Vancouver (-area) born and bred, so I can shine some light here.

It's no wonder so many Vancouverites are house poor, especially if you are single and have no dependents to list for tax benefits or exemptions.

I have to laugh a little at this. I 100% agree, but just wait until you have a family. The options for shelter are either sky-high rent or sky-high purchase prices if you want to stay in Vancouver or Burnaby (the city next-door). If you want to save some money you either live in 1/2 of a house, in the basement of a house, or live somewhere musty worrying about mold [1].

Is it just me or is BC not a really a friendly place at all for technically skilled people working in software/internet industry?

Vancouver isn't HQ for many large corporations, unlike Toronto so there are few big players in this area (TELUS, WorkSafe, BC Hydro, Best Buy). The other big players (Microsoft, Amazon, etc) are still relatively new. When a company like TELUS has a big project, they are a blackhole that sucks up EVERYONE. This happened 8 years ago with one of their projects. If you only stayed in the Gastown district of Vancouver, you'd think Vancouver was bustling with startups, but it's not. It's getting there, but IMHO the startup scene is still in its infancy [3].

An old joke amongst the IT consultants here is that we often see each other repeatedly circling the same big corps. It's a very very small world in Vancouver.

I don't know of what "network effect" there is here other than amateurish Meet-up groups where middle aged men who lived through y2k show up and talk about how they like their coffee.

I've seen this as well, which is why I don't attend too many meetups. Some of the meetups are very small (the Ruby one in particular) and I'd like to see a larger turnout. Saying that, I understand my lack of participation is what is causing part of the low turnout (in my case it is also an issue of travel distance).

real estate

As for the real estate situation in Vancouver (and Canada, in general), there is so many variables at play that there isn't one solid answer. There is the foreign menace buying up our real estate that is portrayed by realtors and the MSM, but the stats (there are few) show otherwise (<10%). Most of the cause is our (Canadians, I mean) own doing due to the low emergency interest rates. Instead of people using the low interest rates to get out of debt, they instead gorged on more real estate. Thus you see people attempting to carry their residential debts (mortgage, interest, taxes) by seeking ever higher rates. Add into that the realtor lie (carried by the MSM) that housing only goes up and you get people flipping houses to each other for ever higher prices (and thus, rents). If you want to know how it all ends, just read up on the US housing/credit crisis circa 2008. If you are a skeptic that thinks this can't happen in Canada, read up on what happened in 1980-1 or 1990-1, the same housing drop happened then [2].

[1] This isn't just a colloquial joke. Because Vancouver is technically classified as a temperate rainforest, we enjoy much much MUCH more rain than other places, with very nominal temperatures. If there is any defect in the building envelope, you will get mold.

[2] But without the low interest rates or credit crisis, so this will be a big new player.

[3] Part of the reason (from what I've heard) is the sky-high office rent in the area. It takes a huge chunk of the operating budget.