Year: 2016

Rent redux: now with comparative anecdotes!

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

In response to my recent analyses of rental affordability in a comparative context, a skeptical reader from Vancouver draws upon personal experience in noting:

I guess just I find this analysis and the chart it’s based on hard to believe.
I make about 57k a year and renting a ROOM in a crappy, old, noisy 2-bedroom apartment in Vancouver costs me near 50% of my take-home after-tax pay. I straight-up couldn’t afford a one-bedroom or even a room in a place built in the last 20 years. And it took two months of solid searching to luck out on this place… everywhere you go, potential renters are already lined up with forms and references in hand (as was I) and were attempting to out-bid the asking price and each other (something I couldn’t afford to do).
Maybe things are different for long-time tenants, whose prices fall under controlled increases, but for someone looking to enter a Vancouver rental anew, I found the crap-apartment prices to be on par with mortgage + strata payments for a better condo – something I’m debating doing if I stay in the city, although both options still seem far too expensive.

Thanks B Danyluk! Let me first reiterate my sympathy. Just because it might be better for renters in Vancouver than elsewhere across North America doesn’t mean it’s easy. And I’m entirely in support of efforts to improve the plight of local renters. Also, as I’ve noted before, I really appreciate these kind of comments based on real experiences. Anecdotes can be very useful.

In light of that last point, let me just direct attention to a couple of recent pieces highlighting the situation for renters in some of what the figures would suggest are the least affordable metro areas in North America:

What’s it like for a couple of new renters of decent means to look for an apartment in New York City? Sneak-preview: it ends with a one bedroom for $3,150 in Brooklyn.

What’s going on with rents across Silicon Valley?  What kind of rents would drive young Google employees toward activism on behalf of new rent control ordinances?

Here’s a quick summary from Miami – which I have to admit, I did not realize had issues before running the analysis – and here’s a longer profile of Miami renters, accompanied by more definitive comparisons across the USA. Note also the frank discussion of how different rental markets have emerged, with those targeting higher-income luxury renters seeing more development than for others.  The segmentation of markets lends credence to this quote from the President of the Florida Housing Coalition:

“People say if there really was a great need, the market would provide it; the market would correct itself. Well, the market has never corrected itself and it’s only getting worse.”

Markets don’t self-correct with everyone’s housing needs in mind, especially under circumstances of widening income inequality, and there’s also nothing singular about how they operate within cities. As a result, and as reflected by B Danyluk’s comment, overall market summaries sometimes obscure the many little corners where people get left behind. Of note, the NYTimes piece also provides a nice reference to this old 2013 study from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.  And I’ll stop here before I depress myself with all the reading I need to catch up on.

On the bright side, it’s all interesting stuff. And if misery loves company, there’s pretty good evidence there are folks out there at least as miserable with their housing as what you can find in Vancouver.

Part II of 2BR Rent to HH Income Ratios: A Data Check

~ Nathan Lauster ~ 3 Comments

[*updated with better Vancouver income stats*]

As I noted yesterday, Vancouver really doesn’t look so unaffordable in comparative context if we use “renting a two bedroom apartment” as our base standard rather than “purchasing a single-family detached house.” Standards really matter, and the single-family detached house is a bad metric in this case – especially for a metropolis that is gradually moving toward a more sustainable alternative that might ultimately serve as an example for the rest of North America.

But I had some lingering concerns about the comparability of the data I used, especially for getting at median rents. To get at rents across the USA I used data from Zillow, which as I mentioned is not an entirely disinterested data provider and also gathers data based upon listings. This provides a nice snapshot of current conditions for prospective renters, but may dramatically overstate the rents for existing renters, who are often protected by contracts, rent controls (in some places), and relatively inattentive or otherwise satisfied landlord relationships. To get at rents across Canada, I used the CMHC’s primary rental market measure, which suffers from its own biases and is based largely on surveys of purpose-built rental building managers.

I wanted to check on my results by looking at something at data that might be a little more readily comparable, so I went back to census figures, drawn from microdata samples of the Canadian Census in 2011 and the American Community Survey (ACS) from the same year. I analyzed the data on-line using CHASS (unfortunately a subscription-based census analysis service I can reach through UBC) and IPUMS (a wonderful organization at the Minnesota Population Center, where I used to be a post-doc – anyone can get access to this data so long as you promise to use it for good and never for evil, which is an actual box they make you tick in your application). I obtained median rents for renters of two bedroom apartments in 2011, then I went back and compared these to the same median income figures for Households (from 2012, close enough!) [updated for better CMHC median household pre-tax total income figures] that I used in my last post.

The results:

Comparative-2BR-Rent-to-Income-2011censuscheck-updated

 

On the whole, I’d call this similar information to what I produced yesterday, but there are some important differences. When we look at estimates based on all existing renters (including public & private rentals) rather than listings, there is a LOT more compression in the median rents, which don’t jump around nearly as much as the rents charged for new listings on the market. But Vancouver hasn’t changed positions much in this chart relative to its position (in 2011) in the Zillow/CMHC-based longitudinal chart. LA, Miami, San Francisco, San Diego, and NYC all remain at the top in terms of the unaffordability of 2BR rentals. Other metros, including Seattle and Portland, look cheaper in this chart. But it’s worth noting that many of these cities also looked cheaper in 2011 in the old chart too, which only moved many of them ahead of Vancouver based on more recent data. My big takeaway: more data provides a better overall comparison, but still gives us the same basic story about Vancouver’s unaffordability crisis. Using metrics beyond ownership of a single-family detached house makes us look much more affordable in a comparative sense.

Quickest Fix for Vancouver’s Affordability Crisis: Change the Standard

~ Nathan Lauster ~ 11 Comments

[*updated with better income stats for Canadian metros*]

Every year (since 2005), the Demographia organization (think tank? consulting front?) comes out with its International Housing Affordability Survey, and every year Vancouver is ranked the most unaffordable housing market in North America (currently the third most unaffordable in the world! – or at least across the selection of countries compiled by Demographia). The results always make headlines in Vancouver, though sometimes a healthy dose of skepticism is applied. Regardless, I don’t think there’s a big problem with Demographia’s data. But I DO think there’s a problem with the standard they use to generate their findings. That standard, of course, is the single-family house.

Demographia uses the ratio of the median price of single-family detached houses to the median household income to create a “median multiple” measure of affordability. In their most recent study, the median cost of a single-family detached house ranged from 2.6 times median household income (in Buffalo, NY*) to 19.0 times the median household income (in Hong Kong). Metro Vancouver came in as the third most unaffordable, after Hong Kong and Sydney, with a median multiple of 10.8.

But what if we didn’t use ownership of a single-family house as the measure of what’s affordable? After all, why should this be the standard? To be clear, it’s not the standard for everyone, and it never has been. Poor people aren’t really part of the discussion for Demographia’s report, where the subtitle explicitly notes a focus on “middle-income” folks. The subtext for using the single-family house as a standard is that this is where middle class people should be able to live and what they should be able to afford. But as I discuss in my forthcoming book, The Death and Life of the Single-Family House, this is both unjust and generally a wrong-headed idea. Single-family detached houses are kind of bad for our cities, our lifestyles, and our planet.

But doesn’t this all trickle down? The degree to which the middle class can’t afford single-family houses – a normative life goal! – must indicate pain for everyone, right? Let’s see by looking at a different possible standard: the two bedroom apartment. What if we divided the median yearly rent of a two bedroom apartment by median household income?

Here’s what I get for major North American metropolitan areas:

Comparative-2BR-Rent-to-Income-updated

 

Changing the standard really changes the picture!

By this measure New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Miami all look like they’re converging at an exceptionally high rent-to-income ratio! By contrast, Vancouver is suddenly far, far down on the list of unaffordable metro areas, as of 2015 below both Seattle and Portland, its American sisters to the South. To be sure Vancouver remains the most expensive metropolitan area in Canada, but this just highlights the very different situations facing renters in Canada and the USA (or at the very least, different measurement issues: see more below).

To return to the theme: on the whole, different standards produce very different results. The most unaffordable metro area in North America using the “ownership of a single-family house” standard suddenly looks pretty average under the “rent a 2BR apartment” standard. The house standard makes San Francisco (3rd), NYC (7th), LA (5th), and Miami (8th) all look more accessible than Vancouver, but the 2BR rental standard leaves a decent lifestyle looking much, much farther out of reach in these locales. In fact, under the 2BR rental standard, unaffordability for Metro Vancouver looks even better than the situation for Metro Dallas or Metro Houston, each deemed perfectly affordable by Demographia’s house standard. It’s no wonder we’re not really seeing the flight of the millennials from Vancouver. The rent’s not too bad.

None of this is to suggest that Vancouver doesn’t have issues with affordability. It most certainly does. And renters also face a very tight market, with extraordinarily low vacancy rates (0.8% in 2015!) But Vancouver looks much better when we use a 2BR rental standard than when we use an owner-occupied single-family detached house standard. Once again, this speaks to the detachability of the detached house market in Vancouver from what’s going on elsewhere.

Why? Well, Vancouver is moving away from the single-family detached house as a standard and toward a different model – potentially a much better, more urban and more sustainable model. To be sure, it still has a long way to go, and all sorts of crazy things will keep happening in the single-family house market along the way. But the story of Vancouver, overall, is less about a painful housing market destroying EVERYONE’S hopes and dreams and more about providing an alternative model for how we should build cities and encourage people to live. Not everyone is going to like that new model, and we should keep tinkering with it to make it more just and more sustainable. But there are good reasons we shouldn’t be using the single-family detached house as a metric of where we want to be. It’s a dead end. When we use different metrics, Vancouver looks better and can keep improving.

—————————————————————————

Now where did my data come from and should you believe it? As noted on the chart, for US metro areas, I drew upon median rental data for 2BR apartments available from Zillow a not entirely disinterested commercial provider. For Canadian metro areas, my rental data came from the CMHC. Here I used averages because I could easily find this data for multiple cities. Using medians would actually make Canadian cities look even more affordable compared to their US counterparts, since median rents tend to be lower than average (see Metro Vancouver’s posting of median rents in the area). For median household incomes, I drew upon Census reports in the US and Statistics Canada data (in this case bringing together economic families and people not in economic families to more or less equate with households, though this may (?) result in understating the household incomes of unrelated roommates) [*update: the link broke on the StatsCan data, so I’m now using CMHC data, for real median pre-tax household income, and have updated the chart accordingly – this actually improves Vancouver and other Canadian cities affordability. Thanks for note from Jens at Mountain Math for making me check this!*].  Census and Stats Can data is pretty solid, but I cannot fully vouch for comparability of the data from Zillow or the CMHC. In the former case, it’s because the data is proprietary, though it seems modeled mostly based on listings. In the latter case, it’s because of the restrictions placed on where the rental data comes from (“privately initiated apartment structures with at least three rental units”), an artifact of CMHC’s attempts to keep tabs on the primary rental market (see also their secondary market data, which includes rented condo units, but doesn’t distinguish by rooms in this time series).

Fewer houses, more models

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

Intrepid local reporter Christopher Cheung, a former student of mine who now often walks the housing beat in Vancouver, has a new piece in the Vancouver Courier on the local scale model building industry. It’s fun! And he came to me for some quotes, so I’m mentioned in there too. Why? Because the model industry has taken off in no small part due to Vancouver’s move away from the standardized single-family detached house.

The model-building industry is important precisely because of its role in providing tangible evidence for what new developments will look like – from the wide-angle view of a towering and all-powerful giant. Fortunately, this point of view is appreciated by developers, by financiers, by city officials, planners and regulators, and even by angry NIMBY neighbors. But let’s set aside for a moment how model-builders further stoke ego-inflation. What’s also key, I think, is understanding their role in almost totemically reducing the enormous uncertainties involved in development across a wide range of parties. As revealed in an earlier (and also quite good) piece on model builders in Vancouver, by Jesse Donaldson, this includes the set of pre-sale buyers increasingly needed to make a go of condo development.

In an early draft of my forthcoming book on the single-family house in Vancouver, I actually used a brief discussion of the model-building industry’s role within the complicated development industry as an entry into describing the very limited traction we get with rational choice and related rent gap models that assume everything can be costed out ahead of time in urban development. It can’t. It’s messy. There’s just way too much uncertainty involved (see, for instance, Shelley Kimelberg‘s great stuff for more on this). And in that sense, it’s often quite different from the more highly standardized detached house building industry.

Lots to play around with here, and hopefully some day I’ll get back to it! (I had to cut out about a third of my early manuscript, which really was WAY too long).  In the meantime it’s great that people keep writing about this stuff. And it’s also worth reading both articles on model-builders, in part because it’s just awesome that B&B Scale Models (profiled in the earlier Donaldson piece) has found its fiercest competitor in AB Scale Models (profiled in the Cheung piece).  Here I wish Chris had been just a little more hard-hitting in his reporting. What I want to know is:

Did AB Scale Models really choose its name just get under the skin of B&B Scale Models (and appear earlier in the phone book)? And are there secret scale model wars that take place between the two companies on the city streets at night? If so, who wins?

A Housing Affordability Agenda

~ Nathan Lauster ~ 2 Comments

I recently criticized the somewhat xenophobic sales pitch for Progressive Property Taxation while admiring the substance. Now let me praise Marc Lee, from the generally praiseworthy Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), for getting the balance about right.

In Lee’s new report, Getting Serious About Affordable Housing: Towards a Plan for Metro Vancouver, he offers up a worthy policy agenda, that acknowledges the problematic role of non-local investment in Vancouver’s residential real estate market without descending into anything like immigrant-bashing (indeed, Lee supports new funding for housing many immigrants, including our recent Syrian refugees!)

There is lots to like here in terms of providing a comprehensive housing agenda, and I like just about all of it. I’ll save what minor quibbles I have for another day, and for now just express my admiration for what Marc Lee’s brought to the table.  If you’re reading this, you should read the whole thing!

Progressive Property Taxation: Good Policy, Bad Sales Pitch

~ Nathan Lauster ~ 2 Comments

I’ve been away from blogging, in part due to various end-of-semester teaching and publishing tasks, and in part due to a minor obsession with US political developments. (And really, who isn’t at least somewhat obsessed by US political developments? But more on that in a moment.)

At any rate, I’ve been thinking a bit about taxes. Specifically property taxes. It’s striking to me that Vancouver has such really, really low property tax rates. This is most true in terms of actual property tax rates, with Vancouver’s at a low, low 0.35%, but it is still true even after accounting for Vancouver’s very high property values, resulting in low overall property tax payments. See relevant Canadian comparisons here and here. To look up (somewhat dated) US property tax data, see the Tax Foundation, or this report on average property taxes at the state level, where we learn that if Vancouver was a state, its tax rates would place it lower than every other state save for Hawaii. In case you’re wondering, the City provides a helpful description of how property taxes are calculated, and also a sense of where the money goes.And you can find comparative data for all BC municipalities here.

So Vancouver pays low taxes? So what? On an everyday basis, doesn’t that help make up for the extraordinarily high costs of real estate? Property taxes are a drop in the bucket compared to the local costs of buying a home, and if they were raised it would only make buying even more expensive and out of reach for locals. Unless…

  • Low property taxes were fueling high prices
  • Money raised from hikes in property taxes could be given back to local buyers and/or set aside to support more affordable housing options

Low property taxes make it ridiculously easy to park money in Vancouver real estate as an investment, and there is a lot of money flowing into property across the metropolitan region. Real estate is an enormous driver of the local economy. But overall, incomes remain relatively low in Vancouver. So there’s a very good case to be made for re-balancing taxes away from income and toward property.

But inequality has also been on the rise in Vancouver, as elsewhere. Income taxes are progressive, falling more heavily on the wealthy, while property taxes are flat – every $1,000 in property is taxed at exactly the same rates. So a re-balancing away from income tax and toward property tax could be regressive.  But why not tax property in a progressive fashion?

One suggestion is that property values over $1 million get taxed at a different rate than values below, with other progressive increases at higher cut-off points.

For example, the threshold for paying any surtax could be set at $1 million, with an initial rate of one per cent on the value above that, rising in steps to three per cent on values above $3 million.

To be clear, in this proposal owners would only be taxed upon the portions of their property value above the cut-offs. (i.e., someone owning a $1.1 million house would only pay the progressive tax on $100,000 of the value of their home). This sort of a progressive property tax could have many positive effects.

A progressive property tax could cool down the local property market, especially at the high end, where it’s been most overheated. At least some of the tax could be offset against income taxes, resulting in an entirely sensible re-balancing of tax burdens reflecting the low income levels relative to high property values in the region. Some of the tax could also be set aside to support more affordable housing locally, by, for instance, supporting more housing cooperatives.

I like it!

Elaborated variations on this kind of fiscal policy tweaking have been suggested by  a team of economists (mostly led by Tom Davidoff) at both UBC and SFU, who offer a more flat-tax version attached to a housing affordability fund, and Rhys Kesselman and Josh Gordon (at SFU), who bring progressivity to the initiative and are quoted above. These are both worthy policy proposals (though I prefer to combine their best elements, bringing together the Housing Affordability Fund with the tax progressivity).

So what’s not to like?

Mostly the sales pitch.

As I mentioned at the outset, I’ve spent too much time watching the US election play out. I’ve also been following the rise of right-wing, xenophobic parties across Europe. I’m not so afraid of Trump (I really don’t think he’s going to do very well in the general), but his xenophobia and racism has proven far too popular for my taste. So popular that even the nice, elderly barber who cut my hair the other day here in Vancouver expressed approval of Trump (and he was an immigrant!).

It’s why I found this headline so heartbreaking:

Foreign buyers crushing Vancouver home dreams as governments do little: study

Yet this was the headline the Canadian Press (and/or CBC) chose to go with in announcing Josh Gordon’s recent policy paper. And this was the spin within the policy paper itself on why we need to re-balance toward a progressive property tax. It’s clear from a close read that most authors of various new property tax proposals direct their ire primarily at government inaction (looking mostly at you, Christy Clark). But who is it we’re most obviously directed to see “crushing” our “dreams”? Foreigners. Needless to say, one needn’t go far in the comments section of the article above to find praise for Trump and outrage directed at foreign buyers (“Ban them and confiscate their property!”).

There needs to be room here to support good, progressive policy without whipping up anger at foreigners and immigrants (who are too often conflated, in part due to the complexities of the transnational world we are living in). This is not to deny that money flowing into Vancouver, quite often (though not solely) from China, is driving housing costs, especially at the luxury end of the market (which in the City of Vancouver, let’s face it, includes all single-family houses). I don’t think that’s really in dispute. There’s a lot of money coming in to Vancouver real estate from China. But that money is here because the city and provincial and federal governments have all invited it in at various times in pursuit of common “growth machine” policies. There are good reasons to change some of these policies and I welcome that discussion as well as many of the policy proposals kicking around these days. There are not good reasons to demonize folks who’ve accepted so many of our governments’ invitations as “foreigners,” nor are there good reasons to “ban them,” or “confiscate their property.” That’s been tried before. It’s not the Canada I want to live in. But then, I’m an immigrant.

 

Participate in the 2016 Symposium on Housing Research in BC

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

The Pacific Housing Research Network (PHRN) is a collection of scholars and practitioners in the field of housing in British Columbia [full disclosure: I sit on the steering committee]. It’s a great organization to be a part of, and I’ve really enjoyed and benefited from all the connections I’ve made through the Network. For the last couple of years, they’ve been working together with the BC Non-Profit Housing Conference to bring greater exposure to local housing research.  Just out now is their Call for Abstracts for those interested in participating in the November, 2016 PHRN research symposium.

PHRN is seeking housing research and examples of promising practices from community-based practitioners, academics (including graduate students), and government researchers from across housing sectors (i.e., policy, technical, cultural, health, social services, political, economic, social) who will help draw the connections between research and practice in creating affordable housing. The Symposium will include research presentations, panel discussions, and networking opportunities.

See the full details here!  Submissions due June 1st!

 

 

(Yet More) Changing Migration Profiles

~ Nathan Lauster ~ 2 Comments

By popular request, I’m posting a snapshot of net migration profiles by age across four time periods for both Metro Vancouver and the Vancouver School District (encompassing both the City of Vancouver and the University Endowment Lands of UBC to its immediate west).  The comparison allows us to see how Vancouver, as a central city, relates to the wider metropolitan area in terms of net migration.  But I’ll also walk more carefully through the steps I’m taking to come up with the figures.  Let’s start with the big picture (click here to make it bigger!).

VanCityMetroNetMig1986-2015

Here I’m comparing net migration figures by age groups (aggregated for simpler presentation) across four time periods for both the Vancouver School District and the metro area.  I toyed around with how to present the data, and went with the Vancouver School District net migration figures in color, and the corresponding metro figures in white.  Of note, and as previously demonstrated, the metro area is growing across nearly all age groups in all time periods.  Only amongst older residents, in their fifties and above, do we see evidence of possible out-migration (and I’d be careful about interpreting this).

For the Vancouver School District (VSD), contained within the metro area, it’s a different story.  Young people, especially of university age, FLOOD into the VSD.  They keep flooding through their twenties, but as they move into their thirties, the flood starts to recede.  As people proceed through their mid-thirties (in red), more of them leave the VSD than enter.  This is a relatively common pattern for central cities, as many thirty-somethings decamp to cheaper and more spacious suburbs nearby.  As visible from the metro stats, more thirty-somethings continue to enter the Metro Area than leave it, even though that’s no longer true for the VSD.

All that said, the historical comparison is interesting!  In relative terms, it looks like Vancouver saw a ramping up of the usual exodus of thirty-somethings between 1986 and 2011.  But in the most recent five-year period, the exodus has slowed again.  Relatively fewer thirty-somethings are fleeing the VSD now than was the case in the previous five-year period.  I’m not sure how much to make of this pattern, but it’s intriguing.

As for the flight of the Millennials, I’m still not seeing it.  Not for Metro, and not for the VSD.  But maybe that’s just because I think of Millennials as the fresh-faced twenty-somethings in my classes now, rather than the dour thirty-somethings of my classes from ten years ago.

How to do it yourself

As with the net migration profiles I ran yesterday, I’m using  BC Stats data from their population estimates.  For Metro data, I’m selecting “Greater Vancouver” from Regional Districts available.  For the City, I’m selecting “Vancouver” from School Districts.  In each case, I use the five year age categories, totaling across both sexes, and I select all years available.

The five year age categories match nicely with five year time comparisons.  Setting aside death and migration, if I knew how many people were ages 5-9 in 1986, then I’d also know exactly how many people would be ages 10-14 in 1991.  But people die and people move around.  To take the former into account, I age everybody five years.  I do this by finding reasonable age-specific mortality rates to apply. This time I chose 2008 mortality rates for all of Canada.  But these rates are worth playing around with; choose your own games to play with death!   Different rates can have sizable effects for older populations, though they won’t matter much for the young.  For good measure,  I killed people off for three years using rates from their starting age bracket, and two from their receiving age bracket.  Then I subtracted how many I had left from my 1986 population from how many people actually showed up to be counted in 1991.  Voila!  The remainder is my estimate of net migration.  Given that most of that migration presumably takes place during the intervening years, I’ve labeled my estimates by mid-ranges, like ages 7-12, centered between 5-9 and 10-14.  There are ways to tinker with this to try and be even more precise, but this exercise should provide a decent estimate of net migration (especially given remaining uncertainties I have about data quality).  If you’ve read this far, you should download the data into a spreadsheet and try it out!

Ch-ch-ch-changes in Vancouver’s Net Migration Profile by Age

~ Nathan Lauster ~ 7 Comments

The other day I noticed data on Bloomberg that I hadn’t seen before, purportedly showing millennials fleeing Vancouver.  What the data actually seemed to show was a declining net gain in Millennials, along with a loss of those in the 25-44 age range.  This didn’t match with what I thought I was seeing in the Metro data for 2006-2011, though perhaps it tracks the data for the City of Vancouver (still looking into that).  As is often the case, there is a frustrating lack of specificity about just what constitutes Vancouver, with Demographia affordability measures reflecting the whole metro region, but the City referenced in terms of local policies (and likely migration data).  Then we get an anecdote about someone moving out of Squamish, treated as a “suburb 45 minutes away from Vancouver” and hence reflective of its market.  All that said, I was just as interested in how the piece pointed me toward BC Stats data on population estimates broken down by age (which I’m assuming is where Bloomberg’s data come from).  Which is great!  Let’s play with that data.

The data are different than what we get from the Census.  Based on this document, it seems they are compiled via administrative data sources, including health data and hydro hook-ups.  Other datasets also mention tax records.  At the moment, I’m not certain where the age breakdown comes from, but it’s interesting.  Comparing the population by age estimates from BC Stats with the Census estimates by Census years (2006 & 2011), it would appear that the BC Stats data systematically finds more people overall in these years, especially more young people (ages 0-49, peaking for 10-13% more 25-29 year olds), though slightly fewer old people (age 85+).  Given known census undercount issues, I’m not sure which dataset should be viewed as definitive on this account, but the comparison is super-interesting!  Wish I knew a bit more about where the BC Stats yearly estimates by age come from.

At any rate, I can calculate net migration rates for 5-year age groups using the BC Stats data that run from 1986 all the way up to 2015.  I’m going to ignore adding estimating how many babies we add via net-migration each year, and focus on kids already born.  I’m going to age them forward five years, killing off a few along the way according to 2009 age-specific death rates (averaged across age groups), and I’m going to identify them (this time) by their ages in the middle of the age groups identified at either end of the five year period – on the calculation that this is where most of the migration is taking place.  Here’s what I get, allowing us to compare age-specific net migration profiles for successive five year periods from 1986 all the way to 2015.  (Update: larger image available here)

NetMigAgeProfilesMetroVan

A few things are interesting here.  For one, I’m still seeing the same pattern, extending beyond 2006-2011, where net migrants at (nearly) all ages continue to enter Metro Vancouver.  Over all periods, the big gain in net migrants comes for university-aged young adults, but extends through thirty-somethings and even forty-somethings.  I certainly don’t see Millennials fleeing the area, nor are we losing our lifeblood, as far as I can see (colored green in all years).

In fact, in the latest period, 2010-2015, the one exception to growth across all age groups, which you can maybe just barely make out if you squint, is a net loss of migrants in their mid-50s.  But even this is an improvement over much higher net loss of those in their 50s from 1997-2011.*  What to make of the turnaround in the net migration of older residents, in their 70s and 80s?  Honestly, I’m not sure.  This may be an artifact of using 2009 age-specific mortality rates, so that it looks like we lost a lot of older residents back in the 1980s and 1990s to out-migration, when in fact they just died more often than estimated.  If so, it’s evidence of real progress in life expectancies at older ages!  But it’s still notable that now there is plenty of room for people to grow older in Vancouver, and they seem to be doing it.

 

*- comparing to net migration figures from the census, where we don’t see losses of fifty-somethings, I wonder if part of the story about those in their 50s is systematic overcounting of youth and undercounting of older residents in the yearly estimate data (or the reverse in the census data).

The story of an empty unit

~ Nathan Lauster ~ 1 Comment

Before we moved to the townhouse in Vancouver where we live now, we had a two bedroom apartment on the top (fourth) floor of a low-rise building in Kitsilano.  We had fabulous neighbours in the building, and have remained close to at least a couple (knowing we were bike commuters, they all pitched in and bought us a chariot bike trailer after we had our first kid!  Such a sweet gift!)  My partner and I lived there together for about seven years.  For about five of those years, we shared the place with at least one kid.  For somewhere between three to four of those years, the apartment downstairs from us remained gloriously empty.

An unoccupied housing unit!  Right below us!  We weren’t going to question our good fortune too closely, but for the most part, we remained at a loss to explain why it remained unoccupied so long.

That said, we had at least some idea why it became unoccupied in the first place.  We lived in a strata (condo) building.  The strata association, after struggling to figure out how to deal with a couple of bad tenants living in the building, decided to pass a no-rental by-law.*  The apartment downstairs from us had been rented out by its owner(s), and when the tenants left after their contract ended, they couldn’t be replaced.  We figured it was only a matter of time until the landlord sold the place.  But we had no idea just how MUCH time would pass.

Lots of things happened.  To our knowledge, it seems the owner may have received the apartment as an inheritance.  They tried to sell at some point after their tenants left, but the deal fell through.  The owner may, it seems, have had some major medical issues that kept them from paying attention to the apartment.  Then the building had a major repair scheduled, and everyone had a hard time selling until it was done.  In fact, the place downstairs from us was never sold.  Instead, the owner eventually managed to get a hardship exemption and rent to a new tenant.**

So there you have the messy story behind at least ONE of the empty apartments showing up in the City of Vancouver’s new report on unoccupied housing.  An anecdote, to be sure, but possibly a helpful one.  There are all kinds of reasons why housing units can remain empty.  To be sure, these reasons no doubt include speculation, shoddy real estate practices, and also the second (or third, or fourth, etc.), but seldom visited home ownership practices of the ridiculously wealthy.  But they also no doubt include things like inheritances (that may or may not be contested), landlords coping with (and/or contesting) no rental provisions newly imposed by their strata corporations, owners coping with illness (which can be quite long-term), plain inattentiveness, and a host of other reasons that might puzzle the neighbours without seeming especially nefarious.

To return to Vancouver’s new report on unoccupied housing, which I’ve been trying to puzzle out (just like everyone else, it seems!), the big finding is the stability we seem to be seeing in terms of a relatively large (but not outstanding) proportion of the City’s apartments left empty – especially, it seems, in my old neighbourhood of Kitsilano.  Here’s where my anecdote (apparently drawn from the dataset under analysis!) may come in handy.  The sheer diversity of reasons the apartment below us remained empty for three to four years may reflect a broader diversity of reasons properties across the city often remain empty.  That diversity, in turn, may help explain the striking overall stability we seem to be seeing in occupancy.

 

*- I learned the other day, via a visiting scholar, that no rental provisions are apparently illegal for condominium associations in Australia.  This was especially striking to me because we get our Strata legislation from Australia (they call their condos “strata” too!)  Incidentally, we lost some good neighbours over that no rental provision…

**- The new tenant who moved in was awesome!  The poor guy had moved hoping to get some peace and quiet after experiencing a noisy upstairs neighbour in his old apartment.  But he was EXTREMELY good-natured about our kid(s).  He attributed this to the fact that he could (almost) always count on everything quieting down around 8pm, when we put all the noisy folk to sleep.