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Feb 2022: average suburban home in Greater Vancouver passed $2M.
Someone wrote that we don’t need SF homes anymore because household size in GV is shrinking. Hmmmm.
If BC housing continues to be available to 8B people as an investment opportunity regardless of the provenance of funds, then one might ask: are households shrinking because young couples cannot afford secure family housing and therefore cannot afford any children – or at most one child?
This is chicken & egg.
If a young professional couple is worried about their ability to have a stable home, they are FAR less likely to have children.
I have three kids at exactly the age when people are most likely to have kids: 34, 31, 28.
In most generations the one who is 34 would have had 2 or 3 kids by now: has one. Lives in a GV apartment. I can’t see them having a 2nd.
The one who is 31 would also have had 2 or 3: has one – lives in Calgary now, hopes to have a 2nd in a couple years and thus is resigned to never living in BC again (5th generation BCer.)
The one who is 28 has said that given housing & opportunities in BC is unlikely to ever live here again – lives abroad, no kids (again, 5th generation BCer.).
All three of my kids have Uni degrees: one has an advanced degree, the spouse of one has an advanced degree & all have well-paying jobs in their fields. If this type of well-educated BC young adult cannot imagine having a typical nuclear family with two or three kids in what used to be a normal middle class GV family home, then no, there isn’t a “need” for typical family homes in GV.
But that does not mean they wouldn’t PREFER a GV family home with the stability to have two or three kids. It just means they cannot.
Corollary: BC is hemorrhaging its next generation of talent. Of my three kids only one still lives in BC and has only one child.
They’ll be replaced by immigrants?
Read the Globe & Mail article (in comments) by a young IndoCandian who works as an accountant – he asked “What kind of country is Canada building?” He came here over 10 years ago. Has been saving to buy a home the entire 10 years, living in a basement suite in Kamloops. Now he says his efforts have been pointless and he cannot imagine being able to afford a home or get married and have a family. So – what kind of immigrants will stay?
Eventually the wealthy will protest the lack of labor and force government to permit the immigration of cheap labor from 3rd world countries. Of course those people will need housing. Perhaps barracks in Mission from where they will be bussed in at dawn?
Meanwhile who pays the taxes that support services? Not those who have bought homes here purely as investments. Not the generation which is forced to move away. Business? But their labor pool is increasingly unstable… -
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