Housing

Is the Lifeblood of Vancouver Leaving?

~ Nathan Lauster ~ 10 Comments

The rising unaffordability of housing is a real concern in Vancouver.  But we should be clear about how and why.  Summarizing the concerns of many, The Globe & Mail’s Gary Mason writes of “A crisis in Vancouver: The lifeblood of the city is leaving.” As I noted previously, scares about the depopulation of Vancouver are easily dismissed by examining migration and mobility figures.  Both the City and the Metropolitan Area of Vancouver are growing, not declining.

So just who are we talking about as the lifeblood of Vancouver?  For that matter, what are we talking about as Vancouver?

Let’s start with the latter question.  The City of Vancouver, of course, lies at the heart of the Metropolitan Region of Vancouver.  Should we be concerned about anyone leaving the City of Vancouver?  Maybe.  But if they’re just crossing Boundary Road to go live in Burnaby or even catching the SkyTrain down to Surrey, it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.  Indeed, to stick with the metaphor, if Vancouver is the heart of Metro Vancouver, so long as our lifeblood keeps flowing in and out and all around the larger region, we shouldn’t have a problem.  That’s kind of what we want it to do. The bigger problem, it seems, is if our lifeblood is leaving the region altogether.  This suggests we should be most concerned with patterns of migration and mobility pertaining to Metro Vancouver as a whole.  Or maybe it’s worth keeping an eye on both Vancouvers: City and Metro Area, but keeping in mind that different issues are involved with each.

So who are we talking about as lifeblood?  After all, both the City and Metro Area just keep getting bloodier and bloodier as they grow in size.  Gary Mason tells us to pay special attention to those in their 20s and 30s.

 For many young adults, however, the city increasingly represents a place of which they no longer can afford to be a part. Consequently, Vancouver faces an almost existential threat; what happens when the lifeblood of any community, those in their 20s and 30s, decide to leave? … Frustrated over the inability to find even a condo at prices their salaries can accommodate, many young people are saying goodbye.

Really?  Are more of these young folks leaving than coming?  Using Canadian Census data, I ran the numbers for the most recent time period I could get a handle on: 2006-2011.  There’s a simple technique in demography of gathering age-specific net migration figures by breaking down the population by age-group in each year, aging them forward (giving them babies at appropriate fertility rates and killing them off at appropriate mortality rates – here I used age-specific death rates for Canadians in 2008), and then seeing how many of them you’d expect to be around.  If you subtract this figure from the actual figure you see in the next census, you get an age-specific net migration rate (expressed below in percentage form).  Here’s what I get for both City and Metro Region:

Van-Net-Mig-2006-11

For the greater metrolitan region, Vancouver’s lifeblood doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.  Many more people in their 20s and 30s are pouring into Vancouver than are leaving.  This is an important point to keep in mind, if only to set the record straight about the implications of the region’s unaffordability.

What about the City of Vancouver?  For those in their late teens and early twenties, the phrase “pouring in” is simply inadequate.  We have a tsunami on our hands.  Why?  Probably in part because Vancouver is a university town – in fact it’s MY university town.  But also because central cities tend to attract young people, provide them with jobs, and provide the diverse kinds of housing stock able to support them.  It’s true that the balance shifts between the City of Vancouver and the rest of the metropolitan region as people age.  The City of Vancouver is a net loser for people in their thirties and beyond.  No doubt many of them are looking for more spacious and affordable housing, and they would stay in the City if they could find it there.  But crossing the border into Burnaby, or down to Surrey, or out to Coquitlam, seems like pretty normal circulation.  The type experienced by central cities everywhere (yes, I checked, and Toronto experiences it too).

2016 is upon us, and soon we’ll have a new census.  We’ll all be eagerly awaiting the results (well, anyone who has bothered to read this far, anyway).  Who knows?  It’s possible patterns will have shifted by then.  But it’s also worth holding on to a healthy dose of skepticism.  Vancouver has at least 99 problems associated with housing affordability, but losing our lifeblood ain’t one.

 

The Pyramids of Vancouver (updated)

~ Nathan Lauster ~ 2 Comments

Frances Bula has a nice piece following up on transnational investments in Vancouver’s real estate market, in particular including the big commercial and industrial properties, like the Molson Brewery.  Are purchases being crowdfunded?  If so, what does that mean? Are all of the investor/buyers being told about the planning restrictions in place?

There are lots of interesting points to draw from all of this.  One point, a point that sometimes gets lost in simplified political economic analyses of urban affairs, is that developers don’t always get their way.  There is little reason to suspect that either the City or Metro Vancouver are bluffing in their commitment to keeping the Molson Brewery zoned for light industrial land use.   Municipal regulations and their regulators still have power, even in the face of the “sharing economy.”  The Province has even more power, which is why we don’t yet have Uber in Vancouver.  It’s also why the BC Securities Commission is apparently looking into some of these crowdfunding advertisements.

Another and perhaps more disturbing point concerns the potential for crowdfunding (and other forms of investment) to operate as scams.  We know they’re out there (we’re definitely not getting straight stories from all the parties involved in the “Sun Commercial real estate brewery project”).  This is, of course, a problem for investors – mostly, it would appear, operating out of China – some of whom are undoubtedly more deserving of sympathy than others.  But scams are also a problem for Vancouver.  In a local sense, they potentially tie up properties (big & small) in litigation, leaving them unattended for years.  In a larger sense, the more of them there are out there and the more of them buying and selling to one another, either by design or by accident, then the more the market as a whole looks and feels like a giant pyramid scheme.  It’s a long, long way down to the bottom, and getting longer by the day.

*** Ummm… And here is more on pyramid-building practices via Kathy Tomlinson at the Globe & Mail.  Read the whole piece!  It’s worth it!

New Social Housing for Vancouver?

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

Vancouver’s mayor announced yesterday a plan to set aside 20 city-owned properties (worth an estimated $250 million) for social housing if the federal government would cough up $500 million to fund construction (joined by some commitment from the province).  Up to 3,500 new units might be added.

This seems like a smart move, insofar as the Liberal government is looking for shovel-ready projects to invest in, and has already raised social housing projects as a possibility.

To put the 3,500 possible new units in context, their addition could add nearly 14% to the current non-market housing stock for the City of Vancouver.  That’s not trivial.  Looked at a different way, 3,500 new social housing units could help house the 1,746 people counted in the City of Vancouver’s 2015 homeless count.

Still lots to be figured out here, including who will run these units if they get built.  But this seems like a positive step for the City.

Gateway Vancouver

~ Nathan Lauster ~ 6 Comments

Metro Vancouver is a great source of data.  I’ve put together this little figure drawing upon their net migration dataset from 1996-2013* to get a sense of how different components of net migration influence the region.  Obviously, the overwhelming driver of growth for Metro Vancouver comes from international migration, and it has for some time.  Vancouver is a gateway metropolis into Canada.  By contrast, net provincial migration rises above and falls below zero like the tides (perhaps in response to the fortunes of oil next door).  Net intraprovincial migration is consistently negative.  More people leave for other parts of BC than arrive from the rest of the province.

NetMigMetroVan

On the face of it, this seems consistent with the gateway story.  Immigrants flood into Metro Vancouver, from whence people gradually trickle outward to the rest of the province.  But this kind of data has also been used (especially when it works in conjunction with the outward tide of interprovincial migration) to suggest that unaffordability in Vancouver, particularly of single family houses, is driving everyone away.  More often, the stories are anecdotal: a doctor leaves in a huff ; a public relations professional moves to Squamish; a Calgary management consultant refuses an offer to move to Vancouver.  But sometimes arguments are made, and vague statistics leveraged, suggesting that housing prices are pushing everyone out of Vancouver.

Taking all forms of migration together, that story simply doesn’t work.  Quite obviously, too many people are still coming in to Vancouver to claim that everyone is being pushed out.  But there is another kind of story that can be told: housing prices (or other forces), linked perhaps to particular lifestyles or standards of living, are pushing some types of people away.  Professional people.  Entrepreneurial people.  Young people.  People with kids.  People from the area.  People who aren’t immigrants.

Housing prices and rents really are very, very high.  And some of these stories may even be true (though I suspect most aren’t).  One way or another, I hope to look into many of them in the future (consider this part I).  But for now it’s worth noting that any story focusing on the loss of some types of movers and migrants runs the risk of implicitly or explicitly devaluing the many others who keep arriving.

 

*- yearly data compiled from BC Stats and Statistics Canada data, including immigration records and use of tax records to estimate intra and interprovincial migration, which is kind of neat!

Renewing the Compact City

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

There will be a talk by Dr. Hazel Easthope on “Renewing the Compact City: Lessons for the renewal of multi-unit housing” at the Allard Law School (room 122), Feb 9th, 12.30-13.30.

Much of it will be about what to do with strata (condo) properties at the end of their “natural” lives.

In this seminar, Dr Hazel Easthope will present findings from a two-year research study of strata scheme termination and renewal in Greater Metropolitan Sydney (in the state of New South Wales, Australia). This study outlined the tensions arising from the conflicting interests of the multiple stakeholders involved including tenants, owners, developers, bankers and property managers. The research used innovative methods to examine how best to deliver outcomes that are both economically viable and socially sustainable in the context of private-sector driven housing development.

Of special note, given my earlier posting, here too we see research being transformed into new legislation.

The outcomes of this research informed details of the legislation that was passed in New South Wales at the end of 2015 and that will come into effect in July 2016. This legislation, which includes provision to terminate a strata scheme with the approval of 75% of all owners, has some striking similarities with that proposed for British Columbia.

Great stuff.  Click here, or above, for more information.

Having and Needing

Video ~ ~ Nathan Lauster ~ 1 Comment

I’m slow to the game on this.  Probably because I don’t yet quite get the twitter.  But I noticed, via a big billboard near Commercial and Broadway, that the #DontHave1Million phenomenon (?) campaign (?) movement (?) hashtag thing in Vancouver has now been joined by the #DontNeed1Million hashtag thing, which is more clearly an advertising campaign.

Evelyn Xia, who began the #DontHave1Million hashtag thing, credits another story, about doctors leaving over the unaffordability of Vancouver housing, for her politicization.

I hope to return to the topic of housing affordability and its effects on mobility and migration in the near future.  But for now, I’m reminded of nothing so much as the tune we sing for the two kids around our household on a regular basis:

(edited after I learned how to embed!)

If we build it, will they come?

~ Nathan Lauster ~ 1 Comment

There’s a wonderful little experiment now under way that puts to the test our ability, as academics, to build policies.  A small collection of UBC and SFU economists is now promoting the BC Housing Affordability Fund, connected to a modest property tax levied against vacant housing.

The basic idea behind the policy itself is two-fold: 1) reduce the role of rampant speculation and tax avoidance on local real estate markets – especially across the Lower Mainland, and 2) start gathering data linking properties to vacancies and taxes paid into local economies.  The full proposal, in all its two glorious pages, can be found here, (the third page is just the signatories).  There’s also a supporting website.   It’s pretty!

Those business school people really know how to sell a policy!

Which is mostly what I want to note here.  Hopefully I’ll have more to say about the plan itself soon, and I’ll be tracking its progress as carefully as I can (it appears its authors will be doing the same!).  But in the meantime, I want to draw attention to what sociologists can learn from this crew.  We, too, can work toward building things.

Too often we offer criticism rather than construction.  We tear apart rather than construct.  What would it look like if sociologists (and all our kin) more regularly engaged in building things?  I have in mind new regulations, policies, tools, and standards.  (But no need to stop there: I’ve got one of my classes working on constructing buildings for me too).  Early sociologists, like Jane Addams (yes, I’m claiming her), clearly had this sort of work in mind.

Could it work?  If we built it, would they come?  Good question.  It’s one of the reasons I’ll be watching what happens with the BC Housing Affordability Fund proposal with great interest.