Vancouver
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.
There has been some recent confusion that got confounded further about transit-oriented development in Vancouver harbouring a large number of non-primary residence homes. Good data is important in moving forward in Vancouver’s crazy housing market. Without proper context, a couple of data points can serve to paint a very misleading picture of what is happening. So I decided to fill in some gaps on the very narrow question of understanding the CT level numbers that get tossed around.
With reporting on the new census numbers gaining traction, and now Mayor Robertson picking up on single family neighbourhoods losing population we thought it is time to crunch some numbers.
Why does it need number crunching? All the reporting so far is based on looking at CT (Census Tract) aggregates, like e.g. in the map shown and linked to the right. But there is actually no single CT in the City of Vancouver that only contains RS zoning.
