Penny Coupland has a question for you excellently informed people:
I wonder if there’s anyone on your blog who can comment on the whole (local, BC, global) economics/personal economics of living downtown without a car versus in the ‘burbs and driving for everything. Maybe your blog commenters can provide some up-to-date numbers.
You have some excellently informed people on the blog – really enjoyed the stuff on the economics of home building in Vancouver.
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She’s wondering because of this:
Brookfield RPS crunched the data for Maclean’s, looking at how much prices for a detached home decline the farther you get from downtown. … With just one exception, prices dropped steadily the farther you get from each city’s central business district, although the rate of depreciation varies widely.
In Vancouver, where average prices within a 10-minute drive of downtown top the list at $1.5 million, real estate values fall by an average of $20,600 per minute, as one speeds over a bridge or two into surrounding communities.
(Click on the image to the right to explore interactive maps showing how house prices change for each minute you drive away from downtown in Vancouver ….)
My first take would be that the chart implies you only ever make a single trip, when in reality, the decision to locate in a place that requires driving, means you will probably be deciding to make that trip twice a day for the rest of your life, in addition to multiple other trips that will now require time spent in a car (and all the extra work required to pay for that car’s care & feeding)
This.
Also too as you move away from downtown (in most municipalities) the number of transportation options decrease. Walking becomes very difficult and good luck waiting for a bus. Cabs will cost an arm and a leg and since everyone already has a car there isn’t a car sharing network.
In downtown I may walk to the store, in the burbs I am likely driving even if as the crow flies the store is a closer distance than it is downtown.
Wherever you live, your trips will be centred on that location.
If you move to the suburbs (and have a family) it’s highly unlikely that you’d be making trips downtown very often (other than maybe a daily commute) as the suburbs offer all the shops and services you’d need (at reasonable prices compared to downtown where high rent, congestion, etc increase prices). The choice also depends on whether both wage-earners work downtown. I think often one will work downtown and the other closer to “home” – they’d use their workplaces to decide which house is convenient for both.
If you are dependent on the car, your travel patterns will also change – perhaps becoming more efficient so you don’t have to drive so much for short trips. Grocery shopping may change from being a daily or twice a week occurrence to being once every week or two weeks (loading up the car each time). And don’t kid yourself – downtown residents do drive to buy groceries – simply because of the weight and volume of the goods (not to mention skyhigh prices downtown). And driving the kids to school isn’t just a suburban practice.
I think one of the “economics” factors of living in a house is just the operational costs each year. Heating and powering a house is expensive, so is maintaining the garden and the infrastructure. Then there are repairs, and the pressure to “upgrade” or “update”. Not to mention property taxes.
I am not sure why people make the assumption that maintenance costs magically disappear in a condo. Ask anyone who has ever had an assessment and they will set you straight on that score. And some monthly maintenance fees on condos are shocking.
It can even out though. Closer to the centre you can get cheaper food and transportation. Spend less of your day just travelling and more of your day living.
But it’s not for everyone, no place is and that’s why I’m glad there are different types of places to choose from.
Too each his own is a powerful concept and we should certainly apply it to housing. The challenge comes when one choice of place imposes costs on others. Do we still say, “to each his own” when one person’s choice of housing requires a subsidy from others, or pollutes another’s air, or puts another’s live at risk?
Choice of lifestyle really matters. We have two kids in a small condo close to downtown. We don’t have a craft/hobby/maker space or a rec room. So, we go out (and pay) for the kids’ activities. And, once we’re out, if the kids are hungry, we head to the nearest coffeeshop/restaurant.
I grew up in a house, playing in the basement/yard/tree and going to the fridge when I got hungry. My parents definitely didn’t spend the money that we’re spending. Our choice though. Might be regretting it ;).
Btw, bus fare for the four of us ain’t cheap. The more kids you have, the cheaper a car gets, especially if you have to go from here to there to there. Plus, dragging/carrying sleeping kids around in the rain on multiple transfers on a busy B-line is a really friggin nightmare. Been there. Done (and still do) that. So glad my kids don’t nap as much as they used to.
In my experience, living downtown (or otherwise close to work) results in savings in commuting costs, but those savings are factored into the price to the home. For example, I live downtown and walk to work and, as a result, I was able to pay more for our condo. So, in the end, it kind of balances out, IMO.
I live near the Yaletown Canada Line stop and, at the time it was being built, I was advised by a realtor that it would increase the value of the condo. I don’t know if it did, but I think there is definitely a perception that buyers will put savings realized from avoiding commuting into the purchase price of a home.
I’ll also +1 Janda’s comment above, about different people liking different things. I too am glad that there are different types of places for people to live.
Anyone got any numbers on this?
Given how much a car costs to own and run every year, getting to many things in the burbs will involve a car ride thus getting regular daily exercise is harder so you’re more likely to suffer health issues due to inactivity, I wondered if the Personal Economics of car-free close to Vancouver made the housing cost savings of burb living a wash.
I.e. does this hold for Personal Economics?:
Burb home cost + Car owning/running costs + Health costs of diseases of inactivity = Extra cost of home close enough to bike/walk for everything (assuming this person actually does use active transportation)
On the Whole Economics level, does this balance out?:
Comprehensive costs of transportation (as given to us by George Poulos*) = Societal benefits of cheaper homes in the burbs
*http://pricetags.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/george-poulos-comprehensive-costs-of-transportation-in-vancouver-1/
Some people prefer space and a yard and low density .. many I’d argue over high density living.
What is nice for a single, fit 20’s person may not be so nice for a family of 4 once they are in their 30’s to 50’s .. and again some seniors love urban lifestyles in their 60’s-80’s and some prefer a leisurely life on a golf course or in more rural Fraser Valley.
As sch any large city has to provide a wide range of housing choices.
One size does not fit all !
Variety is required.
It’d be hard to compare fitness levels. Gardening is supposedly one of the best exercises you can get. And, kids in a cul-de-sac with a hockey net and bicycles could be more active than a lot of Xbox apartment kids.
Because we all know that kids in the suburbs don’t play video games.
The point is that in a walkable neighbourhood, lots of walking just comes naturally, no effort required, as a part if doing all the stuff you need to do anyway. An activity like gardening requires one to carve out time after doing all the other stuff.
But all that is still missing the real issue – do people actually pay for the costs of infrastructure of their preferred lifestyle or do they receive a subsidy from others?
“do people actually pay for the costs of infrastructure of their preferred lifestyle ” .. that is indeed a very good question. The answer is usually “it depends” .. and it depends what you measure and how you calculate an ROI on investments.
One needs to look at the entire tax base paid by a new suburb of say 1000 new homes of say $750,000/home paying $5000/year each in property taxes or $5M annually. Using a capitalization rate of perhaps 5% that would mean $100M investment is justified to collect $5M a year. Did they pay $100M, or $100,000 per house for their right to live there, besides land cost to provinces and cities ? More or less, I’d say yes to that as most cities charge lot levies of $20-$50,000 plus water and sewer and roads costs might be another $60-70,000/lot on average.
Perhaps the provincial feeder road ought to be charged back to them as well, and as such perhaps they pay too little, but then, they pay annual car licensing fees and gasoline taxes of what, 50 cents a litre, and 50% of teh taxes goes to the province, paying off the road, the new school etc.
So, more or less, in balance, but perhaps worthy a PhD thesis by some of Gord’s PhD candidates !
I’m sorry, I had to chime in on this….
Gardening is one of the best forms of exercise??? Say what?
I worked out my transportation costs a few years ago and figured I was saving $7000 a year by replacing car ownership with biking, public transit, and car sharing/renting. But I agree with IanS, it gets offset with the increased cost of living in Vancouver’s core neighbourhoods where those choices are possible.
As mentioned earlier, I live with kids in a small condo near downtown, so it’s kind of weird I’m arguing this. But, I think what’s bugging me a bit is that questioning how taxes subsidize the lifestyles of others is an uncomfortably libertarian stance to me.
For example, 20% of the City budget is policing. Most of that is spent on “urban” citizens in the DTES. Provincially, they also spend a lot of healthcare dollars yet pay very little taxes. City dwellers also get better transit service, arts facilities, cultural amenities, etc. I have a friend who makes snide remarks that I go jogging on the False Creek seawall that his taxes paid for. He lives nowhere near it. I use it all the time. He has a valid point.
Anyway, I hope I’m making a coherent argument. If we didn’t want to subsidize others, then government shouldn’t provide anything and all services should be full cost user fees.
I see a huge equity issue here. For example, car travel is hugely subsidized – probably more than any other public service in Canada. Transit has a lower subsidy. Bike riding actually returns a benefit to society, so it is negatively subsidized. So if I live in Vancouver and ride a bike for most of my trips, a big portion of my taxes go to people driving cars and especially to those who live in the suburbs and drive long distances.
This equity issue can be resolved by road pricing. The cleanest model is pricing based on distance traveled, area driven and time of day. It would be good if gas taxes were eliminated, but not carbon “taxes” (which are not really taxes in any case). Add to this distance based insurance, and a driver could easily calculate the cost of his/her next trip and choose the best mode based on the real cost of the trip. Benefits would be reduced motor vehicle congestion, more efficient use of our roadways and increased use of walking, cycling and transit. If done properly, a majority of people could be better off financially. A minority would be worse off – especially those who still choose to drive long distance during peak periods. At least, I won’t have to pay for this.
Why are cars hugely subsidized ? From GST and PST on acquisition, to EI/CPP/corporate taxes/personal income taxes by car manufacturers and car dealers, to ICBC premiums and surpluses, to annual licensing fees, to gasoline taxes at 50 cents a liter to tolls .. where is the math that cars are subsidized ?
I could equally argue that bikes are subsidized as they wreck park trails and bike paths costs money and need re-paving every so often yet bike users pay almost no taxes whatsoever ..
Show me the facts that the BILLIONS collected from car drivers are insufficient, please.
We would still need roads to transport goods, so even if we all had e-bikes or e-cars or tiny golf carts we still needed some roads to move stuff around .. you know: food, furniture, parcels, building material, everything you see in your house/condo (a quick look up from your PC would show 100+ items at least hat got to your place by truck at some point probably)
Couldn’t be further from libertarian in my case – old fashioned socialist here.
I love taxes, always have, want to pay more of them. Taxes buy all that good stuff that makes our lives secure and comfortable, like schools and hospitals. I’ve worked in both of these and seen the results of tax cuts on what we could provide and the fall out (to the individual and to society) from the lack of that provision.
For example, I know that every dollar spent on child mental health saves at least a hundred down the line in policing, prison, social services. I’m wondering if public money was used to incentivize denser living, instead of more subsidies to motordom (tunnels, bridges), would we have a net $ saving, firstly to society as a whole, secondly in our personal $ economics.
If taxes are too high societies get sick as people slack off. Look no further than E-Europe between 1945 and 1990. or Cuba. Or much of Europe today. Europe is sick financially due to excessive entitlements by: kids, students, corporations, seniors and civil servants. far too few wealth producers and far too many wealth takers or re-distributors.
yes, everyone is more equal in a socialist environment .. at a lot lower level. If that is your goal: vote socialists into power. If you believe that humans actually want to be rewarded for their efforts you have to keep taxes in line. Canada is more or less OK, fairer than the US but not nearly as grossly overtaxing as Europe where I used to live. Personally I would love to see far lower personal income taxes and far far higher GST and road tolls. Then we would consume less, which is real green and drive less. However income taxes at the almost 50% mark for wages over $120,000 are insanely high, far too high in fact.
Federally we also grossly overtax, starving cities of needed revenue as their main source of revenue is property taxes. A large portion of federal income taxes and all GST, in my opinion, ought to be collected by cities, not the federal government. Ottawa pays one of the highest wages in the country. Far too many folks living off our taxes there.
I think your point is perfectly coherent, Kirk. However, I suspect you haven’t keyed in on the subsidies which are really the focus of the thread. The issue is not so much the existence of subsidies, but rather the identification of what should, and should not, be subsidized and the rationalization for that view.
Hi Kirk, I think roads are different than sea walls and DTES policing.
In both cases the money spent improves the places its spent in, and encourages socially benign or even positive actives (walking the sea wall more frequently) However when money is spent on more and bigger roads, it can dramatically reduce quality of life where it’s built by increasing danger, noise, stress, and pollution. Further, by building the road, you are encouraging more travel in cars which quickly eat up capacity and will require you to build another road (and destroy another neighbirhood).
We need roads AND bike paths AND walking paths. Trucks move poorly in the forest and a growing region cannot be sustained on bikes alone !
The right balance is critical.
I agree that road use is far too cheap. It ought to be by the km collected at choke points, or via some form of GPS enabled online system. Gasoline taxes are a poor approximator as cars get more efficient and Tesla drivers pay nothing.
It would greatly help in several ways to have a world wide slowdown much like or better than we had in the 70’s here in U.S. with the oil embargo. Some of the benefits include an immediate reduction in lost lives by 25%, we save lots of fuel, people could get a sense of being back in control instead of runing around like chickens with our heads off, planing trips better with family or others to share and appreciate each other and getting there. Stress alone would be worth it but considering the health improvements it becomes even better.
Carbon Monoxide is hundreds of times more likely to bond with our blood hemoglobin than oxygen and we become saturated with time. Thus people are often driving with tired like symtoms yet not diagnosed as carbon poisoning. It would reduce the 3.7 million premature deaths attributed to carbon pollution per WHO, and the millions of asthma cases and deaths for children.
As we see the rare and aggressive cancers on the rise near refining tarsands and operations one Doctor O’Connor said the smoking guns are everywhere. Tarsands and endless snakes of tar leaving Alberta simply means war on ourselves and pedal to the metal denial of global warming and the decades of road killings and disease. Once people really felt the benefits of slowing down the initial withdrawal could be put into perspective and we could see the compounding of benifits just as we saw the compounding of deaths and fractured neighborhoods for decades with our highways and endless oil extraction no longer acceptable as we breath our own tailpipes.
We have had one car in family for about 10 years and many times I stay home and work from the house and this can be expanded as others i think do this too. The idea we use lots of oil means we have to continue to use it and more can be reversed and sayiing no to tarsands seems the best place to start if we believe our scientists and common sense.
+1
Higher energy prices are like another form of taxation.
As such, higher energy prices are OK if other taxes are lowered. This could easily be done by adjusting the # of civil servants and their excessive salaries & benefits, but even I am not that naive to believe it will actually happen. You see, it is actually the public sector unions that cause global warming by not leaving enough taxation room so we can all afford higher energy prices. With less government, at lower cost, we could afford greener energy. But we cannot today. So, do not blame the tar sands, blame CUPE and the like !
Look no further than bankrupt Europe or Ontario to see what power public sector unions coupled with high high energy prices will do: a slower economy, crushing deficits, huge debts and a less rosy future for our grandkids.
Hogwash! The flip side of high wages is the high cost of living driven mainly by high rents charged by unscrupulous landlords. We don’t need lower taxes we need a freeze on rents! As it is many seniors are paying more than half their income on shelter, standing in food bank line-ups and dining on cat food for protein. Shame, shame, and time for change.
Landlords run a business. They have huge expenses: utilities, property taxes, management fees, repair and maintenance, replacement of aging fridges/roofs/boilers etc.
What specific changes do you propose .. rather than asking for nebulous “change” ?
Thomas, energy prices, especially gasoline, are way too cheap. To my mind, the core problem is subsidies. Car transportation is one of the biggest subsidies we provide. And transportation is the largest contributor to ghg emission in the lower mainland. As shown by research completed by the province, automobile transportation in the lower mainland is subsidized by well over $6000 per vehicle per hear. This is where road pricing would shine, since it would allow drivers to pay their fair share for their transportation choice. An increased carbon “tax” would also help to reduce use of fossil fuels..
Show me some evidence of this “subsidy” please.
GHG are a minor concern to most Canadians, in cold Canada. Only here on the left coast, with a warmer climate, with cheap hydro can we afford to criticise cold weather provinces for using gas to heat their homes or driving cars with gasoline engines. Tesla’s just don’t work as well in -20. That is why they wisely chose not to have a dealership in Calgary.
Let’s talk pollution, as opposed to this nebulous global “warming” or “man made climate change” hype, shall we ? Yes we ought to reduce that pollution. And yes, we ought to use less coal .. but wait a minute isn’t it mainly China and US mainly that spew this carp in the air ?
Let’s talk congestion, shall we ? Yes, road use is far too cheap and ought to be tolled besides taxes on gasoline. Some roads are never clogged and some are only at certain times. As such, like in any real market, price has to go up until congestion disappears.
Here is a BC Government report from 1993:
http://bc.transport2000.ca/learning/background/transport_2021/cost_report.html
It shows that subsidy was $6.6 billion per year or 42% of total costs. Transit subsidy, by comparison was only 38% of total costs. If we estimate 1 million vehicles, this would amount to $6600 per vehicle per year in 1991 dollars so it would be much higher in 2014 dollars. Cycling however offers a net benefit to society.
A Norwegian study found each kilometre driven cost society 35 cents, while each kilometre cycled saved society five cents in terms of total health and environmental costs. So for Norway, societal costs for a car driven 15,000 km (Canadian average) would be $5250.
http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2012/06/30/Velocity-Lessons/
From the UK, we get this research which concludes that every person who cycles confers a benefit to society
http://tinyurl.com/3aorytv.
If someone makes only ½ of their trips by bike instead of by car, they confer a benefit to society of about $1000/year.
I would love to see an increased price for fossil fuels and reduction of the subsidy on automobile transportation so that I can pay my fair share of costs whenever I drive my car.
a 20 year old highly biased report ? listing no benefits either, just cost ? I reckon MetroVan vehicle levies and gasoline is subsidizing BC roads outside of MetroVan …
yes biking more makes sense were it is available .. but not for seniors, families or uphill, in the winter, in the rain
Thomas, in reply to your most recent message, do you have any proof that the research is biased? Is the Norway research flawed or biased? Can you supply any contrary research? Research was commissioned by the province and is published on their website. Sure it is old research, but I am sure that the automobile subsidy is much higher today. My guess is that most people do not understand how heavily automobile transportation is subsidized.
Vehicle levies? I wish, but there are no vehicle levies in BC. And how exactly are we paying for roads outside of Metro Vancouver? Maybe through general taxation but certainly not through gas tax. Note that the provincial portion of the gas tax in Metro Van is only 8.5c/litre while it is 14.5c/litre in the rest of the province. We do have an additional transit tax of 17c/litre but that goes straight to TransLink. Most roads in Metro Vancouver are paid for by property tax, so those that don’t drive are subsidizing those that do drive. Electric cars are even more highly subsidized.
With respect to cycling, I am a senior and I ride pretty much anywhere in Metro Vancouver and I ride year round. I especially like the hills and winter is actually a great time to ride a bike in Vancouver. I know lots of families who do not have cars and cycle for many of their trips. Cycling is now the most rapidly growing mode of transportation. If only we could get rid of subsidies, then people could make more reasonable transportation choices.
You should cycle more – it is the most enjoyable way of getting around our city.
Bias: it lists costs like pollution or diseases, but does not offer benefits, such as time saved or life style benefits of living far away or drive to the Sunshine Coast or V Island where no other options than using a car exist..
I agree that care use is far too cheap.
try telling that a family of 4 though with school events, soccer practice and piano lessons. Not everyone loves to cycle in the rain, and not everyone love to live in dense areas close to SkyTrain stations.
I agree that parking on our streets is far too cheap, and that it should be on top of property taxes to discourage car acquisition. In many parts of MetroVan a car is a necessity though, especially those with kids or those that work or have to be places at certain times.
I don’t disagree that many people wish to drive for some or all of their trips and of course they should be allowed to to so. However when we drive, we should be asked to pay for our fair share of the costs instead of asking others to pay the deficit.
This isn’t a question with an answer. All else being equal, your extra minute of driving per day costs you about 8.3 hours per year. If you live in your house for 10 years and saved $20,600 for that extra minute, you’ve earned $247 per hour of driving time. The extra cost of driving a minute per day is negligible…an idling car burns around $0.03/minute, even generously doubling that to cover the costs of accelerating and cruising, it’s only taking $3.60/hour off our profit. You’re probably still on the same maintenance schedule.
But the problem is that not all minutes are created equal. Somewhere, there’s a marginal minute where you can reduce your car ownership, stop paying for parking, walk more and live longer. If you live on one side of the line, you’ll save somewhere on the order of $100,000 in car costs over 10 years (CAA reports an average compact car costs $9,500/year to own and operate). Maybe at the expense of a bus pass, so let’s net that to $85,000 to cover a 2-zone pass. The other side of the line you NEED that car, and have other extra trips than just the commute.
But here’s what really bothers me about this exercise. It only talks about detached housing. I can see that apartment vs house is a clear lifestyle distinction, that isn’t really comparable, but what about row housing, semi-detached, and other housing options that fall elsewhere on the spectrum. Are you saving that $/min by moving further, or buying more house every minute you move further? Individual home-buyers make these decisions every day, and balance these factors according to their preferences, but public policy to support choice (and subsidize some choices over others) tends to be very ham-handed.
Maybe a bit of a reality check is required. A 3-bedroom place (not house!) anywhere in Vancouver is going to cost $800k and up. A 3-bedroom place in Surrey or Langley can be had for $450k. (I’m trying for a best case here, we all know the $800k place will be pretty crappy, and $450k place will be ok).
Even for a family earning $100k/year (way above median), this is not an accounting exercise over minutes travelled or the annual cost of a car (or two). The only option is the suburbs. The $7-$10k it might cost/year for a car will buy you ~$150k in mortgage, so a difference of $350k-$400k is more than two cars. There is no weighing of options, you just accept a long commute and suburban living. End of story.
I think part of the problem with Vancouver is that the housing price numbers are so large people lose track of the value of small percentage differences. If you can stretch to the utmost limit and scrape together $1m for a house (mortgage/cash/family funds/spare change under the couch etc), then a $1.02m house is unaffordable. That tiny difference is $20k….
It is indeed amazing how easily Canadians give up their land to others for far too little in return.
Foreign ownership is hard to control, as the property could easily be bought in a local trust, a local corporation or by a brother, sister, friend or nephew.
The idea is not to disallow it, BUT TO MONETIZE IT, for the benefits of Canadians and permanent residents. How do you do that?
Not that hard: tax every property higher, far higher, say 30-250%, both on acquisition through higher property taxes as well as annually through far higher property taxes. Then give a credit of these higher taxes on your annual income tax return. Those working here, collecting pensions here or creating taxable employment income here get a break and ay the same as today. The rich foreign investor pays higher taxes and gets no tax credit. This system would be far easier to implement than a “vacancy tax” or “foreign investor tax”.
Land transfer taxes are far too low. How about this one, coupled with the income tax credit idea:
1% on the first $1M, then 2% on the next $1M to $2M, then another 1% on the next $1M to $3M.. all the way to 15% on a residential asset over $15M.
This would dampen the market somewhat, but not overly, and it would create significant, now missing, tax revenue for cities like Vancouver or Richmond to deal with homelessness AND for the province to pay for education and healthcare services of those permanent residents not working here. Permanent resident today are getting both healthcare and education for free. Part of the recent teachers strike was not pay, but ESL and class room support, due to too many folks with poor English skills in classrooms.
The current funding model for education and healthcare is broken, as it relies primarily on PST and income taxes. Many resident do not pay any income taxes (just the mother and 2 kids are often here) or buy little except groceries (exempt from PST), but buy a big house or condo.
Once property taxes and land transfer taxes are up as suggested, enough revenue is generated to hire more nurse, doctors, teachers or support workers .. and feed the homeless.
Canadians are far too gullible. Time to monetize your land. Encourage immigration and foreign home ownership – but put a far FAR higher price tag on it. People will still come to a safe, wealthy, clean and well governed country despite the far higher price tag.
Reblogged this on amvpower.
I find the title of this post somewhat manipulative and misleading. Manipulative because the it immediately casts a negative light on detached housing. Misleading (and still manipulative) because Penny Coupland’s question about the “..economics of living downtown without a car versus in the ‘burbs and driving for everything.” is based on the erroneous assumption that people in the suburbs have to drive to everything.
The Macleans article’s flaw is that it seems to assume everyone in the suburbs has to drive downtown to work. It would seem the smart buyer should take advantage of lower housing prices by living and working in the suburbs and avoiding downtown altogther!
Bob – I agree that the decentralization of jobs (i.e. locating workplaces in various suburbs, rather than exclusively downtown) is a viable strategy. Allowing people to live closer to work and amenities reduces the amount of travel required, saving time and resources.
However, you point out that it is an “erroneous assumption that people in the suburbs have to drive to everything.” – only partially true. For example, people living in many parts of suburban Burnaby and Vancouver (outside downtown) have access to good public transit and can walk or cycle for many trips. Driving is not strictly required.
This is not the case in newer suburbs such as in Surrey or Langley – there are fewer grids and residences are located farther from work and amenities. Walking and cycling is often difficult or impossible because of the longer distances involved and risk of being hit by high speed traffic – a result of the car-oriented physical environment. Public transit is infrequent or non-existent.
My point is that not all suburbs are created equally. A car-free or car-light suburban lifestyle is possible in some areas, but not all. However, even in the latter, dramatically reduced driving distances would be an improvement from the status quo (e.g. a 10 km round-trip commute vs. 50-80 km round-trip).
Penny,
further to your original question, some excellent work has been done on demonstrating transportation “time budgets” which apply at all scales, very local to global/international. This notion runs contrary to the lineal perspective expressed in McLeans and elsewhere that reflects a relatively consistent diminishment on the distance-land value continuum. If this were strictly true, then you would not find the 8 figure housing estates scattered throughout the region, from Lion’s Bay, to Pitt Meadows, and all the way to South Surrey to the US border, which are about as remote in this urban area as you can get, but still have reasonable access to core City services, with the CBD rapidly diminishing in central importance to many in the region anyway.
Rather, mounting evidence exists, at least in academic circles, that a maxiumum travel-time allocation exists which are bundled together with a range of other lifestyle choices. We did this kind of analysis many years back in assessing the impact of Westcoast Express – turns out that an outward shift occurred in domicile location all the way to Mission as the timeliness/reliability of the rail service to downtown provided users access to much lower land values (rather than translating this time advantage to remain closer but have more time at home) but this was just one factor in the decision-making to move – and strongly the lifestyle decision around semi-rural living was even more strongly indicative than just the pure cost/time analysis that many think is paramount in transportation decisions. Unfortunately, I don’t remember where copy of the study might be found, but the MoT archives in Victoria may still have it. Plenty of literature can also be found examining this concept, with the Journal of Transport Geography as a good starting point – hope this helps your query.
And all of the above debate however reminds me of comments from nearly two decades ago from the then Minister of Transportation when we were discussing at a committee the possible adoption of TDM/HOV for the Lower mainland highways. This Northern-originating Minister reminded her political colleagues not to get too far in this thinking, as once you get beyond the Fraser Valley and pretty much everywhere else in the Province these advanced urban transportation notions are simply not practical when you have deep snow on the ground across much of the North for months on end, and the long distances between towns and villages cannot be traversed safely and easily without a four-wheel drive – and half of BC [voters] live in these far-flung places.
It is also worthy of note that in BC, my high-level estimate is only between 5-10% of residents across the Province might live in some form of high-density living (above 4 storey wood-frame for sake of argument), with much of them in the few Town Centers in the Metro region. Says a lot about choices that are being made everyday by the vast majority of British Columbians to where they live, work, and play..
Housing affordability can only be achieved by reducing rents which half the population now pay. No-down- payment mortgages are the best way to reduce high rents, because people prefer to own rather than rent. When nearly everyone can own then rents will fall to levels equivalent to lifetime costs of ownership. This process will make rents very reasonable, just slightly above operating costs, and if that is not a good enough return for landlords then they can convert rentals to strata titles and sell to purchasers using no-down-payment mortgages. When everyone is invested in ownership housing will be affordable because the monopolistic forces of landlords will have disappeared. This is a process that will lead to social equality. Emancipation of the renter is part of a larger process that has seen the end of slavery in advanced societies, the establishment of women’s rights, the end of segregation, rights based on gender, and treaty rights for First Nations People. These are all cases of exploitation which could not stand the test of equality.
JOlson – isn’t the widespread use of little or no down payment mortgages what led to the collapse of the housing market in the US?
No, a recession and unemployment led to house foreclosures and filings for bankruptcy protection by the big auto manufacturers. No-down-payment mortgages can be insured to reduce risk.