Spotted by Jak King on a site called Neighbourhood Change. Vancouver is the outlier in Canada in terms of the shift from detached housing to multi-family, in spite of the constantly repeated statistic that 70% of its land is occupied by so-called “single-family housing.”
Article Categories
Archives (2003-13)
Recent Articles
Recent Episodes
- Podcast
- Events
- Support
- About Viewpoint Vancouver
- City Elections 2022
- Climate Change
- COVID Place making
- The Livable Region
- Transportation
- Urbanism
- All The Livable Region
- Business & Economy
- Energy & Resources
- Governance & Politics
- Housing
- All Transportation
- Cycling
- Infrastructure
- Motordom
- Public Transit
- Walking & Mobility
- All Urbanism
- Architecture
- Art & Culture
- Design & Development
- History & Heritage
- Policy & Planning
- Nature & Public Spaces
- Podcast
- Events
- Support
- About Viewpoint Vancouver
- City Elections 2022
- Climate Change
- COVID Place making
- The Livable Region
- Transportation
- Urbanism
- All The Livable Region
- Business & Economy
- Energy & Resources
- Governance & Politics
- Housing
- All Transportation
- Cycling
- Infrastructure
- Motordom
- Public Transit
- Walking & Mobility
- All Urbanism
- Architecture
- Art & Culture
- Design & Development
- History & Heritage
- Policy & Planning
- Nature & Public Spaces
Hi Michael, this is an awesome chart, and shows off some interesting trends wrt. housing change. However, the 70% SF land occupancy statistic is either misquoted or misrepresented. Using (admittedly out of date -2011) land use information from Metro Vancouver here, http://www.metrovancouver.org/data. We can see some very different numbers. (Please note that Metro treats SF and Duplex as one land use type)
In terms of Vancouver’s total land area, SF lots take up 34% of the City’s land, Road right of ways take up 28%(!!) and recreation/open lands take up 15%.
If we net out roads and open space, SF lands take up 60% of the remaining land.
Only if we look at just residential space do we see something looking like 70%… indeed of all residentially-used lands, SF lots take up 80%. Conversely, low rise apartments, townhouse and high-rise dominant lands take up 8%, 5% and 3% respectively of Vancouver’s residential lands (and correspondingly smaller proportions of total land area).
What is perhaps more astonishing with the numbers quoted in the chart above, is that the proportion of SF units is decreasing in the City without significant land use change. Put another way, SF-zoned land can be considered as a type of urban-urban growth boundary (or density cliff) similar to what the ALR is in Richmond or Surrey. Either way this is great food for thought.
Indeed.
Mountain Math came to a similar conclusion:
35% of all households live on single family and duplex properties making up 81% of Vancouver’s residential land, while the remaining 65% of households live on 19% of the residential land.
http://doodles.mountainmath.ca/blog/2016/06/17/sdh-zoning-and-land-use/
The above chart indicates housing type change, not land use. In other words, the construction of new condo units continues to outpace the construction of SFDs which are often just replaced 1:1. SFDs still occupy a humongous amount of land, and therein caused, amongst a number of other influences, an affordability challenge simply because new land cannot be created out of thin air once the existing land was used up.
Agreed, great chart, interesting to see the very different starting point for Montreal – do you have a direct link to the source available?
Note that this chart shows Metro Vancouver – not the City of Vancouver. “The constantly repeated statistic that 70% of its land is occupied by single-family housing” is a City of Vancouver statistic, not necessarily applicable to the whole of Metro.
It’s also not quite accurate, as it should say something like “on land where the zoning allows residential use, 70% of it is occupied by single-family housing”. Even then it’s wrong, as most “single family” lots actually allow up to three units, provided there’s a lane.
The other thing to note is that the graphic only looks at single family and semi-detached. In Metro Vancouver in 2016 that was 31.7% of all occupied dwellings. Another 16.3% of dwellings were what Statistics Canada call “Apartment or flat in a duplex”. To us, that’s a house with a suite, and it’s an important category, but it’s far less in some other metro areas. It’s under 5% of Calgary homes, for example, and only 4% of Toronto homes.
There are roughly twice as many units as there are structures, as they count both units, provided they’re occupied. If you add those in, 48% are ‘dwellings that look like houses’, 10% are rowhouse and 42% are apartment.
Nonetheless, there are large swaths of neighbourhoods all over the Metro with 50, 60 and 66-foot lots. The new houses built on them are massive, and inevitably zoned SFD, albeit sometimes with multiple illegal suites.
If there are 20 families living in 20 houses in 1 block and 80 families living in a condo on the adjacent block, then 50% of the land in those two blocks is SF housing but only 20% of the families there are living in SF housing.
I think this is where the discrepancy in numbers is coming from. I assume that the chart is referring to the latter measurement, which seems plausible to me given the number of condos that continue to be erected in the city.