Everyone knows that home prices and rent went berserk over the last 20 years in Metro Vancouver. But one unanticipated effect has been a kind of geographic downloading – communities farther from Vancouver have been burdened with ever greater costs as populations shifted in response to the cost of living.
Consider how out of synch school enrolments have become across Metro Vancouver.
Langley, population just under 200,000,saw enrolment this year of just over 25,000 students. Richmond, 240,000 people, counted about 22,400. Surrey, 696,000 residents, had about 77,000 students.
Vancouver, 756,000 people, recently projected that its total student numbers for this year will be around 52,000.
You can see how those numbers don’t match up. In Vancouver, school-aged students in public schools make up just 6.8 per cent of the total population. In Richmond, it’s just over nine per cent. Surrey has 11 per cent. In Langley, it’s 12.5 per cent.
There’s no way to fully rebalance Metro Vancouver – moving to the suburbs to start a family has been a cliche for more than 75 years – but these numbers are examples of how some communities are now bearing far more than their share of the costs of growth.
It’s the same reason why ER wait times are often noticably worse in Langley, Abbotsford, and other Fraser Valley communities than in downtown Vancouver, or why the Vancouver Public Library has a much larger collection than the Fraser Valley Regional Library, despite serving comparable populations.
But we are at a turning point.
School enrolments again tell the story. Richmond, Surrey, and other local districts saw enrolment declines this year. (Vancouver hasn’t made its numbers public yet.) Langley’s increase was the smallest in five years.
Rent and real estate prices are dropping, and the condo market is imploding.
The federal government’s reductions in annual immigration, and the cutbacks to temporary student and foreign worker numbers, are having an impact. The most recent budget by PM Mark Carney’s government moved even more aggressively, which suggests housing prices will not rebound immediately.
Canada is, and will remain, a nation of immigrants. Without them, we would literally have zero population growth, and an increasing imbalance of too few young people compared to retirees.
But this pause allows for a possible rebalancing.
In Surrey, Langley, and the Fraser Valley our schools, libraries, and hospitals were built to serve far smaller populations than we have now. Vancouver, by pricing out many families, has reaped the benefits of regional growth – a larger pool of workers and consumers – without taking on its share of the costs.
But if housing becomes more affordable, we can finally catch up on some of the needed infrastructure for the booming suburbs. Meanwhile, more families will be able to afford to stay in Vancouver.
It’s also a chance to entrench the housing reforms put in place by Victoria, and to leverage every federal housing dollar to ensure more reasonably priced family housing – not just 400-square-foot investment condos – is built in the City of Vancouver, so we don’t repeat this cycle again 10 years from now.