I think many people are concerned that Vancouver is turning into a “resort city” – a playground for the rich – rather than a diverse and thriving city for all. But is this really happening? Yes. And I’m concerned too!

Certainly we see a lot of luxury cars and retail outlets, but we don’t really track wealth very well in Canada. Nevertheless owner-occupiers report their home values in the census and that’s where most wealth ultimately lies for Canadians. We can ask a simple question: where do the millionaires live? By millionaires I’m referring to anyone who reports owning and occupying a home worth a million dollars or more – not a perfect proxy, but not bad. The census uses self-reporting to get at this, and Statcan Table 98-400-X2016232 – in conjunction with total household numbers from Census metro area profiles – enables me to generate the following figure.

Vancouver contains almost as many millionaires as Toronto, despite being less than half the size. Together the two metropolitan areas account for less than a fifth of Canada’s total number of households but over three-quarters of all owned dwellings worth on million dollars or more. To put matters differently, nearly 25% of Metro Vancouver’s households own a dwelling worth a million dollars or more, compared to just over 1% of the Rest of Canada (outside Toronto). We are literally concentrating the One Percent in terms of Canada’s wealthiest households.

Maybe Vancouver’s not quite a resort city yet, but it’s definitely in the neighbourhood!

So how did we get to this point?

In some ways Vancouver was predisposed to growth because it’s got lots of things people want: ocean, mountains, one of the mildest climates in Canada, a thriving port, a railroad line, lots of jobs, diverse ex-patriot communities, parks, strawberry-picking in the Agricultural Land Reserve, etc. This could explain growth overall. But everybody wants these things, not just rich people.

If it’s not just amenities that attract specifically rich people to Vancouver, then how are we becoming a resort city? Some people blame the fact that Vancouver’s amenities have been heavily marketed to rich people around the world in recent years. They have a point: this has certainly happened. But lots of other places try to market themselves to the rich as well. What makes Vancouver special?

We might not be attracting the wealthy so much as we’re systematically excluding everyone else who wants to live here. It’s about changing the composition of in-movers, so that wealthier and wealthier people tend to come (incidentally, this fits with research on neighbourhood change suggesting this is mostly how gentrification occurs).

How are we systematically excluding everyone who’s not rich? Easy! Under conditions of growth, all we have to do is preserve lots of urban land for millionaires and largely prevent anyone else from competing with them. Effectively this is what residential single-family (RS) zoning accomplishes in places like Vancouver, which we can see by comparing what proportion of detached and duplex housing is evaluated at over a million dollars.

Across Metro Vancouver, nearly 60% of detached or duplex housing is evaluated at over one million dollars, yet the vast majority of urban residential land is zoned to support only these forms of housing. This is how you get a resort city, fit only for millionaires (with a little bit of room for their servant-tenants living in basement suites below – which is what duplexes mostly consist of in Canada). This compares to around of quarter of detached houses worth over a million in Toronto, and just over 2% in the Rest of Canada.

We can flip the question around to ask what percent of million-dollar dwellings are single-family detached or duplex dwellings. Strikingly, the answer in Metro Vancouver, Metro Toronto, and the Rest of Canada is pretty much the same: almost 90%.

Luxury zoning is almost entirely detached zoning. Across Metro Vancouver, the converse is also increasingly the case: detached zoning is becoming luxury zoning, affordable only to millionaires.

In places with lots of amenities – including jobs! – where people really want to move, growth is mostly limited by housing. If we only make housing for millionaires, we’ll increasingly have a city of millionaires. If we want to keep Metro Vancouver from becoming a Resort City, we’re going to have to tackle the zoning issue.

For this and more: yadda yadda yadda… book.

Thanks to Frances Bula, Jens von Bergmann, and Chad Skelton for inspiring today’s post and/or snatching away my afternoon! And if you’re interested in what you can do about reforming zoning, look into the platforms of municipal parties, like OneCity, that advocate for inclusivity across our urban landscapes.