Housing

A Limerick (and a reply to a response to a critique of a study)

~ Nathan Lauster ~ 3 Comments

John Rose posted a response to my critique of his study this morning. Almost immediately after I was alerted to the posting (via Kerry Gold), we met up to chat at Sweet Obsession cafe. In appreciation of this turn of events, I offer this limerick:

John Rose is a very nice guy

Despite our dispute o’er supply

We just met for tea

And we mostly agree

Where not, please see my reply

He really is a nice guy. And in order to insure our back-and-forth doesn’t become too tiresome, I’ll offer just a quick reply.

  1. Though I replicated John’s Census results from 2001-2016 for Vancouver, I apparently did not replicate his results for other metro areas. I admit, I didn’t catch this, since I was focused on Vancouver (and since I ran the replication of his 1.19 ratio of new dwellings to new households very quickly, before he’d provided his full report). I don’t know why his results and my own differ for metro areas beyond Vancouver, but it’s worth looking into! The data should be from the same source (Statistics Canada), but sometimes they report things differently in different documents, and it’s also entirely possible that errors were introduced in transcribing data (in which case, they were probably mine! My response was hastily assembled). Though it does not change the results for Vancouver, it’d be good to nail down overall dwelling count and occupancy changes.
  2. As John notes, the Census does not offer guidance with respect to how their procedural changes affect underlying dwelling count data between 2001 and 2006. But in noting their newly inclusive criteria for expanding the count of secondary suites, they clearly point out how single-family dwellings changed to duplexes in their structure data. This implies that each of those dwellings formerly counted as one unit (but containing a secondary suite) would henceforth be counted as two or more. As we know, Vancouver has a LOT of secondary suites, and this shift in classification both could and should have boosted the count of dwelling units significantly, even without any new dwellings being built or added. Worth noting as well that new secondary suites are the LEAST likely to show up in permitting data (though the Metro Van databook for 2017 at least tries to capture them). It would be great to get more from the Census on the characteristics of “dwellings unoccupied by usual residents.” On a related note: I’d love it if someone could point me toward or carry out an intensive study of how the Census counts dwellings in Canada!
  3. John acknowledges the awesomeness of the construction permitting data, but does not (yet) engage with how much better it fits new household formation than census counts of dwellings, indicating a shortage rather than a surplus of supply. I’ll look forward to seeing his comparison between construction and census data if he’s able to pull one together! (Both of us have time constraints involving stacks of grading and lots of other work on our plates).

Otherwise, as I said, John Rose is both a nice guy and clearly well-intentioned. He mentioned during our conversation that his study was motivated over concerns about new construction in the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) in Richmond. On this point, we clearly agree. The ALR is worth saving, and we don’t need to expand our housing supply any further out into Vancouver’s agricultural and wild lands, which is part of why I focus on densifying single-family residential neighbourhoods as the best path toward making Vancouver a more affordable, more inclusive, more lively, and more sustainable city.

 

[Postscript, Dec 15th: for more see Jens’ careful response with a detailed dive into the data over at MountainMath, and see the smart historical commentary on the Census in Vancouver in the comments below by the folks at Changing City (added bonus: see their lovely pictures of changing streetscapes around town!)

Notes on the “Myth” of housing supply

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

Much has been made of a recent study purporting to demonstrate that adding to supply has done little to nothing to bring greater affordability to Canada’s most unaffordable cities. Though I’m loathe to keep it in the limelight, I feel some responsibility to respond to the study, both because I was quoted in its initial media roll-out (despite not having had a chance to see the study), and because once the study was finally written and released it cited me – kind of – through an old press release for my book (To the author: thanks for citing me, though I might also recommend actually reading my book!).

Unfortunately, I need to start by noting that the study itself is not high quality, either theoretically or methodologically. The terms supply and demand are not conceptualized in the way the economists who more or less invented them use them (i.e., as terms in the balancing equation that constitutes the market pricing mechanism), but rather in somewhat idiosyncratic fashion. In part as a result, I initially found it a little confusing to respond to the study. I certainly agree that widening inequality makes our general reliance upon market-distribution of housing problematic for insuring equitable outcomes. In other words, the whims of rich people for a second or third home carry way more weight in the market than the shelter needs of poor people. That is a real problem that would be entirely consistent as an interpretation of the study’s findings. But that’s not the same as arguing that supply doesn’t matter, and indeed would even suggest that adding lots of non-market housing (new supply!) would be a direct way of insuring the housing needs of poor people outside of the market.

It would seem to me that the only reason to suggest supply DOESN’T matter is to effectively take off the table many policy options that might help address our current housing affordability issues. It’s kind of like we’re all in a sinking boat. Most of us are saying, “we’ve got to bail out this water and plug that leak in order to stay afloat!” But someone in the boat is picking a fight, arguing, “No! Look, we’ve tried bailing out water. Look at all the water we’ve bailed out! But now we’ve still got water in the boat. We should stop bailing out and just focus on plugging the leak.” That’s an interesting strategy, but I’d rather stick with bailing out and plugging up at the same time. (I’ll leave the economists out there to keep providing other metaphors).

So yes, I’ll continue to argue for more supply – especially by enabling more housing options on all that single-family residential (RS-zoned) land in and around Vancouver currently reserved only for millionaires. But I’ll ALSO continue to suggest we should be doing things to make the housing market work better, including (but not limited to):

  • Taxing Vacant Homes (and vacant lots!) like Vancouver’s new Empty Homes Tax
  • Raising Property Taxes, esp. in progressive fashion
  • Rebalancing tax burdens from income to property, as with the clever BC Housing Affordability Fund proposal
  • Cap the currently unlimited tax exemption of capital gains from sale of primary residence

All of these things would make investment in housing as a commodity less profitable and help remove some incentives currently in place to sit on empty properties, without renting them out, in order to accrue the capital gains by doing nothing as the property appreciates (e.g. speculation). But if we’re truly concerned about housing affordability, let’s not tie one hand behind our backs. Let’s keep bailing out water and plugging the leaks in our housing market at the same time.

What about the methods of the study themselves? They need some work. For instance, the author uses different measures and different data sources to compare affordability across time, with the most recent data (taken from Demographia – not gonna link to them) also the least transparent. The author also only focuses on market purchase price (as opposed to rent and/or cooperative share price), effectively setting aside those for whom affordability is a more life and death matter. I’m not going to do a deep dive here, in part because with respect to purchasing affordability, even had the comparison been carried out more carefully, the same results would obtain. There’s no doubt Vancouver has gotten more expensive in recent years!

But what about that supply issue? Have we been overbuilding as much as the author suggests, adding an eye-popping 1.19 dwellings for every new household created since 2001? I replicated this result based on census data I gathered right after the first media report came out, and it deserves its own blog-post (up next! spoiler: I’m pretty sure we’re not overbuilding). Before I get there let me leave you with recent vacancy rates for rentals in Metro Vancouver. If we’ve got too much supply, it sure hasn’t hit the purpose-built rental market. Latest update just came out. Good news! We’re almost back up to 1%.

Vacancy-MetVanHouseBook

 

The Million-Dollar Mansions and Migrants of Metro Vancouver, 2011 edition

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

Just who lives in all of these million-dollar and above properties concentrated in Metro Vancouver? I don’t yet have the micro-data for 2016 that would allow a deep investigation. But 2011? That I can do!

Here I’m playing around (once again) with the Canadian Census Analyser maintained by CHASS at U Toronto (access through UBC Library). All my analyses were run on-line: they’re basically just custom cross-tabs from the NHS (our replacement for the long-form census in 2011), sorting by characteristics of household heads and weighted according to sample weights. Metro Vancouver is about as low as I can get as a geographic level for microdata without getting special permissions (and tiny sample sizes).

First I wanted to get a breakdown of who was living in million-dollar homes in 2011 by age and where they lived five years before (2006). This gives us a sense of both who’s lived in these places for awhile, and who bought recently. Note: Even though I refer to these as “mansions” below, I don’t actually know what they look like or even how big they are – I just know they were valued by their owners as over a million dollars. Still a fair amount of money in 2011! (Also worth noting: in 2011 we were still coming off of the Great Recession, which only gently brushed Vancouver…)

Mansions-Migrants-1-AgeLocation

Hey, what do you know? The vast majority of households living in million-dollar homes in 2011 had been living in their places since at least 2006. A good proportion of these householders were older – likely retired – but not actually the majority. Most were still clearly working age. The next biggest group of households are those who moved into their current place from elsewhere in the metropolitan area of Vancouver. Very, very few moved into a million-dollar mansion from someplace in Canada outside of Metro Vancouver. Seriously: who could afford to do so? Most other cities in Canada are far cheaper than Vancouver. So a lot of what we see in terms of people moving into million-dollar mansions around Metro Vancouver are locals trading homes with one another.

What about migrants? People who moved to Metro Vancouver from outside Canada are definitely there, but overall in 2011 they represented a relatively small proportion of million-dollar mansion owners. Even in terms of new buyers, they represent less than a quarter of million-dollar mansion owners who moved in between 2006 and 2011. That’s big enough to have a substantial effect on the market! But by no means did most purchasers of million-dollar properties in Metro Vancouver come from away. Most buying in the years prior to 2011 were already locals.

Of course, people have been flocking to Vancouver from all over the world for quite some time, so even if they’d been in Vancouver for awhile by 2006, they still might’ve been born elsewhere. We can break down million dollar mansion owners by where they were born as well as by where they were five years ago. Here’s what that looks like:

Mansions-Migrants-2-Pob-Location

No surprise: the modal million dollar home owner was born in Canada in 2011 (shaded red above), with another big chunk born in the UK (orange). I put Americans (like me!) in pink, just for fun. The other large group of million-dollar home owners I highlighted come from Eastern Asia (in shades of blue above). Why are so many million-dollar homes in Vancouver owned by immigrants? Some of this, no doubt, has to do with the “skill” and wealth-based selection processes of the Canadian immigration system. But another important part of the story – especially for those in blue – probably involves the enormous real estate fortunes being made all around the big cities of the Pacific Rim (where most East Asian migrants are coming from). A lot of East Asian immigrants to Vancouver are probably housing lottery winners in their countries of origin, and Vancouver property looks relatively cheap from many places across the water! Wealthy East Asian buyers account for over half of those moving into million dollar homes directly from outside of Canada between 2006 and 2011.

But are the majority of migrants moving to Vancouver from Eastern Asia (or elsewhere) moving into million dollar homes? Not so much. Here I break down the proportion of householders living in million dollar homes by place of birth and where they lived five years prior to the 2011 census.

Mansions-Migrants-6-Percent-Pob-Location

Most residents of Metro Vancouver (born immigrants and native-born) live in more modest dwellings, rather than million-dollar mansions. Of note: for those born in Canada and living in Canada five years prior to the 2011 Census, just under 10% lived in million-dollar mansions. Many immigrant groups, but by no means all, exceeded this figure. Those born in the USA, the UK, South and Western Africa, China, Hong Kong, and other parts of East Asia all fell in the 15%-20% range for the proportion of household heads living in million-dollar plus homes. Of course that means the vast majority of migrants, over 80% in most cases, were NOT living in million dollar mansions in 2011.

What about people who moved to Canada from another country in the last five years? Interestingly, this includes a fair number of Canadians. Something to keep in mind when we talk about “foreign wealth!” At any rate, those who’ve recently lived overseas tend, overall, to be even less likely to live in a million dollar mansion than those who’ve lived in Vancouver for more than five years…with two notable exceptions: China and Pakistan.

I don’t actually know what to make of Pakistan – except that it might just be a small sample-size issue. The same sample-size issue probably helps explain why Jamaicans look so wealthy – though it’s possible I’m just missing all the wealthy Jamaican neighbourhoods in Vancouver. For China, it does appear that recent migrants are more likely to live in million-dollar mansions than earlier (pre-2006) migrants. This accords with broader perceptions that Chinese migrants to Vancouver are increasingly selected for wealth. That said, the vast majority of new immigrants from China (over 80%) still weren’t living in million-dollar mansions in 2011.

Now that we’ve got some general idea of the distribution of housing wealth in Metro Vancouver (from five years ago anyway), I’ll try and return to an enduring mystery in my next post: what’s up with low-income households owning million-dollar mansions?

 

Lottery winners of the Pacific Rim

~ Nathan Lauster ~ 5 Comments

Sociologist Harvey Molotch famously suggested that cities should be understood, first and foremost, as Growth Machines. The big takeaway is that the urban political class and overlapping landholding class tend to agree with the basic idea that growth is good and should be encouraged. For the landholding class, in particular, growth is good for their bottom-line. Land value goes up as more and more people are encouraged to concentrate in the same place (particularly if they’re wealthy people). So big landholders, who also often drive local politics, actively and aggressively push for growth. They’re aided and abetted by numerous other parties, including local media. Along for the ride in more or less passive fashion are local home owners, many of whom might be understood as “lottery winners” as they watch their property values soar. Sound familiar, Vancouver?*

Of course, “lottery winnings” from housing wealth are only really available for people to tap into if they a) sell their housing and move somewhere cheaper, or b) avail themselves of complicated financial instruments akin to mortgages. But this sets up a really interesting dynamic, especially with respect to immigration. People can move from a “lottery winning” locale to a much less dynamic real estate market and pocket a lot of change along the way, arriving as a wealthy immigrant. In places with less developed mortgage systems, this pattern can be further complicated, as sellers will have accumulated few loans against their housing before selling (setting aside, for the moment, those who don’t own property).

What does this imply for immigration around the Pacific Rim? Much of immigration takes place to and from the big “gateway cities” of the Pacific Rim. These gateway cities tend be very expensive markets locally because the flow of international migrants drives much of real estate dynamics. Partially as a result, local prices can drift upward from what might be expected by local incomes. But gateway cities are also quite diverse in terms of the success of their local growth machines. As a result, some “lottery winners” are far wealthier than others. By selling their home in an expensive growth machine and moving to a cheap one, migrants can cash in their lottery winnings.

Where should we expect this to be a feature of immigration streams in the Pacific Rim?

I recently stumbled across Numbeo, providing crowdsourced estimates for property prices by square meter of size (as well as rents, etc.) for cities around the world. I still have a lot of questions about this data (and I’m more than happy to entertain critiques!), but they seem quite transparent in their methods, and I can see their stuff is already being used in (forthcoming) academic articles, so it seems like worthy play material. Using their estimates for property prices (in Canadian dollars), I put together the following comparison:

Pacific-Rim-Comparison-Price

I’ve highlighted Vancouver in blue as a big gateway into Canada. Of note: when it comes to the Pacific Rim, anyone selling their home to the left of Vancouver before migrating to same could arrive with a great deal of wealth, especially if they’re moving from a city centre! Vancouver looks cheap to arrivals from Hong Kong, Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Shenzhen, San Francisco, Seoul, Sydney, and even (to some extent) Taipei. “Sell your place, move to Vancouver, and get rich!” could also work at least moderately well for arrivals from London and New York City.

On the whole, this provides some important evidence to contextualize patterns of immigration into Vancouver. Positioned as a gateway into Canada from the Pacific Rim, we should expect a lot of East Asian immigrants to arrive quite wealthy just from selling off their homes in their city of origin! That’s setting aside a host of related issues (e.g., Canada’s selective immigration policies – including its relatively terrible investment class program, China’s selective emigration policies, intergenerational concentration of wealth in single children) that favor wealthy immigrants, as well as others (e.g., China’s capital controls and less developed mortgage system) that complicate the story.

Recent (and generally good, I think!) reporting in Vancouver has emphasized the crooks among Vancouver’s wealthy immigrants – and by all means, go get them! But this has a tendency to obscure how you don’t have to be crooked to arrive in Vancouver with money to spend. You just have to be lucky. And there are lots of real estate “lottery winners” scattered around the Pacific Rim, including many homegrown right here in the Lower Mainland.

Lots more to think about, but I’d love to hear more about a) the Numbeo data! and b) how this maps onto people’s thoughts about Vancouver’s role as gateway to the bustling growth machines of the Pacific Rim.

 

*- This dynamic is viewed as providing home owners a material interest in siding with growth machines. Of note, Molotch’s analysis is pretty solid with respect to North American cities at their founding and through most of the Twentieth Century, and it still mostly holds for central cities. But anti-growth coalitions began to arise and drive metropolitan politics pretty quickly, most dramatically in the suburbs, where NIMBYism and exclusionary policies are pretty much the norm. Lots to say about that, including both that “material interest” can be interpreted quite flexibly and it’s not the the only thing driving NIMBYs, but I’ll set it aside for the moment. How do Growth Machine stories explain other places? Growth Machine analyses are often received critically in Europe, where they don’t seem to work as well, but have been largely embraced – at least in modified form – across much of Eastern Asia. In China in particular, the political economics of urban growth have received a great deal of attention, in particular the collusion between local politicians and local developers (paywalled examples here and here, or see books like Li Zhang’s excellent In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis for a view from the ground). But less attention has been paid to the more or less passive “lottery winners” of Eastern Asia’s rapid urban growth. In the context of China, of course, urban growth was joined to the privatization of housing, producing many double-winners (as well as many new losers, especially rural migrants to cities). See Forrest & Izuhara (sadly pay-walled) for a really nice view of how intergenerational housing wealth accrues – or fails to do so – in Shanghai. It’s one of my regular teaching tools!

Why Keep Adding Empty Bedrooms?

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been playing around with different ways to visualize bedroom data, and here I thought I’d just add one more, combining the data on housing stock by number of bedrooms by what (minimum) percent of bedrooms must be going empty for Canada and Metro Vancouver. I think this best demonstrates how Metro Vancouver has traded off its 3BR “Family Size” units for 5 BR “Super Size” units and bedrooms that largely go empty.

Bedrooms-Stock-by-Empty-2011

I won’t re-hash my previous two posts, but this is largely because of zoning forbidding the construction of townhouses and related forms of “family size” stock that could more efficiently use all the land currently being taken up by “super size” mansions. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that bedrooms are more often put to use in Vancouver than across the rest of Canada, and often times people are being creative in making the best use of mansions they can. But why not let other kinds of housing into Vancouver’s “Great House Reserve” to fill in the growing gap we’re seeing in “family size” units?

[UPDATE: My bedroom antics have now made their way into the Vancouver Sun and The Province along with my mug! And also onto Roundhouse Radio]

Empty Bedrooms?

~ Nathan Lauster ~ 2 Comments

I just can’t stay out of peoples’ bedrooms.

In my earlier post I noted how Vancouver is distinct in the degree to which it’s been trading more bedrooms within housing units (“Super Size” mansions!) for separate housing units of “Family Size.” This is an important part of the story of why Vancouver families feel like they’re being priced out of owning a home (for renting see here). When it comes to bedrooms, Vancouver really does have a “missing middle.”

With this post, I want to explore how bedrooms are getting used. Of course, we don’t have direct information about how people use bedrooms. But we can compare number of bedrooms to household size and get some sense of how empty or crowded rooms are likely to be. We can also compare bedrooms to household structure to get some sense of how creative people are being in filling up dwellings. More on that in a moment. First, let’s count some bedrooms!

Here I’m counting bedrooms as “used” if there’s at least one household member per bedroom. I count them as “extra”, or empty, if they remain left over after after all household members have been given a room. Finally, I count a bedroom as “crowded” if more than two household members would have to share it. Below I count number of bedrooms by unit size.

Empty-Bedrooms-2011

Once again, one thing that really jumps out here is the extent to which Vancouver is unusual in how many bedrooms are locked up in five bedroom, “Super Size” dwellings. Metro Vancouver is way outside the norm for Canada. By contrast, Metro Van has relatively fewer of the “Family Size” three bedroom dwellings that seem to be the workhorse for most of the nation.

What about the counts? I count 459,994 extra bedrooms across Metro Vancouver, estimating that about one-fifth of bedrooms remain empty. Compare this to the 66,719 unoccupied dwellings counted across the metro area, constituting just over one-in-twenty housing units. There are other, less conservative measures of empty bedrooms out there,* but any way you look at it, we have way more empty bedrooms than empty homes.

What’s also striking, though not especially surprising, is that the proportion of “extra” bedrooms rises with the total number of bedrooms in a dwelling in basically a linear fashion. So “Super Size” dwellings tend to have more empty bedrooms. By contrast, smaller dwellings have very few (those in occupied studio and 1BR dwellings, by definition, are always using all of their bedrooms). To put it differently, in Vancouver we have nearly twice the proportion of bedrooms remaining empty in 5 BR+ “Super Size” dwellings (28%) as have do in much smaller 2BR “Family Size” dwellings (15%). Again, this isn’t really a surprise: smaller dwellings are much more efficient ways to house people.

BUT given that we’ve reserved so much land for big, land-consuming houses, and given that so many of these have been turned into “Super Size” 5BR+ mansions, how are the residents of Vancouver dealing with the situation? Are they getting creative?

In my book, I detail the situation of one of my interviewees, a single mother who rented a mansion in a wealthy Vancouver neighbourhood. She couldn’t afford the place by herself, so she rented with a friend who was also a single-mother. Even together they still couldn’t afford the rent on their own, so to get by they also each kept boarders – mostly international students. I applauded the extremely creative way this mother figured out a solution to the housing situation she faced, re-purposing the “Super Size” mansion she lived in to make it work for her and a host of others.

How much of this creativity goes on in Vancouver? Let’s explore household type by bedrooms for residents of Canada at-large and Metro Vancouver in particular.

HHType-by-Bedrooms-2011

Here I’ve separated out in shades of drab gray the more boring kinds of households that we generally expect to find, including living alone, or living with a partner and/or children in a simple census-recognized family household. I’ve highlighted in color all of the more intriguing household combinations, including roommates, extended families, and everything in-between. Relative to the rest of Canada, Metro Vancouver demonstrates a lot more creativity in nearly every category, but it’s especially interesting how much creativity we see in filling up those “Super Size” mansions. Over 40% of residents are living in some kind of creative household, quite a bit higher than the 30% we see in the rest of the country. Lots of this may reflect the ethnic diversity of the Metro Vancouver area, and cultural practices more supportive of extended family living. But there’s clearly a lot of creativity going on in dealing with our housing shortage as well.

To sum up, we could be building in a better way to house people instead of setting aside so much land for mansions, but we also see creative responses to the housing stock we’ve got.

 

*-Empty homes have gotten a LOT of attention. Empty bedrooms less so. A previous analysis that gained some media attention in Vancouver estimated there were 800,000 empty bedrooms across the Metro Area. But the analyst assumed all couples shared a bedroom. I take a more conservative and simpler approach here that counts bedrooms as empty only if they exceed the number of people in a household. In other words: if everyone in a household gets their own bedroom, what’s left over? Adopting sharing rules definitely boosts estimates of empty bedrooms.

Too Many Bedrooms, Not Enough Housing?

~ Nathan Lauster ~ 2 Comments

So I’ve been playing around with bedroom data.

Why? Because despite Pierre Trudeau’s famous dictum, “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation,” we still collect data on how many bedrooms people have. And I’ve found some interesting stuff going on in peoples’ bedrooms!

Following a theme, one thing that’s really intriguing is comparing housing stock by number of bedrooms across Canada’s Big Three Metropolitan Areas. For a rough bedroom comparison, we can divide up housing stock into “Economy Size” units (studio & 1BR), “Family Size” units (2BR to 4BR), and luxurious “Super Size” units (5 BR+). Let’s look at Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver (and the rest of metropolitan Canada) across the past twenty years, comparing 1991 to 2011.

Bedrooms-by-Metro-1991-2011

 

Most housing stock is clearly in the “Family Size” category, containing 2 to 4 bedrooms. Montreal and Toronto look pretty similar in this regard, with about three quarters of their housing stock stably “Family Sized.” But look at Vancouver! Here only about two thirds of housing stock was “Family Size” in 1991, and as a proportion of housing stock it’s been dropping fast!

When it comes to bedrooms, Vancouver really does have a “missing middle” problem. What’s taking the place of the missing middle? Tiny “Economy Size” shoe box apartments in the sky? Not really. Metro Vancouver has a lot of those, but they’ve also been on the decline as a proportion of housing stock since 1991.

What about that “Super Size” housing? Hold on! That’s where Metro Vancouver’s been growing! In fact, it’s got way more giant mansions than any other metro area in Canada.

But what about the housing crisis? What is Vancouver doing adding all of these crazy giant mansions? Good question!

No surprise, mostly what we’re adding when we’re adding 5+ Bedroom housing units is detached single-family houses. In many cases, especially in the City of Vancouver, these are simply “Super Size” mansions replacing more modest “Family Size” houses. Here are the recently built (and occupied) housing units added in the five years prior to the 2011 Census. Notice nearly all new 5+ Bedroom housing units are single-family detached houses – or houses with a secondary suite (showing up as apartments or flats in a duplex). Why are we adding so many more of these? Effectively, it’s because houses are the only thing builders are allowed to construct on so much of our residential landscape. So big houses are mostly (over 80%) what takes up our residential land base. Welcome to Vancouver’s Great House Reserve!

Recent-Van-Stock-by-Type-Bedrooms-2011

Of note, there are also a fair number of detached houses being added in “Family Size” housing stock, but overall the “Family Size” category is far more diverse in dwelling type, with lots of row houses and apartments in both low-rise and high-rise buildings (with the latter categories dominating the 2BR category!) In effect, there are LOTS of different structures that can support “Family Size” housing, most cheaper than detached houses because they use less land. But the cheaper kinds tend to be forbidden across the majority of our residential landscape. So relative to other metropolitan areas, we’re replacing “Family Size” with “Super Size.” Why? Because despite the progress Vancouver has made, we’re (still) reserving a whole lot of land for millionaires. So it’s no surprise that their super sized mansions are proliferating.

Are all of our bedrooms getting used? I’ll come back to that in another post.

 

 

 

 

A Tale of Three Cities

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

Canada is a BIG country, with a lot of land. But it’s also an urban country, with most of its residents sticking to cities and towns (and suburbs) hovering just over the border from the United States. Over one third of Canadians live in Canada’s three big cities: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.

This is interesting for all sorts of reasons, but especially so for a housing scholar, because of the differing routes to urbanization taken by these cities. Their housing stocks, and correspondingly the way people live, are all quite distinct from the rest of Canada, and also distinct from one another. Here I’m just going to look at housing stocks in terms of dwelling types – i.e., what kind of building do you live in? Of note, I’ll also be treating the term “city” as inclusive of “metropolitan areas” as a whole, which is what we’re generally talking about when we say “Canada’s three big cities” (this is important, of course, because the City of Vancouver as a municipality, for instance, contains less than a third of its metropolitan population).

So how do people live differently in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver from the rest of Canada and from one another? Let’s look at some data from Statistics Canada.

Structure-Metros-2016-B

The big difference compared to the rest of Canada is that the big three cities have far fewer residents living in single-detached houses. Less than half of residents live in houses in each of our major metropolitan areas, compared to well over two-thirds in the rest of Canada.

But how has each metropolis managed its move away from the house?

Montreal has developed a LOT of low-rise apartment buildings (up to four storeys tall) all throughout its old urban core. The rest of its housing stock looks a lot like the rest of Canada. On the whole, its a charmingly low-rise metropolis.

Toronto has developed a LOT of high-rise apartment buildings (five stories and above), all throughout its old urban core. The rest of the its housing stock looks a lot like the rest of Canada. On the whole, its different mainly in its promotion of big, bustling high-rises.

Vancouver lies somewhere inbetween Montreal and Toronto, insofar as it’s filled its urban core(s) with a combination of low-rise (often older) and high-rise apartment buildings. But it’s also distinct from either city in renovating and re-developing such a large proportion of its stock of single-detached houses, so that a LOT of them contain two or more dwellings (e.g. basement suites).

To some extent, this last strategy speaks to Vancouver’s late-comer status. Montreal and Toronto are both relatively old cities, each having developed a sizable urban core before getting choked off by heavily protected single-family (RS) zoning in the twentieth century. Vancouver didn’t have that much of an older urban core to work with before most of its residential landscape became locked up by zoning. So many municipalities across Metro Vancouver have sneakily re-worked the definition of a “single-family residential” in their zoning by-laws to include a secondary suite – and often a laneway house too – enabling a very “gentle” form of baby-step densification. This is only part of the story of how the big three cities of Canada provide very different models for density and accommodating the move away from single-family detached modes of living.

A related question we can ask is how housing gets distributed across the life course and history. I’ve been playing around with this from a descriptive standpoint, using age-graded distribution of housing.

Age-by-Structure-Metros-2016-B

This is basically the same chart above, but played out across five-year age categories (except for under 15 and over 85, because these are the categories Stats Can gives me). It’s very clearly visible that outside of the Big Three Cities, single-detached houses are the statistical norm in Canada. They become a little less the norm during young adulthood (20-34) and for post-retirement ages (65+), but even so, more than half of the young and old alike live in houses.

For Montreal, the house is not normative – less than half of people in any age category live in a single-detached house. Nevertheless, Montreal demonstrates the same general age-related pattern of house acquisition as we see in the rest of Canada. Young adults and older adults are especially unlikely to live in a house, turning instead to the plentiful low-rise housing (in the case of the young) or newer high-rise housing (for the old).

What about Toronto and Vancouver? In Toronto, just over half of people live in houses across most age groups, but this figure drops sharply for young adults. Strikingly, there’s hardly any decline at all in this figure for older adults. In Vancouver, the figure overall is lower (<40% of people live in houses across most age groups). Nevertheless, the same age-related pattern pertains: though the young move out into alternatives, older age groups tend to hold onto living in single-family detached dwellings. What’s going on? In large part I suspect this is the result of generational shifts. Post-retirees in Toronto and Vancouver are probably transitioning out of single-detached houses like post-retirees elsewhere (Montreal and the rest of Canada) BUT they began their lives with much higher proportions living in single-detached houses than we see for later generations. (Perhaps you’ve heard that houses in Toronto and Vancouver used to be cheaper than they are now?) As a result, older residents in these cities continue to live in a much higher proportion of the detached housing stock than we’d otherwise expect. This also helps account for why many single-family residential neighbourhoods are shrinking!

 

Do Families Live in Condos?

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

Controversy recently erupted over a new condominium housing complex being proposed in The Annex neighbourhood of Toronto. Ho-hum, pretty run of the mill situation, except that one of the complainants about the condominium was Margaret Atwood, who actually (and to her credit) responded to the many YIMBYs attacking her on twitter for NIMBYing new housing. A golden media moment!

One of the complaints launched during the ensuing debate was that “condos are not for families.” Now this provides us an empirical question, and one near and dear to my heart. So I went ahead and ran the numbers using appropriately weighted 2011 National Household Survey data. I did this quickly on my first pass, mostly because I was listening to a cranky kid who wouldn’t take his nap in the room next door (in my condo). Here’s what I got and hastily posted to twitter as my public sociology for the evening:

FamilyStatbyCondo-2011

Most condominium dwellers (over 70%) are members of families. So as a first pass, it’s ridiculous to say families don’t live in condos. That said, it is true that condos support greater diversity in household members, including more people living alone or with roommates, than other kinds of tenure arrangements. It’s also true, of course, that people living alone and with roommates need housing no less than families.

What do I mean by saying other tenure arrangement? Condos, of course, are a legal category of ownership, not a type of building. Towering apartment buildings can be condos, but so can low-rises, rowhouses (like mine), and even single-family detached houses. Condo units are mostly split – pretty evenly – between the first three of these housing types, covering about 90% of condominium units.

But by the time I posted, the complaint had already turned away from ALL condominiums. The real problem is the NEW condos. New condos are (no doubt) more expensive, on average, than old condos. And often they’re built to maximize the number of units, minimizing the space in each, to provide lots of 1BR and Studio apartments, which appeal to investors, and relatively few 2BR+ apartments, which appeal more to families. These are all fair complaints. Indeed, a variety of cities (including Vancouver) have taken to mandating inclusion of 2BR+ condo units in many new developments.

So here’s my updated chart. Do families live in NEW condos? NEW 1BR condos? NEW Studio condos?

FamilyStatbyCondo-2011v2.0

The answer is YES! Most NEW condo residents are family members (almost the same percentages as all condo residents). What’s even more striking is that most NEW 1BR and studio condo residents are still family members. That’s even a little surprising to me! But goes to show the adaptive ways people are doing family these days, even if often out of need rather than adventure. Even new 1BR and studio condos are supporting mostly residents who live in families. So if you’re keeping 1BR and studio condos out, you’re also keeping families out.

But once again, and it bears repeating, residents who don’t live in families ALSO NEED PLACES TO LIVE! Along these lines, I also fixed an issue with my first figure, where “Person not in census fam” was treated as non-family. What this category actually represents in the Census is people who don’t live in an “official” census family according to the census (defined as parent-child or partner), but still live with family members. So for instance, siblings living together, or grandparents with grandchildren. I’ve moved residents in those kinds of households down to consider them as part of the “family” category here, because seriously… those are still families!

One other note: NEW = built in the last 5 years (2006 and 2011, for purposes of the 2011 data at-hand)

“Buy a house for my daughter [or] I’m not going to let her marry you!”

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

Some of the people who I talked to for my book spoke directly to cultural differences in how they saw the importance of buying a house. A Chinese-Canadian interviewee, originally from Hong Kong, thought “Asians” in general were more likely to link home ownership to marriage. As she humorously described it:

They think that before you get married you have to buy a house. They’re like, “Oh, you don’t have money? Buy a house for my daughter [or] I’m not going to let her marry you!”

Of note, in Hong Kong (and across much of urban East Asia), very few people actually live in houses, and lots of people live in various types of public housing (covering about 30% of the population of Hong Kong, for instance). But setting that – and the selectivity of  just who immigrates to Vancouver – aside, the association between partnering patterns and access to housing is really interesting. In fact, changing the setting to Sweden, it was the topic of my dissertation! (See some of my old research here, here, and here)*

At some point, I hope to return to this kind of detailed research in North America. But in the meantime, I can work a quick metropolitan comparison. We all know that buying a house is pretty much impossible for most people in Vancouver. So how does it affect marriage and partnering patterns here, if at all, compared to other metros?

Here’s a comparison of partnering patterns across four big metropolitan areas in Canada, based on 2011 National Household Survey** results:

MetroMaritalStatusbyAge-2011Data

Effectively, Vancouver fits somewhere between Toronto and Calgary. Hardly the position one might expect if access to ownership of a house was really limiting partnerships. On the whole, all three of these major metropoles look pretty similar. But looking carefully reveals that people tend to partner a little later in Toronto, with a greater gap between the late twenties and early thirties, than in Vancouver. By contrast, Calgarians tend to partner earlier, with over half of those ages 25-29 no longer single. Torontonians are also less likely to spend much time in non-marital cohabitations than either Vancouverites or Calgarians. Interesting little differences which I’d guess speak as much to the multicultural mixes of Vancouver and Toronto as to housing conditions (though, as noted above, it might be the interaction between these that really matter!)

How about Montreal? As always, it’s kind of off doing its own thing. Non-marital cohabitation has been a much stronger feature of partnerships in Quebec since the Quiet Revolution, and it really shows up here. (see, e.g. LaPlante 2006). Lots of material for another dissertation, if anyone’s looking for ideas!

 

*- with apologies for the paywalls – drop me a line if you want access, but can’t get it!

**- basically our best substitute for the Census that year – thanks Harper!