I’ve been trying to track down good total fertility rates (TFRs) for Metro Vancouver for a while now, all part of a larger project of mine to better track demographic responses to housing (un)affordability. You can see powerpoint slides from my recent talk on this topic at the Pacific Housing Research Network (PHRN) and BCNPHA sponsored 2016 Housing Central conference. (PHRN has a call out now for abstract submissions to the 2017 conference!)

In my search for demographic responses, I’ve been playing around a lot with migration data, and I don’t yet really see much of a response to our housing affordability issues in terms of overall migration or age-specific rates. The millennials aren’t leaving. At least not yet – we’re still waiting on that 2016 Census data for confirmation! Also: there may be other types of out-migration we should be paying attention to.

But what about demographic responses to housing unaffordability in terms of fertility? Are people having fewer babies? Lots of people I talked with for my recent book described feeling housing constraints on their family plans. “Marlene,” a mother of one in Vancouver, spoke for many people who talked about feeling like they needed a house for their families. The expense of buying a house in Vancouver seemed nuts to Marlene compared to whenever she thought of her friends in her small, northern hometown:

They can afford more kids than I could. You know, I mean, they each get to have more than one child, because they can afford it. (p. 128)

But many other people told me they felt little in the way of housing constraints. They could envision parenting as many kids as they wanted just as well (or better) in a low-rise, townhouse, or high-rise as a big and now completely unaffordable single-family house.

As we all know, the price of detached properties has skyrocketed since roughly the turn of the millennium (though 2BR rents have remained more stable). So what’s happened with total fertility rates (TFRs) over the last seventeen odd years?

As it turns out, they’ve been remarkably stable.

The TFR, of course, is a measure of how many children a woman could expect to have in her life if she lived each year at the average age-specific risk of childbearing. Below is my summary of data I only recently tripped over from BC Stats. They don’t provide a single  Metro Vancouver TFR. Instead they provide separate TFR data based on births for each Local Health Area in BC. (see: Maps of Local Health Areas). Here are the historical TFRs for all the Local Health Areas for Metro Vancouver, plotted against TFR for the province as a whole in gray.

What patterns jump out for me here?

1. Mostly the provincial patterns match the Metro health area patterns. As a whole, Metro Vancouver’s average TFR is a little lower than British Columbia’s. I haven’t (yet) bothered to back-calculate Metro BC’s TFR from aggregating Local Health Areas (LHAs). But the bulk of LHA TFRs is below the provincial TFR in all years. Moreover, McDonald & Belanger (2016) have a lovely free-access paper out confirming this pattern, at least for 2011 data, where Metro Vancouver’s TFR is estimated at 1.35 – the lowest for a major metro area in Canada (BC is the lowest province).
2. Childbearing patterns – overall – haven’t changed much since 2000. My read would suggest that fertility dropped through the 1990s, and has since held more or less steady, despite the extraordinary rise in the cost of single-family detached houses. In other words, while we have low fertility relative to the rest of Canada, it doesn’t seem to be responding much to the unaffordability of houses.
3. The fertility gap between Local Health Areas in Vancouver has decreased. The highest fertility areas (Surrey, Langley, Maple Ridge, Delta) have come closer to the lowest fertility area (Vancouver-City Centre). Indeed, the TFR of Vancouver’s high-density urban core has risen while all others have dropped or remained more or less stable. I think this is further evidence for what I suggest in my book. Many urbanites are adapting to life without a house, and forming families accordingly. There are a lot more kids downtown than many planners expected!

I’ll wrap up here for now. Lots more fun to be had, but I sense I’m already packing in far too many acronyms (TFR, LHA, PHRN, BCNPHA) for my taste.