I can never quite get over just how dramatically the residential stock of Vancouver has transformed away from its former dominance by single-family detached houses. As recently as 1961, proportionately more of Vancouver’s households* lived in detached houses than in Phoenix, Arizona today (well-known for its inescapable sprawl). Less than sixty years later, Vancouver has now toppled both New York and Montreal as the least house-dominated metropolis in North America! That’s a dramatic transformation!

Above I’ve updated an older figure of mine that made its way into my (award-winning!) book with the newest census data from 2016, when Vancouver definitively displaced Montreal as the least house-dominated metropolis in North America. What’s led to and resulted from this dramatic change in Vancouver’s housing stock? That’s all in the book!

*-UPDATE: I’ve corrected an earlier version of this post where I misleadingly used the word “residents” instead of “households” to refer to the data. The data is for households. Proportionately somewhat more residents live in houses than households, because average household size is larger for those living in houses (Sept 18, 2017).