Don Buchanan sends along an article from New Geography: Vancouver: Planner’s Dream, Middle Class Nightmare.
With a reiteration of familiar arguments, the Calgary author lays the blame on our ‘land-use restrictions’ such as the ALR and Green Zone:
To be sure, geography deserves much of the blame for Vancouver’s high housing costs. But a large chunk of the blame lies with restrictive municipal and provincial land use policies. …
In 1972, the provincial government passed legislation aimed at protecting BC farmland. This left less than half of the already scarce land in Greater Vancouver off limits to developers. As a result, the city is circled by undeveloped land, referred to as the Green Zone. The Green Zone acts as a de facto urban growth boundary, largely designed to prevent sprawl.
I note the article omits discussion of interest rates, liquidity of credit, tax incentives, incomes and a host of complicating economic policies. It’s almost impossible to draw definitive conclusions from all these interacting influences – but that doesn’t seem to stop commentators from doing so when it comes to land-use policy.
Not to mention a variable that – when measured in real dollars – increasingly determines whether low- and middle-income residents can afford to live in Vancouver.
Do they have to own cars?
Precisely Gord. The ALR actually does a huge favour to Metro Vancouver in providing some limits on how far infrastructure networks have to be spread. I recall when I was with the ALC seeing a desk drawer plan that one of the chief engineers at MOT had, basically envisioning a wide network of limited access freeways across the entire Fraser Valley and out to Hope, including parallel highways to the TCH north of the Fraser and to the south, slicing right through the heart of the ALR. That is the kind of infrastructure that would have been needed to support the Calgary model in the Lower Mainland. At the significant cost of all that “undeveloped” farmland in the ALR. When muncipal planners appealed to ALC staff for exclusions from the ALR to deal with “a million more people in the lower mainland in 30 years”, former ALC planner Barry Smith used to quip: “Feeding them all will be a hell of a job, but we think we have enough land to do it”.
I find it hard to argue with this:
“It is a very attractive place for those who can afford it. Nevertheless, creating a city fit only for the wealthiest segments of society and non-families is hardly something to be proud of.”
s – I don’t think anyone is arguing that Vancouver doesn’t have an affordability problem. The article Gord links to is making the claim that the unaffordability is due to the fact that Vancouver didn’t sprawl all over its farmland. (corrleation does not equal causation)
Clearly the article is speaking of the metropolitan area not the City of Vancouver. It seems to me that there are quite a few middle class families spread across the 20 some municipalities of metro, including many I know. Some of these folks even live in the city, although not many in traditional single detached homes. There have been a number of articles over the years noting families that have decided to live in the West End, or Yaletown and forego the yard, and the car. The last time I looked prices in Calgary were not exactly low either, even with the apparently wide open expansion frontier they favour there.
If a shortage of land (for whatever reason) was causing restrictions on housing supply that was making housing affordable, you’d expect that rents would also be sky-high – but they’re not.
The divergence between rents and prices is a clear marker of a housing bubble. The severe volatility of housing prices over the last 7 years or so (sharp rise for 5 years, plummeting for one year, sharp rise for another year, now seemingly headed for another plummet) also belies any explanation that moves in incremental fashion, such as increasing densification.
Should be ‘unaffordable’ in my first line above, obviously…
Tessa has a good comment in the page of the original article.
that said, people against “land use control”, can become quite vocal when it come to talk of the ALR and other greenbelt…but we don’t heard them that often on the zoning of current residential neighborhood.
As states Tessa, those constraints certainly restraint the housing stock (But does there is an housing stock issue? Delcan has a god take on it) and it could be economically much more efficient to relax them.
Also, inferring that because Vancouver doesn’t have freeway make it automobile unfriendly, is quite misleading:
Vancouver doesn’t experiment the level of Congestion of Seattle, LA or Toronto, and in fact it is most of the time faster to move by car in Vancouver than in LA.
That said, Steve Lafleur has a point when he says about the lane house: ” by increasing the revenue generating potential of houses, it may actually increase the cost of purchasing a single dwelling home. After all, if the potential rental income of a single dwelling unit increases, the market price of the unit is likely to do the same”:
he is right, and it is where the city is completely wrong headed on the topic.
I’ve read previously that as an investment, housing barely keeps up with inflation over the long term and depending on locale (think of places like Prince George) may offer no better long term investment security than purchasing a car. Nevertheless by one metric it is getting harder to engter the market – the ratio between cost of housing and annual income. When I purchased my house in relatively more affordable Victoria in 1996, it cost three times my annual income at the time. Now that I make about twice what I did then, if I entering the market for the first time and wanted to buy the house I currently live in, it would cost almost 6 times my current much greater annual income.
I totally agree with Voony traveling by car in Vancouver is not affect even though we don’t have freeways through our city. One thing I find that does effect the traffic is if we have power and for the last three black outs I have noticed that traffic does become more congested after the black outs but as long as we have power traffic is smoothly flowing.
Why, thank you, Vooney. It’s interesting you raise the point of difficulty of driving in Vancouver, and I have to agree. I live on 12th Avenue and cars zip by at speeds often approaching what they would on a highway, and it likely moves a similar amount of traffic, yet it does this on a very thin, neighbourhood-street with traffic lights. First Avenue is quite similar, and these streets tend to perform highway functions without being highways.
Is there really an appetite to fix the housing affordability problem in BC? Any increase in affordability would mean a decrease in housing values – great for those of us who are young and haven’t had an opportunity to buy, not so great for anyone who bought in the last five years or anyone who had hoped to sell their million dollar home and retire in Barbados.
Richard Florida has an interesting take: http://www.creativeclass.com/creative_class/2010/08/24/the-great-housing-policy-distortion/
@canadianveggie: If you believe the rich should get rich and the poor should get poorer with fewer chances further between to cross class boundaries, then yes, you might want ever-increasing land values. If you actually believe in a fair society, or even an urban future at all, then we need affordability. We can’t have cities in the future if they’re all just full of retirees and that’s it.
Of course, you can create extra supply and affordability simply by building more units, and more rental, in the same amount of land, and do so without affectnig land values. But we won’t ever solve the overall problem of affordability that way.
In the end, those landowners who look only at their house price are killing the city for their own personal piggy bank.