[stevegalla]

The article is talking about detached housing. In Vancouver I keep seeing the trend of several detached houses in a row being bought, bulldozed, and converted to low-rise condos or townhouses.

The supply of housing (condos, townhouses, duplexes) is increasing, it’s just people aren’t too happy with “lowering their living standards” by having to live in a condo or townhouse, or having to move out of their neighborhood to a suburb.

Land is an issue in Vancouver. We have mountains to the North, ocean to the West, and farm land to the East and South.

What little land is available does get converted to “dense” accommodations, but it could be more dense. For example, in my area 10 years ago there were maybe 3 or 4 detached houses on the land. Now there are 450 condo and townhouse units. This could be significantly more dense by building a high-rise (6+ floors I think) instead of the low-rise (5 or fewer floors). However, we don’t really have the correct road infrastructure to accommodate huge density increases. Pre-pandemic a 20-25 minute drive to work already takes around 1.5-2 hours during the weekday.

The detached housing that remains detached is converted from, for example, a 3bed 2 bath rancher to some sort of luxury home with 6 bed 4.5 bath. Doubling or tripling of value is not uncommon.

I can’t find it right now, but articles in the local papers have talked about changing communities from being all single family detached to a mix of condos, townhouses, detached. This way new buyers can start at a condo, move to a townhouse, then upgrade to a detached house as equity builds up, the family increases their income, and the family expands.

The problem with this is the people who own the detached houses don’t downsize when their kids leave, so these rarely come on the market, or people are buying more house than they need at that point in their life to counteract rising house prices.

Yes, people have expanded outwards. For example, my mom and step-dad moved approximately 1.5 hours East of their last house (now a 20 minute commute for my stepdad instead of the previous 60-70 minute commute). The problem here is that the house prices have risen here too for detached houses. Places on my parents street are 650-800k. Go over one block to the next cul-de-sac/ street and they go for 800k - 1.2 million. These are all new detached houses built [edit: on previously vacant land] in the last 3-5 years. Spreading out hasn’t actually caused prices to drop. Spreading out has done the opposite. They call it half-doubling or something here. Half the price for double the house if you move outwards.

Who knows what will happen.