Learning to Not Fly

January 8, 2021January 28, 2021 ~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

Updating my mini–series on flights and exposures through YVR airport in Vancouver. No particular reason…

Here’s passengers on flights in and out in and out of Vancouver. Unfortunately the series I get from YVR still ends in November, so we don’t have the full update on how many holiday trips we should be enraged about for those of us avoiding non-essential travel. But we can see that since the arrival of COVID, passenger travel dropped dramatically, then slowly rose in what looks like some combination of a response to lessening restrictions / fears and seasonal patterns.

Speaking to the persistence of seasonal patterns, we can see that August 2019 was the pre-COVID peak for travel, just as August 2020 represents a post-COVID peak for travel. Since then, travel has eased off, which may also reflect the second wave of COVID. The combination of seasonal patterns and renewed COVID concerns might be seen a little more clearly looking at year-over-year passenger patterns in 2020 explicitly compared to 2019. For Domestic passengers, in particular, it looks like travel recovered up to about one-quarter of pre-pandemic levels by August, and pretty much stayed at that level through October, but we may see some evidence of a fall-off in response to the second wave of COVID in November. That said, I have to imagine that once December figures come out, we’ll see a jump in travel, just like in 2019, pointing to the continuing persistence of seasonal patterns.

International travel patterns are different, and more than a little troubling, insofar as they don’t seem to be at all responsive to the second wave of COVID. Though the progress has been much slower than for Domestic travel, International travel just keeps rising back toward historic norms, led, in November, by a sharp jump in travel between YVR and Europe. Yikes.

But how much is all of this jetting around really contributing to the spread of COVID? Unfortunately, we don’t know. Our surveillance system, data consolidation, and transparency game is still pretty weak here in BC. But we can get a very conservative sense of the changing scale of the contribution by just looking at the BC CDC Flight Exposure data (full pdf). There we see a remarkably steady upward rise in flight exposures, despite the leveling off in the overall number of passengers carried. Yikes, yikes!

Once again, posted exposures represent a very conservative estimate of how air travel is contributing to spread of COVID. Obviously, given the combination of asymptomatic cases and our lax testing regime, the BC CDC still isn’t catching all cases. We also don’t get the actual number of confirmed COVID cases per flight, just whether or not there’s been an exposure, and corresponding rows assessed as being at risk. Sometimes there are multiple seat sections, suggesting multiple, and potentially unrelated COVID cases aboard some flights. But the big takeaway is that even before holiday travel, airlines were already jetting around more COVID cases than at any other time in the pandemic.

I’m not sure it’s as useful, but for consistency’s sake, I’ll also post the exposures per 100,000 passengers, which I played around with in my last post. Last time I didn’t include the Miscellaneous International flights, because there weren’t very many, but they included a lot of exposures, and also because I wasn’t entirely clear on the reporting of flights to Mexico, which is where nearly all the exposures occurred. This time I’ll add those flights back in assigned to my best guess of how to combine the data, in part because Mexico seems to be where a lot of non-essential vacationing is occurring. Unfortunately, once again, we only go up to November data. The data highlight just how risky travel to common vacation destinations in Mexico has been, especially back in July, though by November the US and Europe had moved into riskier positions. That said, the chart really obscures the steady rise in risk of exposure for domestic travelers within Canada, still representing most of our travel.

Overall, though data remains poor, we appeared to be flying around an increasing number of COVID cases through 2020, significantly complicating efforts to contain the virus. Particularly worrisome, despite Public Health orders to avoid non-essential travel, lots of people – including politicians and other public figures – took to the skies on recent vacations. For now, folks, it’s probably time to learn to NOT fly. Maybe stay home and watch a video instead?

************* UPDATE January 27, 2021

Still no updated YVR passenger data for December! But lots of discussion about travel restrictions. So I’m posting a comparison of BC CDC flight exposures to overall exposures by month below, running up to January 22 (latest flight exposure notification data). The scales are set to 1 flight exposure = 500 cases reported, though of course I make no claim for direct causality there! The figure merely enables a comparative analysis of trends.

Feel free to grab the spreadsheet behind the figure containing downloaded BC CDC data from Jan 27 here:

BC CDC Data on Flight Exposures & Cases Download

What to Expect from an Empty Homes Tax

December 7, 2020 ~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

Joint with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at mountainmath

Empty Homes Taxes are back in the news!

In a very short time period, we’ve got Vancouver raising its Empty Homes Tax rate from 1% to 3%, based in part on a report from CMHC about a sharp rise in condos on the rental market, we’ve got Toronto eyeing its own Empty Homes Tax, and now reports suggest that even Ottawa is considering getting in on the game.

We’ve long argued that Empty Homes Taxes are a pretty good tax. Consider it as equivalent to a bump up to property taxes (which cities like Vancouver could really use!) paired with a principal residency exemption, kind of like BC home owner’s grant, but also applicable to property owners who rent out their properties on a long-term basis, hence providing incentive to keep housing occupied.

The incentive is real. But we have questions about whether Empty Homes Taxes are being oversold as solutions to the broader housing crises facing Metro Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa. To start with, as we’ve demonstrated previously, none of these metro areas rank particularly high in North America in terms of vacant housing stock on census day. Indeed, all Canadian cities appear to be on the low end, implying relatively few of the abandoned homes and vacation pied-a-terres that seem to push up vacancies in many US cities.

Vancouver and Ottawa appear high for Canada, but somewhere between low and middle-of-the-road for North America as a whole. Toronto is definitely on the low end. Of note, a scan of the data for the US, which includes reason for vacancy, suggests that regular housing processes (dwellings up for sale or rent, awaiting new residents; dwellings caught in temporary legal limbo after the death of an owner, etc.) account for a substantial portion of vacant homes overall. For metros at the high end of vacancies, these numbers are boosted by abandoned homes and/or pied-a-terre vacation homes. This suggests that abandoned homes and pied-a-terres just aren’t that common in Canada.

With some caveats, we can test this by looking at Vancouver’s Empty Homes Tax and BC’s Speculation & Vacancy Tax data. Most homes that appear as if they might be empty qualify for exemptions from these taxes, reflecting regular housing processes. After exemptions, there just don’t seem to be very many empty dwellings left. In the most recent Vancouver EHT data, declared vacancies range by neighbourhood from 0.08% (in Sunset & Grandview Woodlands) to 1.26% in the West End, roughly matching the City of Vancouver’s 0.7% of properties non-exempt from the tax in the provincial SVT data (excepting out “Satellite Families”, which would bump the figure to 1%).

Of course, taxes may be bringing dwellings back into the rental market that weren’t there in 2016, meaning our EHT and SVT data might be reflecting big declines in empty units. What about that CMHC study showing a bump of condos being rented out after the Empty Homes Tax was imposed? Well, funny story… first it’s important to know that the study is based on condo managers reporting from their Form K, which are meant to be filed when condo units are rented out, but in the past have been largely inconsequential. Indeed, in previous work we have highlighted that the CMHC estimate of rented condos in Metro Vancouver differs significantly with census estimates.

Here it’s notable that the first year of the EHT’s existence did not see a great many condos added to the rental market. But after the Speculation and Vacancy Tax came into place, the number of condos being rented out seemed to grow quite a bit. Was this a real change, perhaps because the added taxes became higher? Or did this represent a reporting change? Due to a variety of policy changes (including SVT), suddenly failure to file Form K has more teeth. As a result, it’s likely the reporting compliance for From K has gone up significantly. In other words, we’re not actually certain that a slew of condo units recently came onto the rental market. It may be, instead, that a slew of condo units already on the rental market were suddenly reported correctly. Overall, it is hard to get robust estimates of how many units have entered the market in response to the tax, but there’s no doubt some have. Looking at City of Vancouver data on homes that are either exempt or pay the tax, and cross-referencing this with the Ecotagious study estimating vacancy by electricity usage, we can arrive at a very rough estimate of the number of homes returned to the market being roughly double the number of homes that end up paying the tax. Which is a sizable achievement.

So what should Toronto and Ottawa expect from an empty homes tax? We have previously used City of Vancouver data to give fairly accurate projections for the Speculation and Vacancy Tax, and we can apply the same method to Toronto and Ottawa at the city level. The estimate is quite crude, it simply scales the units “unoccupied” on census day to match the City of Vancouver Empty Homes Tax numbers. So let’s take a quick look at what kind of dwelling registered as “unoccupied” in the Census.

While there is some variation across the regions, the duplex category, which generally captures houses with basement suites, comes out universally with the highest share of unoccupied homes. We have written about this at length before and it should not be surprising given the flexible nature of secondary suites that they are used flexibly, which frequently means that they aren’t rented out. Of course, these suites also aren’t taxed as empty, since they’re considered part of one residential property and can so easily be reabsorbed into the main dwelling. The high prevalence of basement suites in Vancouver is a big part of what drives up its vacancy rate in the census.

Taking account differences in housing stock we can apply a crude formula from the City of Vancouver Empty Homes Tax experience, assuming exemptions are structured similarly. Accordingly we can project that an Empty Homes Tax would capture around 2,000 units in Ottawa and 6,000 in Toronto. Roughly twice that number might be induced to re-enter the rental market in each city.

So should Toronto consider an Empty Homes Tax of its own? Relative to the size of Toronto’s housing market, we probably shouldn’t expect an Empty Homes Tax to a) find very many empty homes, or b) create much new revenue. We’re likely looking at shifting over no more than a single percentage point of units into the market. But adding any new units to the market is good. And we like Empty Homes Taxes overall. Just insure expectations are set accordingly!

What about Ottawa? Similar wisdom pertains. Set expectations accordingly! At the same time, Ottawa is instructive to consider insofar as it’s the centre of government for Canada. We actually kind of expect a certain number of properties will be empty a substantial portion of the year. Why? Well, Members of Parliament and Senators are both expected to represent other parts of the country in Ottawa. In other words, they’re expected to split their time between Ottawa and elsewhere. Indeed, Senators are still required to own at least $4,000 worth of real property in the province they represent, though there’s currently a bill to repeal that requirement (property requirements for MPs were abolished with the 1920 Dominion Elections Act). Again, not to say an Empty Homes Tax is a bad idea for Ottawa, and why not tax politicians a bit more? But Ottawa is also uniquely well positioned to demonstrate why some people, including – but not limited to – MPs and Senators, maintain some form of residence in multiple places. And Empty Homes Taxes necessarily tend to hit hardest for anyone who finds it difficult to choose just one.

As usual, the code for this post is available on GitHub for anyone to reproduce or adapt for their own purposes.

Henderson’s Guide to Pandemic History

November 25, 2020November 26, 2020 ~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

What will happen when the Pandemic ends?

Will pre-Pandemic patterns, like people moving to Vancouver, go back to normal? Or will small towns, far-flung suburbs, and rural areas see a boost at the expense of cities, reflecting perhaps a new aversion to density and/or embrace of the rise in telecommuting acceptability? (we’ve seen such speculation in certain corners of City Hall).

Or indeed, might we see the opposite? Will people flock to cities like Vancouver as we return to mobility (including newly amped up immigration along with outreach to Hong Kong) and enjoyment of all the urban pleasures we’ve given up during the pandemic?

It’s all speculation at this point. But it’s got me curious about the past. What happened after the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic? And here I struggle with two things: 1) there was a LOT going on during and prior to the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, making it hard to isolate any response, and 2) the census data skips right around the two key years, with timing gaps too large for zooming in.

I can’t fully fix the overlapping events (WWI, and prior to that a big speculative economic crash), but I can kind of get around some of the data limitations of the Census by playing with some historical data sources I’ve been meaning to give more attention, in particular, the brilliant collection of BC City Directories archived by the VPL, including especially Henderson’s City and Greater Vancouver Directories and Wrigley’s BC Directories.

First, a couple of quick notes about the 1918-1919 Pandemic, brought to you by Margaret Andrews (1977) enlightening research in “Epidemic and Public Health: Influenza in Vancouver, 1918-1919” open access in BC Studies vol. 34. According to Andrews, the Pandemic hit Vancouver especially hard relative to other cities in Canada and the USA. It was also very different from today’s Pandemic in targeting mostly young and middle-aged adults.

At the same time, it was similar to today’s Pandemic in arriving across multiple waves, though the first (in 1918) took the greatest toll.

So what can we add by looking at City Guides? Well, we can compare them to Census results to get a more fine-grained sense of how the City responded to and potentially bounced back from the Pandemic of 1918-1919. The guides include, especially, the Henderson’s City of Vancouver Directories and related Wrigley’s Guides (which swallowed up Henderson’s in 1924), all providing listings of businesses (and households) across Greater Vancouver. I estimate the number of listings for each year, folding businesses and households together. While this isn’t a perfect match for population, or even households, it provides a relatively consistent method for a fine-grained look at how Greater Vancouver businesses and households together experienced the concentrated events piling up between census years (more details below!)

What’s our fine-grained examination of directory listings in combination with census data tell us? It appears we really do miss a lot with census data alone, especially between 1911 and 1921, where we saw a gigantic speculative bubble crash in 1913, followed by the Dominion’s entrance into WWI in 1914, and the Influenza Pandemic itself in 1918.

Where Census data from 1901, 1911, 1921, and 1931 make Vancouver’s growth look relatively steady and nearly linear, directory data demonstrate the enormous upset and losses of 1913-1915 in Vancouver, followed by a bottoming out and start at recovery during WWI (when many otherwise unemployed men went to fight in the war), finally interrupted by effective stasis during the Pandemic of 1918-1919. Then boom! Vancouver was off to the races again, climbing rapidly in listings from 1919-1923 and again (jumping different guides & methods) from 1924 seemingly only slowing a bit in 1926. From there, the trajectory of growth seemingly carried right through the beginnings of the Great Depression to 1931, when the next census was carried out.

Is past prelude? If so, Vancouver looks set to recover quite spectacularly from the Pandemic once it ends, as people flock back to the joys of the city. Maybe we’ll get our own Roaring 2020s!

But of course, for now we’re still here in the middle of the damn thing. So I’m still singing “Come On Vaccine.”

You know the tune…

APPENDIX

A couple quick methods notes for my beloved nerds. Historical census data was taken from Norbert MacDonald’s “Population Growth and Change in Seattle and Vancouver, 1880-1960” from Pacific Historical Review 39(3): 297-321 (unfortunately paywalled). MacDonald combines South Vancouver and Point Grey into the City of Vancouver boundaries for 1921, but I believe he considers the populations of these municipalities effectively too low to matter in earlier years. Henderson’s Directories were released on a yearly basis with a pretty standard, two column format, from 1905-1923, and seemingly covered all of Greater Vancouver during this time, with listings showing up in North Vancouver, New Westminster, and Burnaby, for instance (though North Vancouver was sometimes also reported separately). Ads were placed somewhat randomly within the text, rather than as full pages. In 1924, the Henderson directories were absorbed by Wrigley’s directories, using a new three column format (and smaller type) with interspersed full page ads. I attempted to estimate the listings for each year of these two different sources by gathering page numbers for alphabetized listings (of resident households and businesses) and multiplying by an estimate of the number of listings per page, excluding full page ads where possible. I estimated ~95 listings per page for Henderson’s and ~184 listings per page for Wrigley’s, based upon a quick count on what seemed representative pages (the second A listings), but this estimate could certainly use further checking.

BC Housing Platforms!

October 16, 2020October 16, 2020 ~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

It’s election time in BC! And housing is back on the agenda, even if not quite as centrally as in past elections. Here I want to provide a quick basis for comparing each party platform, adding in a short bit of my own analysis. My quick take is that when it comes to housing there are things to like in each platform, and I hope the parties work together to keep housing on the agenda!

I’ve drawn housing proposals from the platforms of the BC NDP, the BC Liberals, and the BC Greens. It’s possible that housing-related items show up in other parts of the platform, but I’m focusing on the sections linked. For anyone following along outside BC, the NDP are a provincial labour-oriented left-leaning party, affiliated with the federal party, the BC Liberals are a centre-right amalgam, combining sympathies for both federal Liberal and Conservative parties, and the BC Greens sympathize with the federal Greens. We’ve had a governing coalition of the NDP and Greens since they managed to cobble together an alliance booting out the BC Liberals in 2017.

I tried to compare based on broad categories of proposed action in housing, highlighting more concrete proposals over vague suggestions where possible. Here’s what I get, divided into two parts below, the first covering COVID-relief, Taxation, Strata Insurance, and Social Housing, and the second covering Development. Click on each graphic to blow them up!

In terms of COVID relief, the NDP have offered to freeze rents until the end of 2021 (optimistically forecasting the end of the pandemic). After that, they propose to limit rent increases to inflation, in line with their application of rent control provisions in BC to date (under the prior BC Liberal administration, rent increases were generally capped at inflation + 2%). The BC Liberals suggest their COVID relief proposals will be targeted at tax relief for home owners (most of whom can already defer their property taxes). The Greens, who’ve had the least time to develop their platform thanks to a leadership contest followed almost immediately by a snap election, don’t suggest any specific COVID-relief related housing policies.

Taxation & Strata Insurance!

Restructuring of tax policies more broadly has been a persistent theme in BC’s recent history, with the NDP’s establishment of an Additional School Tax on high value ($3m+) properties and Speculation and Vacancy Tax (SVT) hitting mostly vacant properties, but also those occupied by “Satellite Families” at the end of 2018 following the BC Liberals imposition of a Foreign Buyer’s Tax (FBT) in 2016. This time around, the NDP are re-upping a promise from last election, the $400 Renter’s Rebate tax credit for renters to complement the existing home owner grant reducing annual property taxes (the BC Greens famously opposed said rebate).

The BC Liberals hope to scrap the SVT, and replace it with a capital gains tax targeted at condo flipping (not yet well-defined) and higher property tax rates for non- residents of Canada (a slippery concept). The BC Greens want to keep the SVT but close “loopholes” allowing exemptions for “Satellite Families” and foreign owners. It’s not clear what exemptions the BC Greens are talking about, but here are the ten most common claimed. Of note, the SVT currently applies to very few properties (<1%). If all declared foreign and satellite families exempted in the last tax data were forced to pay the tax, then just over 3% of properties would pay. The BC Liberals also propose creating a new property tax category (along with lower rates) for purpose-built rental buildings containing three or more units (a cut-off that could include some subdivided detached house properties in Vancouver!)

All parties have responded to rapidly rising strata insurance costs, suggesting reforms to bring down costs, but in a few key different ways. The NDP suggest providing a public option in case costs don’t come down. The BC Liberals are pushing for lessening insurance requirements. The Greens are… proposing a task force to look more into the issue.

Social Housing

All of the parties pay at least some lip service to adding to BC’s stock of affordable social housing. As the party in power, the NDP have the most developed proposal in the continuation of their Homes for BC plan, promising 114,000 new affordable units through partnerships over 10-years. The NDP have also proposed new transitional supports to renters moving from supportive housing into the private rental market. The BC Liberals and Greens offer more vague support for social housing investment, especially promoting cooperatives (UPDATE: more specifics from BC Liberals just released today!). The Greens also propose applying $500 million toward a new renter’s grant, aiming to bring rental payments for tenants down to no more than 30% of their income. It’s not yet clear whether this is simply an expansion of the current Rental Assistance Program offered by BC Housing, or meant to apply differently, but the potential pool of applicants in BC remains quite large.

Development

All of the parties offer something in the form of acknowledging the limited range of housing on offer in BC. Both the BC NDP and the BC Liberals place at least part of the blame on sluggish BC municipalities. Both parties push for streamlining municipal and provincial permitting processes that have slowed up and added expense to the development of new housing. The BC NDP also make a welcome proposal to eliminate parking minimums for projects near transit.

The BC Liberals add a variety of other proposals, pushing to match municipal zoning more directly to official community plans and potentially waive rezoning hearings for projects complying with plans. Similarly, the BC Liberals suggest strengthening and enforcing municipal adherence to regional growth targets. To match these “sticks” the BC Liberals would apply to municipalities, they also suggest “carrots” in the form of an incentive fund offered to municipalities expanding supply. Other welcome suggestions include digital tracking for development projects, enabling the identification of hold-ups in the approval process. Interestingly, the BC Liberals also suggest mixing a cautious approach toward rental zoning (recently enabled by the NDP) with provincial restrictions requiring replacement of rental apartments (which many municipalities already require). Finally, they suggest upping the mandated number of disability-accessible units for new developments. The BC Greens call for encouraging a “missing middle,” but offer the fewest specifics on development reform for getting there. Yet they embrace two proposals for reforming development that many in the non-profit housing sector have long called for, including both a capital fund to acquire old rental buildings when they come up for sale, preserving affordability, and the establishment of a land bank to support cooperative development.

Mix and Match!

Overall (and staying positive) there’s a lot to like in mixing and matching the housing platforms on offer. I like many of the NDP’s taxation and social housing ambitions (though I don’t like targeting satellite families and I’d up property taxes and social housing construction further); I’m happy with the Green’s embrace of supporting land banks for cooperatives; and it would be great to see many of the BC Liberals plans for reforming and improving the municipal role in approving housing development implemented (also shout out to the NDP here: yay for lifting parking minimums!) Let’s hope everyone keeps their good ideas on the table after the election’s over!

Return to the Airport!

October 6, 2020October 6, 2020 ~ Nathan Lauster ~ 1 Comment

A couple of months ago I took the blog for a visit to the airport to check out historical passenger data and see what’s happened since COVID. Today I want to return, both to provide an update and to pull YVR Passenger data (enplaned & deplaned pdf) together with BC CDC Flight Exposure data (full pdf), providing a check on air travel’s contributions to spreading COVID.

First the update!

We can see that through August (last month of data available as of today), flights are still gradually rising toward a return to 2019 levels, but they’ve still got a loooong way to go. Mostly the rise has been led by domestic air travel within Canada. We can zoom in, looking at monthly passenger totals for 2020 as a percentage of passenger totals for 2019.

Sure enough, by the end of August we’re back up to over a quarter of the Domestic air travel from the same month in 2019. International flights still remain far below 2019 levels, with the biggest drop in Transborder trips between Vancouver and cities in the USA. Miscellaneous International trips that mostly cover Latin America and the Caribbean have seen a recent decline from slightly higher numbers in June and July. Passengers to and from Asia Pacific destinations never dropped as much as other international passengers and have bounced back a little, and passengers to Europe appeared to rise through July and August.

So how are we doing containing COVID exposures on these flights? The BC CDC lists exposures by flight number, origin and destination, and affected rows, and as of today includes exposures through September 30, though given lags in reporting it’s possible the September listings aren’t yet complete (none have yet been listed for October). Here I separate inbound and outbound flight exposures for Vancouver by Origin/Destination Stream roughly matching YVR categories (I remain less certain exactly how flights to and from Mexico fit in, and have included them here as Misc. Intl).

Overall, it’s clear that COVID exposures on flights have declined and then risen again with flights overall between March and August, with the pattern likely continuing into September (again, we don’t yet know if September data is complete and we don’t have YVR passenger data for September yet). Domestic exposures dominate flight exposures overall, especially the rise in August and September.

Finally, we can combine the two sources of data to provide a rough estimate of the inbound and outbound specific risks associated with exposures. How many exposures do we see per 100,000 passengers for different streams of travel? Here I’ve given outbound exposures negative values, and inbound exposures positive values, which tells us something about the direction COVID is traveling relative to YVR during exposure events on flights. I’ve proxied September passenger data with August passenger data to match with September exposure data, and I’ve dropped International Miscellaneous flights, which mostly involve flights to and from Mexico and harder for me to confidently link to passenger data.

A few takeaways:

We get the sense that risks of exposures per 100,000 boardings are real, but generally pretty low, at least as discovered and reported by the BC CDC (where are there have been occasional transparency issues).
We can also see that while most YVR related COVID exposures are happening on Domestic flights between Vancouver and other Canadian cities, the risks of exposure on these flights tend to be lower than the risks of exposure on inbound international flights.
We get a peek at the gateway pattern by which international exposures tend to arrive at YVR from elsewhere, while YVR has tended, in recent months, to send more exposures to the rest of Canada than it receives from Domestic flights.
Finally, while all inbound international travel remains risky relative to domestic travel, European and Transborder (USA) flights generally alternate the lead for most risk, with Asia Pacific flights trailing. That said scanning the international exposure data reveals that European and Transborder risks are generally diverse across cities, while most recent Asia Pacific exposures seem to relate specifically to flights to and from Delhi.

Big takeaway: the tentative and on-going return of air travel will likely continue to contribute to the on-going return of COVID infections, both Domestic and International. Air travel provides a key link between the rise in cases elsewhere and what happens here, potentially turning visitors into vectors. Definitely something to keep an eye on as we continue into Fall!

Vancouver’s Crime Pandemic! That wasn’t.

September 27, 2020November 17, 2020 ~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

We now have over six months of pandemic conditions in Vancouver and crime data to (roughly) match. We also have all kinds of claims about crime flying around, sometimes pushed by the police (VPD) themselves, only heightened by click-seeking reporters and the vote-seeking politicians. So we should probably check into the data. Long story short: there’s scant evidence of a crime wave showing up in the VPD crime data.

First a quick round-up of claims. Let’s start with a recent police report, promoting the idea that crime, and particularly assaults, have risen. This was touted by various media reports and politicians as pointing toward a breakdown in law & order associated with the pandemic and prominent tent cities in parks near downtown. But the police report – though they failed to emphasize this point properly – explicitly referred to data from the first two quarters of the year. In other words, they mixed pre-pandemic and post-pandemic data from earlier in the year, and this data was used to make claims about conditions on the ground now. This was perhaps potentially useful to the VPD in the face of calls to defund the police, but bad form overall! The report has been joined to anecdotes, polls, and neighbourhood and political campaigning all pushing the idea of a pandemic-induced breakdown in public order.

Despite the VPD reporting only on data from January to June, regular monthly VPD data now extends through August. We can use this data to more carefully separate pre- and post-pandemic conditions. Let’s first do this for the most common crimes reported (i.e. those where trends are most easily distinguished from random variation). These include both violent (Assaults) and non-violent (Break & Enters, Thefts of Motor Vehicle, Thefts from Vehicles, Thefts up to and around $5,000, and Mischief) crimes, all of which tend to average more than 100 cases a month. We’ll compare all of 2019 to the pandemic period we’re currently experiencing. What’s that look like?

Let’s start with assaults, the most common violent crime (top lines above). It looks like any rise in assaults relative to 2019 occurred BEFORE the pandemic. Indeed, for July and August, we’re running well below where assaults were in 2019. Of course it’s possible that the composition of assaults have changed, with drunken brawls on Granville down, and hate crimes up. So it’s worth paying closer attention to the data than is available in VPD reporting. But there’s nothing about post-pandemic 2020 that looks like a violent crime wave.

The picture for common non-violent crimes is more suggestive. But here it looks like we’ve seen a dramatic drop in crime reporting associated with the pandemic. The seasonal pattern from 2019 whereby crime rises through the summer months looks like it might’ve been replicated in data from June to August of 2020, but at a much lower level overall relative to 2019. Looking at the most common crimes, we’re not in a crime wave. If anything we’re in a crime trough.

But does it cover the spots most identified as trouble spots by recent political rhetoric? The VPD data also allow us to break out data by neighbourhood. Here I’ll zoom in on Downtown Vancouver (the Central Business District) and the Strathcona neighbourhood, both of which surround and contain the neighbourhood of the Downtown Eastside, where many have recently claimed a breakdown in public order (also associated with tent cities in parks) is threatening public safety. What do assaults look like in these neighbourhoods?

The patterns for assaults are pretty similar in these neighbourhoods as what we see for the city as a whole, but there as some variations. Assaults downtown ran high in January and February, but seemed to drop dramatically at the beginning of the pandemic, and have since risen with the warm weather, but not to levels comparable level to 2019. In Strathcona there wasn’t any sustained drop in assaults early in the pandemic, but relative to 2019 they declined from heightened levels in January and February to roughly match and recently drop below 2019 patterns.

The pattern for non-violent common crimes looks much the same for Downtown and Strathcona as it does for the rest of Vancouver. There’s been a big and sustained drop in these kinds of crimes relative to 2019. If there’s been a breakdown in public disorder, it’s not showing up in common reported crime data.

Are we seeing anything different in less common crimes? I’m wary of monthly patterns in the data, but including March, we’ve now got six months of data since the pandemic began. So let’s look at all kinds of crime reported by the VPD and compare the six months of the pandemic (March – August 2020) to the data for the six months prior (September 2019 – February 2020), as well as the six months matching the same year-over-year period (March through August) from 2019.

Here we can see that there’s not a lot of variation in most crimes between how they’ve appeared in the pandemic relative to the prior six months or the same set of months last year. The most recent drop off in Assaults doesn’t really show up as notable across the full six month period. But the decline in Thefts of all kinds is striking and strong (as compared to the other crimes of Break & Enters and Mischief, which appear down relative to the prior six months). Overall, very little evidence to support a pandemic crime wave. But there is one exception to the trend…

What’s up with Arson?

Any interpretation of Arson data needs to be keep in mind that Arson is not a common crime, but let’s set aside my concern about random fluctuations to just take a peek at the monthly arson data. Is this a sustained rise, or driven by a weird month?

That looks… pretty sustained. Though arson cases generally remain rare relative to other kinds of crime (nowhere near my arbitrary cut-off of a hundred cases a month for common crimes), they appear to have gone up, mostly in conjunction with the pandemic itself. The one month during the pandemic where they drop below 2019 levels looks like a weird spike in arson in July of 2019.

It’s hard to fully interpret the arson data without more context. Properties left unattended subject to a particular form of mischief? Business owners weighing their insurance policies against the cost of staying open? Pretty interesting… but who knows? Not me. The consequences, as with the New Westminster Pier, can be terrible. But overall, arson is still pretty rare.

My big takeaway: we’re not seeing a big crime wave associated with the pandemic here in Vancouver. Anyone running on that theme would appear to be doing so with bad information or in bad faith.

If anyone wants to play around with the data themselves, I’ve downloaded the VPD monthly report pdfs into a common spreadsheet here, complete with the summary of data and figures above. Enjoy!

vpd_crime_2019_2020 Download

*** UPDATE Nov 17, 2020 ***

Given that crime and VPD remain in the news with the VPD’s survey on crime feelings and attempt to set up a new unit, I thought I’d update the chart to their latest data (now from September, but October should be out soon). The story remains consistent with the above. Feelings aside, no evidence of a pandemic crime wave, assaults comparable or below 2019, common property crimes still waaay down.

Homeless Counts and Migration Patterns in Metro Vancouver, Calgary, and Winnipeg

September 12, 2020September 13, 2020 ~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

People move. That includes people who end up getting counted as homeless. How should we interpret what homeless counts tell us about these people?

To an important extent, this question brings us back to fundamental interpretations of who gets counted. Is being counted as “homeless” interpreted as a social problem: the lack of enough accessible housing? Or is it being interpreted as a person problem: identifying the “homeless” as fundamentally different from housed people?

I’m a sociologist and a housing scholar, and I think homeless counts can be really useful indicators of the social problem of housing inaccessibility. We’ve got some great solutions to this problem, which basically come down to making more housing more accessible to more people. The alternative approach, interpreting homeless counts as identifying problem people, is… really problematic. The solutions it points toward tend to involve “fixing” people (at best?) or keeping them out entirely.

We can see an example of this problematic approach at work in a recent article, entitled: “Vancouver is Canada’s dumping ground for the homeless, and this needs to stop.” The language is offensive, immediately identifying those counted as homeless as more like trash than people, and pointing toward the need to keep them out. Sure enough, the gist of the piece is that Vancouver’s homelessness problem is being driven by problem people coming here for our mild weather in combination with the concentration of supports and services here and the lack of them elsewhere. This mixes a potentially good message (we need more housing and services and supports everywhere) with a bad message (so stop providing them here) as well as the aforementioned dehumanization.

From here on out, I’m going to set aside these portions of the argument and turn my attention toward a few of the empirical claims. Correspondingly, I’m also going to focus at the metropolitan level in terms of thinking about migration and homelessness, meaning I’m setting aside how people counted as homeless, as well as supports and services, are distributed within metro areas (my position, again, is that we need more housing, supports, and services, and every neighbourhood should have them). For the rest of this piece, I’m mostly going to return to my starting question: how should we interpret what homeless counts tell us about people who move? And I’m mostly going to do it by comparing patterns of migration as they show up in homeless counts in Metro Vancouver to Calgary and Winnipeg.

First let’s start with a few relevant claims from the “dumping ground” piece that are easy to knock down. Do people counted as homeless in BC disproportionately congregate in Metro Vancouver? That’s an easy one, and the answer is: no. As I showed awhile back with a post drawing upon coordinated provincial counts, on a per capita basis, Metro Vancouver has fewer people showing up in homeless counts than most other metro and non-metro locations across BC. Why use a per capita basis? Because people counted as homeless are people. And knowing what proportion of people get counted as homeless tells us something important about where we see problems with the accessibility of housing. These problems are widespread across BC rather than concentrated in Metro Vancouver.

What about more broadly? Is Metro Vancouver Canada’s “epicentre of homelessness”? Is it due to our mild weather as claimed in the piece above? Let’s look outside BC, comparing Vancouver to Calgary and Winnipeg (where no one’s claiming mild weather). If Vancouver was really the epicentre of Canada’s homelessness crisis, you’d think we would jump out when we control for the size of the surrounding population. But quite the opposite happens. Both Calgary and Winnipeg have more people showing up in homeless counts per 10,000 residents than in Vancouver.

So maybe Vancouver’s not the epicentre of where people are becoming homeless, but instead the place where people are disproportionately moving after they become homeless elsewhere? Except, when we look at the proportion of people counted as homeless who migrated to each city within the last year, it’s actually much higher in Calgary, and only a little lower in Winnipeg. Suddenly the idea that all Canada’s homeless people are moving to Vancouver because of the weather looks pretty… well… ludicrous.

It’s worth noting that Winnipeg was actually featured as the origin for a homeless man in Vancouver in the image accompanying the “dumping ground” piece. So we should definitely take a look at how Winnipeg’s Street Census makes available the origins of its interprovincial migrants who show up as homeless. Guess what: 23% of them came from BC!

Is Vancouver dumping its homeless on Winnipeg? That’s probably just as bad a take as the converse. A better take is that people move. And not just to Vancouver. And that people counted as homeless are first and foremost people.

But do people who show up in homeless counts move for different reasons than other people? We don’t actually have that data for Vancouver or Winnipeg. But Calgary has it! So just for comparison purposes, let’s set reason for move to Calgary in the past year for those who show up in Calgary’s Homeless Count alongside reason for move for a more general selection of the population. In this case, the most similar question and options on reason for move actually come from the USA’s Current Population Survey (Mobility Table 17), so we’ll plot the two together. (If you want to see more on reason for move data and comparability, have I got the post for you!)

The options are worded differently in places, but I’ve attempted to harmonize them as possible, and the correspondence is pretty clear. Main reasons for move fit into the same four broad categories (work & opportunity, family, housing, other) for those who end up homeless in Calgary as for all movers in the USA, and in roughly the same proportions. Where responses differ, they tend to indicate that migrants who end up counted as homeless are taking slightly bigger risks than migrants overall. For instance, fewer people who ended up homeless in Calgary moved with a job already secured, compared to those who moved looking for work. But overall, the patterns suggest that people who move and then show up in homeless counts seem to move for pretty much the same reasons as everybody else.

People move. And moving is actually kind of risky.

Mostly moving works out pretty well, and people find work and a place to live. But sometimes it doesn’t work out. So some people move on again or return to where they came from. Others, for various reasons, find themselves homeless. Are recent movers more likely to find themselves homeless than long-time residents? Let’s compare homeless count data to general mobility data to find out.

And there it is. Even though most people who show up in homeless counts are long-time residents, being a recent mover to a region is much, much riskier. For both intraprovincial and interprovincial migrants, moving to a new place is a brave thing. This makes intuitive sense. Recent movers have to find housing without the benefit of already having any. They join a much smaller pool of local residents displaced from their housing in the search for a new place to live without the benefit of an old place to hold onto. So overall, recent movers are much more likely to find themselves out of luck in the search for housing than long-time residents. This seems to be exactly what we see for both intraprovincial and interprovincial migrants. Why doesn’t the same pattern fit for international migrants? Several studies have aimed to answer this question, and the short answer is: because international migrants are both selected and supported differently. As a result, they’re much closer to long-term residents in terms of their reduced risk of becoming counted as homeless, even though the risk is still there.

Seeing as how they’re at greater risk for being counted as homeless, we should probably be doing more to support recent movers to our cities. ALL of our cities. How? By making more housing more accessible for them.

The resistance to making more housing more accessible sometimes comes from the xenophobic notion that housing should only go to local residents. That movers should be somebody else’s problem. There are many who’d prefer to erect walls around our cities, keeping new folks out. Other times it comes from the idea that anyone who can’t find housing must be defective, which is right where we started. And maybe it even comes from the notion that our mild weather means people don’t need housing quite as badly as elsewhere in Vancouver.

We can probably make the case for that last point by looking at how many people are left unsheltered here in Vancouver compared to Calgary and Winnipeg. Vancouver has fewer people counted as homeless per capita compared to Winnipeg and Calgary, but many more people left unsheltered. Our mild weather doesn’t seem to be drawing people here in any disproportionate fashion, but it might be enabling a callous disregard for housing needs.

On a final note, the high proportion of those without shelter among the people counted as homeless in Vancouver might also account for the recent reactionary stance taken by many local politicians and activists. The visibility of those left without shelter makes homelessness seem a bigger problem here than elsewhere. Interpreted correctly, the statistics tell us something else. It’s not a bigger problem here. And the problem is not a floating problem population that ends up in Vancouver. The biggest problem we have is a local lack of generosity leaving less shelter space and less housing available for those who need it in Vancouver. We can fix that. And we should.

Methodological note: While the Metro Vancouver count covers the entire metro area, the coverage of the Calgary and Winnipeg counts may be more constrained to the central cities of each metro area. This may result in a slight conservative bias, undercounting those who would show up in a homeless count in Calgary and Winnipeg covering the entire metro areas involved. At the same time, Calgary and Winnipeg dominate the populations of their metropolitan areas in a way which Vancouver, as a central city, does not. So I use metro populations as denominators in all cases in assessing the relative prevalence of homelessness in those cities relative to general populations and migration streams. I obtain comparative statistics on metro areas via StatsCan Tables 17-10-0136-01 ; 17-10-0135-01 ; 17-10-0141-01 for homeless count reference years, or, in the case of estimating migration-based risks, for the periods leading up to reference years. I use the data to estimate populations of non-migrants (stayers & local movers), intraprovincial, interprovincial, and international migrants for each metro to use as baselines for establishing risk of showing up in homeless counts. All data and calculations are available in this spreadsheet. Please send any corrections or questions my way!

homelessmobility_van_cal_win Download

Keeping the Leavers

August 28, 2020August 28, 2020 ~ Nathan Lauster ~ 1 Comment

co-authored by Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at mountainmath

Do people select cities from diverse alternatives? Or do cities select residents from diverse flows of people?

The answer is pretty much: both.

People can look around and consider where they want to end up. And cities, through municipal policies, can and do work to select their residents. EXCEPT cities can’t do this directly. At least across North America, cities generally aren’t allowed to establish and maintain their own immigration policies. When they try to do so, the courts shoot them down, because both Canada and the USA enshrine the right of people to move within their borders. Cities can’t stop them. But cities have a big role in deciding how much room to make for people. And they also generally get to decide what form any added room should take. Many, for instance, only allow the most expensive forms of new housing, like single-family detached on large lots, selecting for wealthier residents. So that’s how cities select their residents.

The fact that it’s a two-way selection process, with both people and cities doing the selecting, makes it quite difficult to forecast something like future housing needed to prepare for a city’s population growth. Yet this is what cities, including Vancouver, are often tasked with doing by way of justifying their policies.

One way of going about this is to argue that past population growth is our best estimate to forecast future housing demand. This is a bad argument on many levels as we have explained at length before. In expensive gateway cities, like Vancouver, this often gets accompanied by nativist notions that population growth is driven almost entirely by international migration as net domestic migration is small. But net estimates obscure the actual size of flows, where local and domestic movers predominate and make up the majority of those occupying new housing.

More troubling is the implicit logic that elevates domestic in-migrants over international in-migrants, providing only the former a legitimate claim to the place freed up by a domestic out-migrant. So far, freedom for movement in Canada extends to immigrants, as it should. And not all immigrants come from outside of Canada. Increasingly non-permanent residents turn into immigrants (including both of us!) This simply results in a drop in net non-permanent residents and an increase in immigrants in these stats, without anyone actually moving. This speaks to the complexity of how cities select their residents from diverse flows of people. A thought experiment might be helpful to better illuminate how it works in practice.

Creating room for people to stay

First let’s look at past population growth. BC Stats splits this up neatly into several sub-categories, which we can think of as flows.

Net population growth for Metro Vancouver has hovered around 28k people a year. But it’s not like this is a one-way flow, about 50k people leave Metro Vancouver every year and somewhere around 75k people come. Some people have a really hard time making room for newcomers. But maybe people are more sympathetic to people leaving. Of course many people leave Metro Vancouver for greener pastures, a better job, move for university or other personal reasons. But the “Leaving Vancouver” letters (practically a genre at this point) are testament that not all people moving away think of their moves in positive terms. Many feel squeezed out. People keep talking about friends that left because they could not find adequate housing in Vancouver.

So let’s say, for the sake of argument, that one out of five people moving out of Metro Vancouver to elsewhere in Canada really wanted to stay but could not make it work. And, of course, we already know that feeling “forced” to move is strikingly common in Vancouver, even for those who remain. So let’s say we are sympathetic to the people who leave town and would actually like to insure enough room for them to stay. What would that take?

That’s easy to check, all we need to do is reduce the size of the inter- and intra-provincial out-migrant buckets in the above graph by 20%.

The net effect is that fewer people would have been leaving Metro Vancouver, while the same people came. And our population growth went up by about 30%. Which means that we should have built 30% more housing than we did over the years to make that possible.

Now some readers will argue that that’s not how things work. If we had built 30% more housing, that does not mean that one in five of the people that moved would have gotten to stay. Some of that housing would have been taken up by people that wanted to move to Metro Vancouver but could not find adequate housing, but with more housing they could have made it work and would have out-bid some of those that were hoping to stay.

And with more housing available, some new households might be created that might otherwise not exist. Maybe someone will move out of their parents place earlier and take up one of those new units without adding to population growth at all. And in return one of the 1 in 5 people that had hoped to stay might still end up feeling forced to leave again.

And people arguing that are of course exactly right. That’s the point of this exercise, housing and population growth are endogenous. Which is kind of a fancy way of saying that people select cities from diverse alternatives AND that cities select residents from diverse flows of people.

Empty homes – the ultimate anti-housing red herring

Here in Vancouver, those resisting making room for more people to stay and arrive like to point toward a supposed mismatch of housing growth to household growth between 2001 and 2016, supposedly leaving lots of empty homes. This time window is of course chosen deliberately to include the change in census methods 2001-2006, and this talking point mostly goes away when properly accounting for that. To avoid adding homes people will still point to some vague notion of dwellings being left empty, even though we have better data on empty homes than ever before and there are very few problematic cases paying the Empty Homes Tax or Speculation and Vacancy Tax left in the region.

How should we do population projections?

So given the endogeneity issues: how should we be doing future population projections? In high demand areas like Metro Vancouver we should start from housing growth. That’s what cities can control. How many condos will be built? How many rental homes? How many non-market homes? How many infill homes? And given a scenario of housing growth, we can model what population growth might look like. How many people would move here from elsewhere in BC? How many from elsewhere in Canada? How many from outside the country? How many people would move away? It’s not an exact science, but demographers can build decent models once we know how much housing is being built and how cities are trying to select their residents. And the public can look at different scenarios of housing growth and the resulting scenarios of population change and use that to have a more informed discussion about where they want the city to go as well as who they want to enable to stay.

As usual, the code for this post is available on GitHub for anyone to reproduce or adapt for their own purposes.

Let’s Visit the Airport!

August 7, 2020August 7, 2020 ~ Nathan Lauster ~ 1 Comment

So, what’s happening at the airport these days?

Here in Vancouver (or more specifically, Richmond), I discovered that YVR actually posts some of their data. This is great! I’m going to look at their recent passenger data to get a sense of two things. First, how much air travel into and through Vancouver has grown in recent years. Hello globalization! Second, how much air travel into and through Vancouver has shrunk in recent months. Hi there world-wide pandemic!

Let’s take a look, first at annual data, which YVR has posted from 1992 on. Of note, this series begins just YVR completed its international terminal expansion in 1996. Also, the series starts after Vancouver’s first global party event (Expo 86), but before its second (2010 Olympics), both of which are mentioned in YVR’s declarative history of the airport.

The data cover all “enplaned and deplaned” passengers, so everyone coming through YVR for air travel. They break down the passengers by domestic, transborder, and other international travel. From 1995 onward, they also helpfully break out Asia-Pacific and European passengers from other miscellaneous international. My working assumption is that passenger categories mostly mirror YVR’s organization of flight destination information, so that Domestic covers all flights within Canada, Transborder covers flights to the USA, Asia-Pacific covers flights to Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and Australia, and Europe covers flights to the EU plus the UK. Misc. Intl. covers everyone else, but probably mostly picks up flights to Mexico and the Caribbean / Central America. Of note, there’s enough ambiguity in labeling that it’s possible flights to Mexico fit in the Transborder category instead, but I’ll assume we’re just talking about the immediate border there.

The big patterns are dramatic growth in passengers between 1992 and 2019. There are waves to the growth, which really seems to kick off in earnest with the expansion of the international terminal in 1996 before retracting a bit by 2003, then expanding in near linear fashion till the recession of 2009. From there, once again we’re back into a dramatic rise until… well… 2020. Where we don’t yet have full data, but needless to say, we expect we’ll see a drop. Once all the data’s in, we’ll probably end up somewhere back in 1992 territory. We’ll have a look at monthly data in a moment, but first let’s also point out two other patterns.

First, despite the name-check of the 2010 Olympics in airport marketing materials, we see no real evidence that 2010 was anything special for passenger traffic. It fits right about where we’d expect it to be on the ten-year rise between 2009 and 2019.

Second, the growth in passenger air travel through YVR has been widespread. It’s not driven by any one category of destination. But the rise of globalization is apparent. Domestic air travel between 1992 and 2019 more than doubled. But transborder travel nearly tripled and other international passengers nearly quadrupled over the same time period. Other international passenger travel is only broken down by Europe, Asian Pacific and other categories from 1995 on. Here we can see that the rise in Asian Pacific destinations leads international growth, but the growth remains widespread. Of note: seats for Hong Kong appear to be only the second most common destination outside of Canada, just behind seats for Los Angeles. Despite Hong Kong’s extensive ties to Vancouver, it’s hard to make out for certain any particular upswing in flights to the city surrounding its handover to China in 1998.

Back to the present! Let’s zoom in on 2019 to 2020:

There’s our pandemic effects! Normally February begins the climb back to summer travel highs. Instead, March saw a big drop with quarantine restrictions put in place, and the drop only got bigger in April. Since then there’s been a very modest recovery into May and June, which likely continued into July (data forthcoming). After a couple of months of quiet, I can certainly hear the jets back in the sky again. But they’re still not carrying very many passengers.

Here’s 2020 again, looking at percentage of 2019 monthly passenger data by category:

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun
Domestic	99%	102%	56%	4%	6%	13%
Trans-border	97%	96%	44%	1%	1%	2%
Asia Pacific	99%	76%	45%	5%	4%	7%
Europe	108%	108%	62%	2%	1%	1%
Misc. Int’l	113%	118%	62%	1%	2%	5%

We can see that the biggest recovery, so far, is in the Domestic category. Not surprising, given that the provinces have lifted most of their quarantines against travel within the country. Canada continues to impose a travel restrictions for other international travel. But the next biggest recovery is for flights between Vancouver and Asia Pacific, where COVID recoveries so far tend to look the strongest. Misc. Int’l flights, continue, but travel to the US and Europe remains almost non-existent. At least as of June (Europe began lifting travel restrictions in July). Of note, of course, we’re still experiencingair travel related exposures (h/t Jens).

Every decent human being is looking forward to the end of the pandemic. But do we want air travel to come roaring back to where it was? There are lots of things to think about, like the emissions associated with air travel. But there’s also little doubt that here in Terminal City, air travel is now how an enormous proportion of our visitors arrive and how many Vancouverites get around. So no matter what, it’s worth keeping an eye on the airport.

Lots for Sale

July 30, 2020August 19, 2020 ~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

I’m currently enjoying Desmond Fitz-Gibbon’s Marketable Values: Inventing the Property Market in Modern Britain. It’s a fascinating book on how British real estate was transformed from estates granted and traded in private transactions bound by custom (think of landed nobility but also the Commons pre-enclosure) into something that could be bought and sold at auction and described in terms of a market, mostly over the course of the late 18th and 19th Centuries.

I was curious about this book for lots of reasons, not least because it seemed British property practices often spread to colonies, as in Canada. But as described by Fitz-Gibbon, this was actually a two-way street, and experiences in real estate at the peripheries of Empire also often informed practices back in England.

At any rate, the book and related projects have me re-examining the creation and marketing of properties here in Vancouver. Head on over to the Vancouver Archives and search for “lots” to have a look. We can see maps of surveyed properties to be sold and advertisements for the land that would become the City of Vancouver. Crucially, all of this property was created from unceded land claimed by the Crown in an enormous act of theft amid a series of pandemics spreading across BC’s First Nations. Locally, the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh held lands that were carved up into properties to be granted or sold by the Government of British Columbia.

Let’s take a look. The first lots for sale show up for the townsite of Granville in 1870, some 16 years prior to the (renamed) City of Vancouver’s incorporation (archival links: left, right). The lots, carved out of the government reserve, cover old Gastown between Carrall, Hastings, Cambie, and Water St. The latter remains mostly underwater in the map, but the surveyors imagined the future land that now extends beyond Water. Note the disregard for existing buildings outside of lot lines in the map! Several lots (circled) had already been sold or otherwise issued grants of ownership.

By 1886, the railroad had been promised to the City, and in turn, Vancouver had been promised to the railroad. The Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR) obtained enormous land grants from the province in downtown Vancouver, extending south across False Creek, in exchange for establishing their western terminus in the City. They made similar deals with nearby land owners, obtaining every third lot in the West End (famously pre-empted by the Three Greenhorns) and other districts nearby. The land was quickly cleared of trees and sold off in a speculative frenzy. One of the fires used to clear the brush famously ended up burning the whole city down shortly after its incorporation. But the clearing had to continue apace in order to sell off all the new properties being subdivided and marketed abroad.

The maps above were printed using the same underlying survey and land subdivision plan, originally authored by CPR land commissioner Lauchlan Hamilton in 1887 (archival links: left, right), whose signature remains on each map (see more from Derek Hayes wonderful Historical Atlas of Vancouver). The more weathered map on the left is annotated and coloured to represent clearing status in 1887-1888, with lots in blue fully cleared, and lots in red just waiting the hauling off of lumber piles. On the right, the same underlying map has been turned into an international sales brochure by 1889, adding lots in Mount Pleasant and highlighting Vancouver’s location alongside travel lines and connections relative to Liverpool, Hong Kong, and Sydney.

The Provincial Government also got in on the sales, slowly releasing their own surveyed and subdivided holdings onto the market via auction. The lots auctioned below would ultimately become the Western third of Kitsilano, centred around McBride Park (archival links: left, right). Sales agents played up the advantageous location of subdivided lots and blocks within lot 540 near the CPR holdings, arguing that the CPR might install a port nearby.

Any Lot of Block not cross-lined on Map herewith, offered for Sale, WILL BE SOLD WITHOUT RESERVE – Adjoining this property the Canadian Pacific Railway Company have located their Docks, it being the nearest Ocean Shipping Point of Vancouver And the place Selected for the Commercial Traffic of the Trans-Pacific Fleet.

Joshua Davies, Auctioneer.

Instead, of course, the CPR subdivided and sold off most of the nearby holdings within their land grant as well. The size of the grant, visible above and comprising roughly a quarter of the present-day City, says a great deal about why Vancouver’s often referred to as a “Company Town.” The company was the CPR, and its business was primarily real estate (see further discussion in Doug Harris’s great piece on “A Railway, A City, and the Public Regulation of Private Property: CPR v. City of Vancouver“).

By 1906, some provincially owned lots remained for sale in District Lot 540. These were auctioned off with other provincially owned lots available in Hastings Townsite to the east and South Vancouver to the south and west (marked in red on left map below). Of note: western portions of South Vancouver would secede to form Point Grey in 1908, before ultimately reuniting in the amalgamated City Vancouver in 1929 (archival links: left, right).

Provincially owned lots in the Hastings Townsite went up for auction again in 1909, as advertised in the map on the right. These were sold on the basis of their proximity to “important and extensive railway yards” associated with the Great Northern Railway and the prominent “99-foot” wide Renfrew Street. Times were given for transit options:

These lots can be reached on the 2:30 Great Northern Railway daily. After 1st April by the First Avenue B.C.E.R. cars, thence along Renfrew Street. Just here will be one of the most important suburban railway stations around the City. TERMS easy; one-fourth cash, BALANCE 6, 12, 18 and 24 months. INTEREST 7%.

Hastings Townsite would vote to amalgamate with the City of Vancouver in 1910. According to an advertisement for the vote in the Vancouver World (dug up by John Mackie):

At last women will have a voice in municipal affairs. On December 10th, if they are registered land owners, women will be able to cast a vote to say whether Hastings Townsite will be annexed by the City of Vancouver or not. In fact, everyone holding property in the said townsite will be given an opportunity. Anglo-Saxons, Orientals, Hindoos, and Africans alike, will be entitled to have a voice in such an important question.

Property ownership entitled owners to a vote in this particular municipal affair, potentially providing a voice to many groups, including most noted above, kept from voting by explicitly sexist and racist legislation at the time. Little wonder that immigrants and others facing discrimination have often devoted their energies toward purchasing property as soon as possible.

Of course, haters gonna hate. And exclusionary racists gonna discriminate by race. By 1927, the westernmost parts of Point Grey were subdivided and put up for sale. Westmount Park was advertised as The Subdivision Superb, an exclusive set of lots still tucked away North of 4th, just west of Blanca before the UBC Endowment Lands. Lots were sold not on the basis of nearby industry, but rather on beautiful views, nearness of beaches and golf courses and, perhaps most crucially, restrictions:

Realizing the necessity of guarding and conserving the character of the development of such a property as Westmount Park, the following restrictions have been placed on the sale of lots:

For a period of 20 years, one residence only may be built on any one lot.

No residence of a vale of less than $4,000 may be erected.

No business or commercial building may be erected.

No lots will or may be sold to Orientals.

In the Westmount subdivision we see covenants restricting properties to single-family residential uses directly tied up with classist and racist exclusion. A good reminder that real estate subdivision and sale simply left to the market was terrible at keeping out “undesirables.” The making of a truly exclusive neighbourhood required market restrictions and careful control over development. This particular version of “community not commodity” may have been quite useful to the exclusive agents at Orr-Hamilton Ltd. in selling the lots of Westmount Park (archival link to brochure below).

On a happier note, let’s turn our attention to a bonus map from the Archives. Here we see Kitsilano Indian Reserve No. 6 still set aside on a map of lots in Vancouver in use from 1935 to 1940. Quoting Doug Harris, this was a time period more than twenty years after “…the City and Province induced the Squamish residents to leave the reserve” in 1913, but before “it was formally surrendered” in 1947 (p. 10). We also see the right-of-way forced through by the CPR long before this time. The Squamish reached a multi-million dollar settlement over the shady circumstances of the surrender of the Indian Reserve in 1999. Coming full-circle back to the railroad, in 2002 the Squamish won back the land that had earlier been taken as a right-of-way by the CPR. Of course this win happened only after the CPR, true to form, attempted to sell the land for redevelopment.

So it is that the peculiarly shaped parcel of land pictured above – extending beneath and around the Burrard Bridge kind of like a big curvy triangle – was returned to the Squamish Nation (archival link). It’s now under development planning as Sen̓áḵw, a massive project aiming to create some 6,000 dwellings, largely much needed purpose-built rental, all tucked in around the Burrard Bridge. See detailed renderings here.

All in all, it’s way too easy to fall into the trap of naturalizing property as currently recognized on land titles in Vancouver. To forget how it was stolen in the midst of successive pandemics, marked off by survey line, written down on paper, then granted or sold off to the highest bidder. We need reminders. Which is one of many reasons to support the City of Vancouver Archives and all their wonderful digital imaging work. They’ve kept the receipts!