As our previous postings have explored the geographic distribution of the City of Vancouver’s Single Family Housing prices in 2011 and its $1,000,000 line, here is its counterpart from 1979 by Paul Raynor, a planner extraordinaire and data guru in the City of Vancouver’s Housing Centre.  Before the days of Excel and ArcGIS, Mr. Raynor mapped these Single Family Home values by hand!

For the benefit of our readers, when one uses the Bank of Canada Inflation Calculator to adjust values to 2011 dollars, the map scales would be $117,000 for a house worth $40,000 in 1979 and $876,000 for a house worth $300,000 in 1979.  Incidentally, a house valued at $80,000 in 1979 would be worth $234,000 in 2011 dollars.

This post also includes Raynor’s observations and analysis which accompanied the map and was published in a City of Vancouver Quarterly Review in July 1979.  Interestingly, as Raynor ends his piece with the observation that improvements on the average (largely defined as buildings on a property) accounted for 46 percent of total values in 1979, this percentage dwindles to less than 20 percent by 2011.