housing
05. housing
Communities throughout British Columbia have struggled to add enough housing to keep pace with their ever-growing populations. Without a substantial increase to the pace of construction, existing housing deficits will grow.
A GROWING DIVIDE
It’s well documented that the cost of housing has historically been more expensive in British Columbia than in other parts of the country. And costly housing, whether ownership or rental, means that some people make different choices regarding their own living situation than they otherwise would if housing were more abundant. Adult children living at home for longer, living with roommates, and families sharing bedrooms are all relatively common examples of the trade-offs people make in BC and elsewhere. But we can also estimate how people might prefer to live if housing was sufficiently available and affordable to them. If we use a starting point of 2001 when housing was more affordable in BC, we can model how much housing construction our growing population would have needed if we were to hold those living conditions constant. This is done by looking at population growth by age, and allocating housing needs based on 2001
levels of household formation—when 18 year olds could more easily move out. From there we can compare it to the number of households actually formed, and the difference between the two is the deficit (or surplus) of housing that has accumulated since 2001. In Metro Vancouver, we’ve accumulated a deficit of more than 45,000 homes in a little over two decades, which at 2.4 persons per household represents housing for 110,000 people—more than the entire population of Maple Ridge. This millennium we’ve underbuilt by an annual average of just over 2,000 homes, on a net basis. With demolitions in Metro Vancouver representing 16% of housing construction, this means we should have been building more than 2,400 additional homes each year. And with continued population growth expected in the coming years, we’ll need to substantially increase the pace of housing supply just to keep the deficit from growing—let alone reduce it.
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