Vancouver
The dire home affordability in Vancouver weights heavily on everyone’s mind and it seems like we reflexively try to explain everything that is happening, or that we think is happening, though that lens. After we seem to have thankfully left the meme that millennials are fleeing Vancouver behind, an article claiming that Vancouver’s middle-aged population is leaving keeps popping up in my Twitter feed. The data point in the story is that between 2006 to 2016 the City of Vancouver saw a 13% drop in the number of people in the 40 to 44 year age group.
Recently there was some discussion at my son’s school about the hot lunch program, and who should pay for those who need a subsidy. Which made me curious how that works. Here is what I learned.
Student Vulnerability Before we can talk about the VSB meal program, we need to talk about student vulnerability. VSB’s program concentrates its resource where the need is highest. Schools get ranked into tiers depending on the proportion of vulnerable students and categories and resources get attributed by tier.
The night before the council hearing discussing the character home zoning review and changes to duplex zoning we decided to spend some time understanding for who we keep 67% of residential land zoned as “single family” (RS), and another 2% as quasi single family in First Shaugnessey (FSD) and 9% as “duplex” (RT). Keeping things simple, let’s just look at RS.
Who Can Afford To Buy? That’s a pretty easy question to answer.
Over the backdrop of Vancouver’s rising real estate values the exhibition of the “Vienna Model” at the Museum of Vancouver has triggered lots of discussions about what Vancouver could learn from cities like Wien. There are many angles to approach this, one of them that has received a lot of attention is the much larger proportion of government owned subsidized housing in Wien compared to Vancouver. In this post we want to focus on a different angle: land use.
The fate of young families in Vancouver is a frequent news topic. And as Vancouver is growing it is important to understand how families navigate the sometime challenging environment and what choices and compromises they make.
So we decided to take a closer look at where families and their children live in Vancouver over the last decade and how they fit into the rest of Vancouver. I had most of scripts already assembled over the long weekend to provide some data for a story by Mike Hager, so I decided to tidy things up and add some visuals.
