Author: Nathan Lauster

A Brief History of Canadian Real Estate Investors

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

(Written jointly with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath)

The newest trend in the search for reasons for rising home prices is to look toward investors. The Bank of Canada released a report showing that the share of investors has risen over time. For this they took mortgage data from federally regulated financial institutions and matched them with credit history to determine if some of the buyers already owned property before they bought (during roughly the past 10 years) and kept it after they bought.

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On Broadway

~ Nathan Lauster ~ 1 Comment

(Written jointly with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath)

We have finally found some time to take a closer look at the Broadway Plan. There are many good things to say about the plan, it adds housing in an amenity and job rich area about to get a new subway line. It promises to not just undo the downzoning the city imposed on parts of the area in the 1970s but enables a bit more housing to make up for lost time.

The plan also tacks heavily against the displacement risk to renters in the established rental apartment areas by both 1) limiting the redevelopment potential in those areas and 2) increasing the strength of tenant relocation and right of return policies, a hard-learned lesson from the redevelopment activity around Metrotown in neighbouring Burnaby. In short, overall there’s a lot to like.

In this post we want to accomplish several somewhat diverse goals

  1. Provide some code to improve the data analysis in the plan that uses census data,
  2. Place the Broadway plan more firmly into context of historical zoning changes in that corridor, and
  3. Interrogate the decision to limit development potential in the existing low-density areas, which we have argued in the past make for ideal sites to concentrate development becaues of their low displacement implications.

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Estimating Suppressed Household Formation

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(Written jointly with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath)

TL;DR

We develop and elaborate a Montréal Method for estimating housing shortfalls related to constraints upon current residents who might wish to form independent households but are forced to share by local housing markets. Applying simple versions of the Montréal Method to Metro Areas across Canada suggests that Toronto has the biggest shortfall, which we estimate at 250,000 to 400,000 dwellings, depending upon assumptions. For Vancouver, the estimated shortfall range is narrower, from roughly 75,000 to 100,000 dwellings. But models suggest housing shortfalls remain widespread, and there is much room for further elaboration. Note: shortfalls estimated in this post only account for those due to suppressed household formation among residents and do not account for e.g. migration pressures, which means that overall housing shortfalls are likely much larger.

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What’s Up With Squamish?

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(Written jointly with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath)

In our previous post we have outlined the broad problems with the recent UBCM report, in this post we return to one particular one, the comparison of dwelling growth to population growth for “BC Major Census Metropolitan Areas” (Figure 2 in the report), paying particular attention to Squamish as the largest outlier. To start out, let’s take a comprehensive look at how dwelling and population growth play out across BC’s CMAs and CAs.

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Unoccupied Canada

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

TLDR

Canadian Census data on “Dwellings Unoccupied by Usual Residents” are frequently misunderstood. Now that data from 2021 are out, we provide a timely explainer and draw upon a variety of resources, including comparisons with US data, Empty Homes Tax data, and zooming in on census geographies, to help people interpret what we can see.

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No Shortage in Housing BS

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

Say you built a bunch of housing in a cornfield in the middle of rural Iowa. Would people come to live in it? Maybe. But probably not. Let’s imagine the same scenario scooted over to Vancouver. The conditions for our little field of dreams have changed. Here we’re pretty comfortable predicting: if you build it, they will come. Housing limits population growth here in a way it does not in rural Iowa.

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A Brief Data-Based Primer on Mobility and Housing

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As a housing demographer, I’m on the lookout for various ways to explain basic aspects of how people and housing fit together. A recurring theme is that this stuff is not obvious to most people. For example, people tend to associate new housing in a metro area with new people coming to a metro area. In fact, most new housing houses people already living within a metro area. But their moves free up other housing, which often incorporates newcomers.

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Ankh-Morpork Urbanism

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My household has spent a lot of time escaping to Discworld lately. We started visiting during the beginning of the pandemic (I’d long heard good things). We’ve been returning on a regular basis ever since. And fortunately, the borders have stayed open! With only a small wait time occasionally spent in quarantine (waiting for the volumes we really wanted to read to become available).

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