When $235K could buy you a home in Vancouver

House prices in freefall. Soaring interest rates. A housing boom gone bust.

No, that's not a dystopian vision of a not-too-distant future it's a snapshot of the Lower Mainland 34 years ago.

For this week's edition of From the Archives, we take you back to a time when MetroVancouver was experiencing a different kind of housing crisis.

Home prices acrossCanada soared in the late '70s, peaking in early 1981.

But the booming B.C. economy quickly gave way to bad times.

Unemployment, inflationand interest rates soared across Canada over the course of a year, and the problem was said to be at its worst in Vancouver.

Many wholost their jobscould no longer afford their mortgages, which were now subject to interest rates close to 20 per cent.And they couldn't sell theirhomes because few could afford them, leading tobankruptcy.

The homeowner in the video above, originally broadcast in 1982, had bought his home in Vancouver for $235,000 the equivalent of about $591,000 today. By the following year, the value of hishouse had dropped 25 per cent.

But the video also shows how some were able to take advantage of the situation. The couple in reporter Georges Tremel'sstory buy a three-bedroom Coquitlamhome for $93,000, down from $150,000 the year before.