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A Look Back, Data Desk, Observations, Research Papers January 16, 2012

The $80,000 Line: Single Family Housing Values in the City of Vancouver circa 1979

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.

Data Desk, Research Papers December 12, 2011

The 0.3 Percent – Properties under $500,000 in the City of Vancouver’s Single Family Home Districts and Other Details

After some post processing which excluded properties that were either parks, right of ways, railways, side yards or boulevard medians as well as SPLOT properties (Spaces Planners Left Over Time), this posting will highlight some of the specific features from the recently published map of property values of single family home districts in the City of Vancouver.

We were able to isolate and find properties in the City’s RS Districts for less than $500,000 – all 182 of them which, out of the 71,000 study properties, which equates to about 0.3 percent of the study base. To respect the privacy of individual homeowners, we won’t publish a map on their specific locations, but highlight the characteristics of this population. The characteristics include:

All properties were east of Main
Being built between 1905 and 1996
Generally along major arterials or next to mass transit right of ways like the Expo line.
Valuations for land value far exceeded “improvement” values which is term that refers to buildings well beyond the overall patterns for the overall SFH population

Other details in this map include:

Overall Patterns

42 percent of overall properties in the study population were over $1 million; however, as earlier, identified; this pattern is highly geographically uneven with Main Street (and specifically Ontario Street) being the principal dividing line with value shifts depending where a property falls either west or east of Ontario Street. In one sample block with similar housing stock on either side, properties west of Ontario were worth between $100,000 to $300,000 more than their counterparts east of it.

East of Main Patterns

7 percent of our study parcels east of Main were equal or more than $1 million in the 2011 BC Assessment or conversely, 93 percent of our study parcels were under $1 million.

West of Main Patterns

89 percent of our study parcels west of Main were equal or more than $1 million in the 2011 BC Assessment or conversely, 11 percent of parcels were under $1 million.

This Study in the News

An interesting web dialogue has occured with the publication of this map and two subsequent analysis are of particular note: one written by Pete McMartin in the Vancouver Sun and another by Gordon Price on his blog: Price Tags. Thank you, Pete and Gordon for sharing your insights on these patterns.

Data Desk, Research Papers December 10, 2011

Main Street: The City of Vancouver’s Million Dollar Line?

Land zoned for single family housing represents about half of the overall land mass of the City of Vancouver. As Vancouver strives to become the Greenest City on Earth, this land and activities on it will invariably have a role in determining this outcome. In turn, its value will help influence what can and cannot occur on it and, perhaps, just as importantly, who can and cannot afford to own it.

Using data from Vancouver’s Open Data Catalogue, this map illustrates the property values of single family districts in the City of Vancouver and its distribution. For purposes of this map, single family homes are defined as all properties that are within the City’s “RS” zoning. Interestingly, historic neighbourhoods with large amount of single family homes like Strathcona and Shaughnessy do not have a “RS” zoning, but rather a RT-3 and First Shaughnessy District which were established to preserve the architectural heritage in each respective neighborhood. Another key note is that with the approval of laneway housing and the legalization of secondary basement suites, the traditional notion of a “single family homes” in Vancouver is changing.

The property values in this map are derived by the combination of land and “improvement” assessed values for 2011 released by BC Assessment which, in turn, were the market value of each element assessed as of July, 2010. Through the usage of the ArcGIS Geographic Information Systems platform, this map was produced.

Certain data artifacts were kept and left unedited in this map by purpose. There are some data point in Stanley Park, along Beach Avenue near Sunset Beach, the Kitsilano waterfront and Jericho Beach that fall into an RS-1 zoning. The designation of these properties are likely spurious or erroneous zoning and property data that need to be updated or edited within the Open data Dataset rather than development potential and highlight some of the data editing that is required in the usage of some datasets in the Catalogue.

Before discussing values, this first observation of this map begins with the distribution of RS zoning as it largely corresponds with the pre-consolidation 1929 boundaries of the municipalities of Point Grey and South Vancouver. Prior to 1929, Vancouver consisted of three separate municipalities: Point Grey, South Vancouver, and Vancouver. With the exception of a section of Vancouver east of Victoria Drive, there is little to no RS zoning within the boundaries of pre-1929 Vancouver. Instead, RS zoning dominates the former pre-1929 municipalities of Point Grey and South Vancouver.

Within the distribution of property values, a few patterns emerge. In the 2011 assessment, there were no single family homes in Vancouver that were worth less than $500,000. At the same time, the overwhelming majority of homes west of Main were worth over a million dollars. (Admittedly, this line is Ontario Street, but Main Street is the closest arterial). With some very small pockets of sub-$1,000,000 homes in Marpole and minute isolated cases, any single family home west of Main Street was worth over a million dollars.

Conversely, homes east of Main Street were largely under $1,000,000. While there were homes over $1,000,000 of which were concentrated in the far southeast corner of the City, there was a much more diverse collection of homes under $1,000,000 in areas east of Main Street. In all likelihood, there will be more homes worth a million dollars in the 2012 Assessment east of Main, but one of the surprising patterns in this map is the how strong Main Street remains as delineation between million dollar and non-million dollar homes in Vancouver.

(Additional observations and details on this map are now avaliable in this later posting.)

For most of the City of Vancouver’s history in the 20^th Century, Main Street was a social, cultural, and political dividing line of wealth, social status, and political affiliations. The power of this line can still be observed in single family home values both east and west of Main, but is it a line that is increasingly permeable? In the most recent 2011 Vancouver municipal elections, home values and, of greater interest, density had a strong correlation with how voters voted than one’s location east or west of Main. The geographic shorthand of East/West of Main being on the Left/Right could become less reliable to describe the electoral politics in the City. As prices for single family homes continue to rise and million dollar single family homes in the City of Vancouver becomes a likely norm west and east of Main, there lie even greater changes, shifts, and complexity for its social, cultural, and political geography.

Data Desk, Observations November 3, 2011

2011 Vancouver Trick or Treating Hotspots: An @BTArchitects Experiment in Crowd Mapping

As an experiment in social media, crowd mapping and urban metrics, BTAworks decided to conduct a survey of Trick or Treating Hotspots around the City of Vancouver through the over 1,800 Twitter followers and the 600 plus Facebook fans of Bing Thom Architects. We wanted to explore the question: Could the number of trick or treaters be used as a proxy measure towards illustrating the social cohesion, fabric, and capital of a neighborhood? In a series of tweets and posts between November 1 and 2, we requested respondents send us the number of trick or treaters that visited their households and the nearest street intersection to their homes. From the 16 responses, we processed these replies in Excel and used Google Fusion to produce this map.

While the results can hardly be said to be scientific nor comprehensive, there is promise and perils to this type of technology where citizens can help gather and share information about their environment. We were able to rapidly develop and deploy this data acquisition and analysis system in less than two hours with very little resources. In spite of its representative and severe statistic limitations, the map results follow a popular observation that the best trick or treating areas in the City of Vancouver are, for the most part, in the ground oriented, family sized housing neighborhoods surrounding Downtown Vancouver. With reported number of 200 plus tricker or treaters on its streets, the neighborhood of Strathcona seems to be an epicenter of Halloween spirit.

These observations being said, there are a few challenges and limitations towards the representativeness of crowdsourced/crowdmapped data. Clearly, many more data points need to be gathered before this map could ever be suggested to be statistically representative. One needs motivated crowds to report – a post sugar haze may not be one of them. Within this data, the issue of respondent bias occurs where the data may reflect who the respondent is as much as the desired phenomenon that is being measure. The maps created through crowdmapping are only as good as the crowd who are doing the mapping.

These maps may reflect more those who have access or desire to use social media than the actual measured phenomenon itself as the method defines the responses. As an example, does Strathcona have the most trick or treaters? Or does Strathcona have the most BTA social media subscribers who live in the neighborhood and are generous enough to share information about the trick or treaters? While using new technologies like social media and online mapping resources, this experiment also reflects age old and ongoing challenges and limitation in data gathering and interpretation.

From an urban metrics level, high density tower districts do not seem to be not very friendly towards trick or treaters. At the same time, the neighborhoods that are often identified as the most affluent in the city did not necessarily see many Trick or Treaters. Neighborhoods that saw the most Trick or Treaters tended to be in the older inner ring/street care suburbs of Vancouver who often share a pedestrian friendly scale and block structure compared to other parts of the region. Both in the number of responses and location of responses from Strathcona as well as number of trick or treaters, this perhaps reflects the remarkable social and physical fabric and richness of that neighborhood.

On a much more serious note, organizations like Ushahidi are doing trail blazing work in the field of information collection, visualization, and interactive mapping via the web and mobile phones. Meaning “testimony” in Swahili, the website was originally developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout in 2008. Since then, its software has been used to document and share data on such events like the 2011 Sendai earthquake and tsunami, the 2010 Haitian earthquake, and 2011 “Snowmageddon” in the Northeastern United States. Ushahidi has also set up Crowdmap to monitor elections, curate local resources, and map crisis information which allow technological neophytes to create their own crowdmapping platforms — and, in the off chance, also document a zombie invasion.

Special thanks for the BTA Twitter and Facebook respondents for making this experiment possible!

Data Desk, Media, Research Papers July 14, 2011

Sea Level Rise will Mark a Sea Change for Vancouver Coastline

New Toolkit Designed by BTAworks for Understanding Sea Level Rise in the City of Vancouver Now Available

Click image for slideshow (in Flash)

BTAworks, the research and development division of Bing Thom Architects, has published a new community toolkit exploring the effects and costs of sea level rise in the City of Vancouver. Inspired by similar projects in San Francisco, New York City, and the Netherlands, the Local Effects of Global Climate Change in the City of Vancouver toolkit provides a sobering local view of the City’s coastline.

“We wanted to inform a civic conversation on sea level rise which takes it from a global to a neighborhood level” says Eileen Keenan, a BTAworks researcher. “Instead of a far off example like the Maldives, we wanted to illustrate how the City of Vancouver and beloved local landmarks like Granville Island might be affected by various sea level rise scenarios.”

Using data from the City of Vancouver’s Open Data Catalogue and through a series of maps, the toolkit illustrates a number of sea level rise scenarios from a 1 metre to a 6 metres which could severely affect 3 to 13 percent of the City’s landmass. The toolkit also charts how various types of land uses such agricultural, industrial, and residential might be affected.

“Not all land uses in the City would be equally affected by sea level change.” observes Keenan, “As a legacy of our city roots as a port, and location at the mouth of the Fraser River delta, land with industrial and agricultural uses would be the most vulnerable to rising sea levels”.

The toolkit also examined some of the financial implications of sea level rise. Using a recently published provincial paper on sea dikes as a technical reference and its estimate of a 1 metre sea level rise for the coast line of British Columbia by 2100, the toolkit was able to generate estimates on some of the financial implications of sea level rise.

“If we expect key infrastructure and public investments like sewage plants and parks to last over 100 years, this provincial paper provides some major scientific and engineering insights into what and where we can build”, Keenan mentions. “This report represents the best and most current thought on how the BC coastline might change in the face of sea level rise and a framework through which we developed our toolkit estimates”.

While a 1 metre sea level rise seems conservative, its implications are dramatic when various coastal engineering criteria such as high tides and storm surges are accounted for. According to the provincial report, 5.6 metres could become the new flood construction elevation level in the Vancouver harbour for the year 2100 once these are factored in.

When combined with the 2011 land assessment values, the BTAworks toolkit estimates that over $25 billion worth of Vancouver real estate could be negatively affected by sea level rise. Additionally, the researchers caution that this does not reflect the value of existing physical and utilities infrastructure such as roads, sewers, and electrical facilities on these lands. When this is accounted for, the final costs of sea level rise are much higher.

The toolkit goes into further detail with the costs of defending Vancouver shoreline. Depending on the type of coastal defense, from earth dike to seawall, it could cost $255 to $510 million; however, Keenan notes that this estimate does not include any land acquisition for these dikes which could go into the billions.

“This is a cursory look at the potential costs and effects of sea level rise to City, but we felt that some kind of dollar estimate can illustrate what is at stake for Vancouver and, indeed, when it comes to sea level rise. Much more research and collaboration needs to be done to fine tune it.”

The toolkit concludes with the three recommendations. Firstly it concludes that the tool kit is a first step towards understanding the impact of sea level rise, but that a Metro Vancouver wide study is badly needed as a piecemeal municipality by municipality study is not enough. It points to the need for data for all municipalities to be readily available to facilitate this work. Secondly, it highlights the need for public and policy discussions around developing a Sea Level Rise Planning Area for those portions of the coastline that would be the most heavily affected by rising sea levels. This type of zoning would help us to place major land use and infrastructure changes in the context of a changing coastline. Thirdly, a need for a popular education program to educate citizens about the challenges to both the city and the region caused by sea rise and suggest what they might be able to do about it.

“This toolkit emphasizes the importance and value of long term urban planning and public education. We are very proud to help bring this critical issue forward for public discussion and study.” says Michael Heeney, a partner at Bing Thom Architects. “While these scenarios only offer a peek of the world at the end of this century, we owe it to future generations to begin preparing for this future today”.

To download the project news release and toolkit, click:

The Local Effects of Global Climate Change in the City of Vancouver: A Community Toolkit and Atlas News Release (PDF)

The Local Effects of Global Climate Change in the City of Vancouver: A Community Toolkit and Atlas (PDF)

The Local Effects of Global Climate Change in the City of Vancouver: An Atlas (PDF)

Media Contact

Eileen Keenan
BTAworks Researcher
ekeenan@btaworks.com
(604) 682-1881

A Look Back, Data Desk December 6, 2010

Closing Schools in the City of Vancouver circa 1928

As the proposed closure of five public schools in the City of Vancouver in 2010 has been averted, a view from 1928 provides an important and interesting historical context and perspective. In A Plan for the City of Vancouver British Columbia including Point Grey and South Vancouver and a General Plan of the Region, Harland Bartholomew and Associates developed the urban and physical skeleton for Vancouver through the first (and only) attempt to create a complete master plan for the entire City. Hidden within the plan, there was also the issue of which elementary and secondary schools should be “abandoned”.

Data Desk, Research Papers November 18, 2010

School Enrollment Growth and Decline in Burnaby, Coquitlam, Richmond, Surrey, and Vancouver

School enrollment can provide key insights into a city’s vitality and social sustainability. This brief builds up the findings of the September 2009 BTAworks’ study on the public elementary school enrollment patterns in the City of Vancouver and extends its scope to examine the five largest public and independent (private) primary and secondary school enrollment patterns in the Metro Vancouver region — Burnaby, Coquitlam, Richmond, Surrey, and Vancouver. With data provided by the British Columbia Ministry of Education, this data brief compiles standard enrollment data from the 1991/92 to 2009/10 school years with a focus on the most recent ten school years of 2000/01 to 2009/10. To place these numbers in a context, this brief also examines the state of enrollment in independent schools for these cities as well as school age population estimates and birth rate statistics from StatsBC

Brief highlights include:

In the span of 10 school years (2000/01-2009/10), total public school enrollment in Burnaby, Coquitlam, Richmond, Surrey, and Vancouver declined by 0.3 percent (-617). However, growth and decline in public school enrollment is very uneven as cities like Vancouver and Coquitlam declined by 3,092 (-5.5 percent) and 2,451 students (-7.4 percent) respectively whereas Surrey grew by 6,452 students (11 percent).
Surrey has the only public school enrollment to grow as Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond, and Coquitlam shrunk by four to seven percent.
Since the 1999/2000 school year, the public elementary and secondary school system in Surrey has had the largest enrollment in the Metro Vancouver region.
Independent school enrollment has grown by 19 percent (5,300 students) on average in 10 years.
Growth in independent school enrollment in Burnaby, Richmond, Surrey, and Vancouver ranges from 0.1 to 36 percent.
Public school enrollment declines in Burnaby and Vancouver have occurred while the population of school aged children (aged 5-18) is at near 10 year highs in these cities.
Average birth rates in the region are at record lows.
From a 20 year perspective, the school age population in every school district is at an all time high.
40 percent of independent schools in Burnaby, Coquitlam, Richmond, Surrey, and Vancouver are less than 20 years old.
The decline in public school enrollment may not necessarily be attributed towards just the student outflow into the independent system and the user fragmentation of primary and secondary education, but also the effects of changing demography and housing costs and type to restrain the growth of the total number of families with children and number of children in Metro Vancouver.
Enrollment patterns illustrate a set of large urban planning consequences, challenges, and opportunities for cities in the region in term of affordable family oriented housing for low and middle income families, family oriented development and the intensification and densification of schools as an “educational land reserve”.
Between a growing school aged student population, higher relative birth rates, and affordable family oriented housing, growing public and independent school enrollment will likely remain the strongest in the City of Surrey for the near and intermediate future.

To download the brief and presentation, click:

Public and Independent School Enrollment Growth and Decline in Burnaby, Coquitlam, Richmond, Surrey, and Vancouver Data Brief (PDF)

Public and Independent School Enrollment Growth and Decline in Burnaby, Coquitlam, Richmond, Surrey, and Vancouver Summary Presentation (PDF)

For Media Contacts:
Andrew Yan
BTAworks Researcher
ayan@btaworks.com
(604) 682-1881

Data Desk, Media, Observations November 15, 2010

Why are the Public Elementary Schools East of Main Emptying?

A 3 part series in the Vancouver Sun by Pete McMartin examining the state of emptying elementary schools and its causes and impacts on the City of Vancouver. A 2009 BTAworks study on the state of public elementary school enrollment in the City of Vancouver was cited in the article. Any thoughts, dear readers?

Data Desk, Media, Observations November 1, 2010

Turning Schools into ‘Neighbourhood Learning Hubs’

A great article in the Tyee by Katie Hyslop about the challenges and opportunities in declining enrollment and closing schools in the City of Vancouver with comments by Michael Heeney from Bing Thom Architects and Andy Yan from BTAworks.

Data Desk, Media, Observations, Research Papers March 31, 2010

Climate Change and the City of Vancouver

The Georgia Straight recently published on cover article on BTAworks’ upcoming atlas and toolkit on the Neighborhood Effects of Global Climate Change. Click here to read the article. Watch this blog for Part One of the publication!