What if recent apartment buildings in Vancouver were 20% taller?

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

(co-authored with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath)

Earlier this year a report from the NSW Productivity Commission in New South Wales, Australia, included a useful estimate to illustrate the harm that’s being done by height restrictions in Sydney. We thought it might be helpful to replicate the analysis for the Vancouver context.

Taking ideas from the report we set up a simple counter-factual question:

What would rents be if every apartment building built in Metro Vancouver over the past five years had been on average 20% taller?

TL;DR

We estimate that planning decisions preventing apartment buildings built in the past 5 years in Metro Vancouver from being on average 20% taller are resulting in an annual redistribution of income from renters to existing landlords on the order of half a billion dollars across the region via higher rents.

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Recent Works

~ Nathan Lauster ~ 1 Comment

A lot of my efforts in this blog go toward figuring out solutions to major housing problems. What works? But I also devote time to figuring out what not to do. What doesn’t work and/or just adds new problems? Last year I spent some time working with teammates to direct these efforts into two major reports. I’m linking these reports below.

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Book Recommendations from 2023

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

It’s been a year! In addition to all the big news of the world, I spent much of 2023 going slowly but inexorably blind with early onset cataracts. But a bit of surgical intervention finally patched me up, and now I’m better. To celebrate (and because I’ve fallen way behind on my posting goals), let me talk about some of the wonderful fiction I still managed to read, even if at times very slowly and with much squinting.

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Housing Outcomes

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

(co-authored with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath)

Almost everyone agrees that we have a housing crisis in Canada, and that it has gotten progressively worse over recent history. But there is a problem. The metrics most commonly used don’t reflect that.

TL;DR

Most commonly used metrics use existing households as the base of analysis, but households are a consequence of housing pressures. This kind of misspecification is a form of collider or selection bias that, especially in tight housing markets, misleads researchers toward faulty conclusions and policy recommendations. It blinds researchers to the struggles of people who are unhappy about their current household living arrangement, like young adults struggling to move out of their parent’s place or out of a bad roommate setup, as well as people who have left their desired region and moved away, or failed to move in, because of the lack of housing options.

This post explains the problem with analysis based solely on households in more detail, and explains why this will lead to incorrect diagnoses of our housing problems and misguided policy recommendations.

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Housing Targets

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

(co-authored with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath)

Municipalities in BC are required to submit Housing Needs reports, and integrate these into Official Community Plans and Regional Growth Strategies in something resembling housing targets. The BC Housing Supply Act now sharpens this process and adds some teeth, effectively enabling the province to define housing targets, accompanied by new provincial enforcement mechanisms, where the province selects municipalities not meeting housing need. Left unstated are the details of precisely how we should go about calculating housing needs or housing targets.

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Metro Vancouver Planning Regimes

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

(co-authored with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath)

In a previous post we looked at the history of planning regimes in the City of Vancouver. Similar shifts happened in other municipalities in the region, and they also fit into a broader shift in planning at the regional level. Regional level planning is less concerned with zoning and the regulations that govern housing production, and more with coordinating services and the broader guiding principles applying to municipal policies. Service provision means regional level planning has an interest in keeping track of population. But how far does that interest go?

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Investing in Definitions and Framing

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

Co-authored with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath

With last week’s CHSP release of data on the investment status of residential properties and the framing of the accompanying article there has been a lot of rather uninformed and misleading news coverage.

The misleading reporting, combined with sometimes plainly wrong statements by people quoted in the news coverage, on one hand highlights the poor understanding of housing in the public discourse. On the other hand it highlights the importance of providing careful framing with data releases. In general it is good practice to accompany a data release with a brief analysis to provide framing and context. Analysts close to the raw data will have a much better understanding of what the data is measuring and can properly frame the data. Unfortunately, StatCan fell short of doing so, and the overview analysis provided by StatCan itself contains a number of problems. Given the public attention this has gotten it’s probably worthwhile to take a look at what the data does and does not say, and to correct some of the misinterpretations that have been circulating.

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A Brief History of Vancouver Planning & Development Regimes

~ Nathan Lauster ~ 2 Comments

(co-authored with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath)

Say you want to construct some multi-family housing in Vancouver. How long will it take? The answer is simple: it depends. There are many factors upon which it depends. Here we want to highlight one in particular: when you started.

As it turns out, it used to take a lot less time to build multi-family housing. There is reason to believe we could reduce that time again, but getting there involves gathering a better understanding of our current development regime, and placing it in historical perspective. We begin this process below, before diving deeper into two case studies of developments along Alma Street, located very near one another in space, but separated by some fifty years in start time. We’re going to look at the 14 storey rental building currently under construction at the intersection of Alma and Broadway, and the 12 storey rental building built in 1970 two blocks to the north at 3707 W 7th Ave.

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