Vancouver wants to be the greenest city in the world. But it's also one of the least affordable cities in the world, with the price of an average detached home sitting at about $1.5 million.
And this raises an important question: how sustainable can a city be if large sectors of the population can't afford to live in it?
Paul Kershaw is a professor in the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia and the founder of Generation Squeeze, a campaign that advocates for young Canadians.
He says it will take 23 years for someone in Metro Vancouver to save up for a down payment for a home today, compared to five years a generation ago.
"That's a fundamental challenge to social sustainability," he said.
Instead of staying in Vancouver, more and more young people are moving out to the surrounding municipalities, Kershaw said.
"They're swapping really long commutes for access to a little bit more space to raise their kids."
Those people then have the choice between driving to and from work in Vancouver every day, or taking public transit. Kershaw estimates that the extra cost for transit from the municipalities would add up to $200,000 over 25 years.
"A generation ago, that would have been enough to afford another home," he said.
Kershaw said affordable housing is an important consideration from an economic and an environmental standpoint.
"We need to overcome our financial squeeze . . . and we need to minimize the risks of the environmental squeeze."
And the solution must be multi-faceted, Kershaw said. Cities like Vancouver need to build a supply of rental units suitable for families, and developers should be rewarded for building around transit hubs.
In part, that means building in neighbourhoods that are traditionally dominated by single-detached homes, he added. That can be a tough sell to people already living in those neighbourhoods who are worried about the value of their own homes.
But Kershaw said there are ways to convince them. "You want to be able to visit your grandchildren easily," he offered as an example.
He also said affordable transit and childcare should be priorities. Families shouldn't be spending the equivalent of a second mortgage on childcare, he argued.
There are plenty of innovative ideas out there for providing more affordable housing in Vancouver.
Zoning changes made in 2009 have encouraged the construction of small laneway homes that increase the density of detached-home neighbourhoods.
There are also about 55 self-identified collective houses in Vancouver, according to the Vancouver Sun, with many other renters likely living in some kind of informal collective arrangement.
Collective housing set-ups can have different structures and rules, but food and other bills are often shared between roommates, and communal living tends to keep the rent down.
The City of Vancouver has also recently unveiled the design for its first temporary modular housing complex, slated to open in 2017. The complex will include 40 units for homeless people or those on low or fixed incomes.
Still, Vancouver is hardly the only city where soaring housing prices and static incomes are a problem.
Duncan MacLennan, a professor at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, recently told the CBC that it's getting harder for young people around the world to purchase their own homes in major cities. And that could have negative impacts on the development of those cities, he said.
"Younger couples who are both skilled and innovative at being in labour markets . . . are the drivers of success in dynamic cities like Vancouver . . . and a really important driver of productivity."
By Maura Forrest, 27 October 2016