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What kind of housing should young families in Vancouver be able to get?

July 9th, 2015 · 62 Comments

What is a reasonable price for a young family to have to pay in this city for housing?

It’s a topic that frequently gets muddled in the news, as the rising price of west-side houses sets off a dynamite trail of news stories about how young families are being forced out of the city.

But, unless that young family is the doctor-dentist of #EricandIlsa fame, trying to survive on their paltry $300,000 a year (or was it a month?), that’s not the real issue.

The real issue is what kind of income do young couples/families typically have and what is a not-outrageous expectation they should have about the kind of housing they should get in this city.

I know a fair number of late-20s, early-30s couples these days who do want to stay in the city. They are, no, not service workers. They work at mid-range professional jobs and, between the two of them, earn somewhere in the $95,000- to $120,000-a-year range. (Sorry, I realize lots of singles out there and dual-income couples making less, and that is an even greater problem, one that’s been going on for longer, but I’m focusing on a particular group that has been getting a lot of headlines lately: the solidly middle-class, middle-income young couple.)

According to the handy Canada mortgage calculator website, they could get a $600,000 mortgage for 25 years at 3 per cent for 25 years and pay around $2,800 a month. That’s a little more than a third at the lower end, less than a third at the upper — the usual marker of what’s affordable.

So say they somehow had $50,000 saved for a mortgage, they could get something in the range of $650,000.

I know that the new fake-heritage duplexes in my ‘hood are going for $850,000 or so — so that’s out of range. But, realistically, those places have a lot more space than a young family absolutely needs. The two next to me are 1,800 square feet apiece, which is more than what we live in.

But what should they be able to have? I think we all agree that bringing up a family in too-small a space is more than most people can handle (Kirk and his whole extraordinary family aside). It’s not entitlement to expect to be able to find a place to live on a reasonably middle-class income in this city that isn’t a tiny box.

That’s going to be an important question soon. Vancouver is looking at how to create some affordable home-ownership. But the success of the plan is going to depend partly on what exactly they are able to provide for young families and at what cost.

It’s not going to be a full four-bedroom home on a single-family lot, not any time in the near future. People who want that are going to have to go to Port Coquitlam and Port Moody (which I hear from some realtors they are doing) or further.

What should they be able to expect? I await your ideas.

 

 

 

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  • Lysenko’s Nemesis

    Please Chris, be cautious with the word ‘we’. It has profound meaning when used properly. You may associate the automobile with Henry Ford but that’s certainly not the origins of the contraption and the item I mentioned is the internal combustion engine, which is far more important than just the car. If innovation is your criterion, as you say, then you’d have to be thinking of those small English villages were the most efficient and powerful automobiles are produced for the F1 circuit.

    You seem to be obsessed with the origins of finance for forwarding developments of inventions, which, I’ll grant you, tends to be in more densely populated towns and cities.

    Your attempted clarification of the GUI and the mouse is really a bit silly. Xerox were located in Palo Alto, another suburb 50 km south of San Fran. In 1970 when Xerox were there the population was around 55,000. It was THE quintessential suburb!

    You might want to now go to Sigmund Freud. He from a very small town in the present Czech Republic.

    Cities are important. Especially for innovations like capuccino and Japadog. Remember too that perhaps the most important innovation of the 19th century, indeed the industrial revolution, was Stephenson’s Rocket in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1829 when the population was 55,000 souls.

  • Chris Keam

    For sure ‘suburb’ is a poor descriptor in having the ‘sub’ prefix.

  • The 99

    OK, refrigeration: Oliver Evans and Newport, Delaware come to mind. Newport’s current population is just over 1,000, and who knows what it was in 1805. However, we do know it was then as now a suburb of Wilmington.

    All of “Chicago’s” meat packing facilities were, and most still are, in Bedford Park, a suburb of Chicago.

    And we could go on ad nauseum, and continue the same with the top athletes who shun cities because of high air pollution levels, and pictorial artists who’ve long sought the countryside for visual inspiration.

    What we are dealing with is urban bias here, a desperate effort to declare the value of an experiment in human evolution that has gone horribly wrong. Cities account for 80-85% of all carbon pollution, yet house just 50-55% of all people. They simply cannot and will never be able to feed themselves. Cities are the most sterile, biologically homogenous, most highly-polluting and polluted, most disease-ridden, AND most expensive places to live.

    And did I mention not terribly friendly either. No bias at all here; just the facts.

  • The 99

    I just get over how off-topic we are here!

  • Chris Keam

    By 1900 Newcastle has nearly a quarter-million people. Did it grow massively more dense or spread out? I surmise that it displayed the characteristics of an urban setting even in 1829.

    I doubt the people who worked at Xerox in the 70s got their post-sec. educations in suburbs.

    The examples you’ve chosen demonstrate how urban areas create demand for innovation and highlight how they foster great change by giving smart people plenty of opportunities to collaborate with like-minded individuals.

    The defining characteristic is density, rather than pure population size, esp. in earlier eras where we see villages and small towns having higher population densities than modern suburbs.

  • A Taxpayer

    It’s just Chris’ envy showing again.

  • Chris Keam

    Sorry, no bias here. Just the facts.

    Top athletes may train in the countryside, but their bread is buttered in the city. Same with artists. Could be Paris in the 20s, San Francisco in the 60s, or New York almost anytime since it was founded, but if we are generalizing, it’s in cities where innovation finds the most fertile soil.

  • Chris Keam

    I’d like to see affordable housing for families more available. I value people’s quality of life more than old buildings.

  • Chris Keam

    LOL, I really couldn’t imagine anything worse than being stuck with one of those monster houses and the demands on my time it would require to pay for it.

  • Lysenko’s Nemesis

    Some people say silly things imagining themselves to be important. It’s embarrassing and sometimes as a gentle correction one tries to help them in their folly.

    Sometimes they just cannot let go and the insistence goes on for days. Like all legends the concepts become warped and the argument can become more vitriolic. It’s vaguely interesting.

  • Chris Keam

    “NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE is sometimes emphatically styled the Metropolis of the North”

    – Historical Account of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne Including the Borough of Gateshead. Originally published by Mackenzie and Dent, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1827.

    http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/newcastle-historical-account/pp157-160

  • Vancouver Janitorial

    I think reasonable townhouses is a really good idea.

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