A recent CBC article on my yahoo account recently caught my interest, and I figured it would be interesting to discuss what I though about it. Titled B.C. ranks high in home (un)affordability survey, this article sums up the findings of a study done that states that three cities in British Columbia (Kelowna, Vancouver and Victoria) are severely unfordable. These findings are found by comparing average income and average home price to determine affordability. These statistics seemed interesting and I decided to do some research to determine who had done this study. After a quick googling, I wound up on the Demographia website. I knew right away that things would get interesting when I saw the small ad on the left column advertising a book written by the author of the website, Wendell Cox, entitled WAR ON THE DREAM: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life, a book that states among other things that Smart urban growth is a threat to quality of life. Just that statement alone is enough to make me question the accuracy of the study conducted by them. Secondly, after scrolling to the bottom of their website, I learn that “Demographia is “pro-choice” with respect to urban development. People should have the freedom to live and work where and how they like.” But I wonder, shouldn’t an organization whose founder is so concerned by quality of life, a seen by Mr. Cox’s book, be “pro-life”, not “pro-choice”. M. Cox is also the main contributor to the website http://www.rentalcartours.net, a website that encourages people to travel to other counties and live the way they do back home, in a car. Why have to deal with actual local people, when you can have the privacy of your own air conditioned car. This particular article actually encourages people to go to Europe, rent a car, and go shopping in Wal-Marts and K-Marts. In any case, now that we’ve got these discrepancies out of the way, let’s start dealing with this “report”. Here are some actual quotes from the report, and My responses to them:
“…one factor which clearly separates all of the urban areas with high Median Multiples (median house
price divided by median household income) from all those with low Median Multiples is the severity of the artificial restraints on the availability of land for residential building.” In many cases, these restraints are not “artificial”. Just because land seems to go on forever, does not mean it does. We have to remember that PEOPLE live in these houses that are being built further and further from the urban centers, and that these people too have restraints. Most people are not willing to commute further and further, wasting more time sitting in traffic due in large part to sprawl. These are the factors that lessen quality of life, not smart growth.
“There is a claim that households no longer are willing to locate on the urban fringe for less expensive housing. Yet, wherever people are permitted to move to less expensive urban fringe housing, they do.” This might be correct, but how on earth can someone think this is positive. Maybe instead of shoving low income families to the fringes of our cities, we should provide low income housing in the more dynamic, central parts of our urban centers. Being “pro-choice”, I think Demographia should focus more on giving real choice of where to live to low income residents.
“Ethnic minorities, such as Maori in New Zealand and Hispanics and African-Americans in the United States tend to have lower incomes and will be, as a result, disadvantaged to a greater degree by higher house prices.” Again, while this might be true, I don’t think the answer to integrating minorities into other communities and promoting homeownership can be done by creating more and more suburbs. A perfect example are the suburbs of Paris. These segregated, low income communities are hot beds of violence and high unemployment simply because they are not nearly diverse enough, and cut their people off from the rest of the city. Their residents are incidentally almost always black or north African.
Demographia’s urban liberalism can be summed up by this quote, taken also from the report: “…consumers continue overwhelmingly to show their preference for housing on the urban fringe wherever they are free to do so.” Well, consumers also overwhelmingly show their preference to speeding, jaywalking and not paying their taxes. But for the general benefit of societies, I think we should probably keep the rules in place that keep people in line. We shouldn’t allow people to live wherever they want for the same reason we should let people smoke wherever they want, for public interest. It’s in my best interest to not have to eat in a restaurant full of smokers, and it is also in my best interest to not have people commute 100km a day.
PS: This is the banner for the study itself. Do any of these homes seem middle class? Can you imagine any factory workers living in communities like this? Why are there not any low income homes in this banner. Because, although Demographia is concerned about home affordability, they are not nearly concerned enough for the right people.
