking site visitors to identify which photo is a crack shack and which is a mansion. Your answers will undoubtedly amaze you. The site creators are having some obvious fun along the way, but they make their point: If you want to buy a home in Vancouver that’s more than a tear-down, be prepared to pay at least one million. And that’s not even for waterfront or a sea view.

(The website drew such a popular response that there’s now a new version of the questionnaire, Crack Shack or Mansion II, available on the same web page. Have fun with it.)