Quote:
Originally Posted by Hondaracer
Yea..the policies of the 1920’s had way more of an impact on local housing than expo, Hong Kong immigration, mainland Chinese money laundering, Olympics, etc.. ya kidding me?
Between 1920 and 2000 the median house price probably changed 200%
Between 2008 and 2021 it’s probably 500%
Zoning is obviously an issue but it hasn’t really been an issue for 90% of the time you’re talking about.
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Housing policy is generational and the ripple effects of it aren't felt quickly (for better or worse) until they are felt very quickly (like climate change). When Vancouver banned multi-family homes in the 1920's (GVRD pop: 232k) there was no shortage of land to build on in Vancouver or the suburbs so that bad decision has little to no impact on society (also there was a depression then WWII).
Up until the 70's or so (GVRD pop: 1m) there was still empty land to build detached homes in Vancouver so the policy of only detached homes or slums wasn't really a problem yet but by the end of the decade the script had been written because that's when we ran out of land and we starting seeing real sprawl. The Port Mann was built in 1964 despite literally nothing being around it. Surrey was 10% of the GVRD pop in 1971 then was 16% in 1991 and now it's 21% of the GVRD - you see similar increases in other suburbs, they all become a bigger portion of the population b/c in the 70's we not only ran out of land in Vancouver but had put a somewhat rigid cap on density (we weren't building enough housing for the population growth).
Housing is generational - once you build a house it sticks around for 60-100 years - so once something is built it's really hard to change what's there. By the 70's we were going to be fucked in some way....cue the following:
- Tax changes that drove wealth towards the rich. Rich got super rich.
- Rise of tech that created a new class of wealthy (this wasn't till the 21st century)
- Drop of interest rates (80's peak), it was possible to borrow more.
- Destruction of the middle class that pushed people into the working class.
- Rise of the "3rd world", namely Asia. We've got a lot of new rich people going around in the world and they want the best.
- Implementation of even more restrictive zoning policies intended to protect the livability of Vancouver. Everything from view cones to restrict height to mundane stuff like setting minimum lot sizes. Most of this was good - we're one of the best cities in the world to live in (victim of our success)
- Housing options remain either detached home or condo (very limited townhouse or multi-family housing allowed).
All the while the number of detached lots in Vancouver (and Burnaby) stayed the same (and actually dropped a small amount). Since 1991 population growth has actually
slowed in the GVRD - it used to be about 35-40% every 10 years and over the 30 years it's dropped to about 20% every 10 years. Surprised? I am. We already were unaffordable in the 90's and we already weren't building enough housing.
So you have a fixed amount of detached homes and you have a large increase in people who could afford a detached home (local and foreign), no viable alternatives to detached homes, and you have a massive drop in cost of borrowing. At the same time you have nowhere to build alternative housing options - it's either condo towers in the few remaining empty spots (False Creek, Joyce-Collingwood, River District, Brentwood, Lougheed) or it's a detached house - people with families are having to borrow every cent they have to get a detached home b/c they can't live in a condo.
We've been screwed for a while now - we've got new externalities that make it extra bad from time to time but the core underlying issues are: water border, land border, mountain range, and housing policy. The others are factors but they're amplified by the core 4 issues - it's the same in Sydney, Singapore, New York, London, SF etc, the volume is just different depending on if all the externalities are cranked to 11 or not at the time.
FWIW: There's a tonne of great detailed analysis about housing in the GVRD using real data/math here that explains a lot of the buildup to what we see today:
https://doodles.mountainmath.ca
Examples:
https://doodles.mountainmath.ca/blog...bility-crisis/
https://doodles.mountainmath.ca/blog...n-projections/