The Missing Middle – A millennial’s perspective
I
n spring 2017, the Vancouver Board of Trade held its 2017 Housing Forum on the Missing Middle. As someone who is part of a key demographic this crisis affects, I was ready to hear some recommendations. The message heard loud and clear at this seminar, as well as at the multitude of others this year, is that we “have to adapt our expectations.” A hard pill to swallow as someone who is now on the cusp of the age at which I ‘should be’ investing in my forever home. My story is like many of my peers’: I was born to immigrant parents and raised here in Vancouver. My parents’ lives followed the typical synopsis of what an ideal plot should look like: be educated, get married, have kids and buy a house. This is the same narrative I, and many others of my generation, have been raised to believe is the most secure way to live our lives. To purchase a property is an investment in our future as much as a measure of success. It has become our expectation of our life’s trajectory. We want to ‘make it’ and be seen as making it by others; personal accomplishment, image and status matter to millennials.1 So, what do we do now that this is no longer a viable reality for us if we choose to live in Vancouver? We are suddenly finding ourselves being none so gently coaxed to fundamentally change our expectations about how we intend to live – how we live together in our community, how high and how big we live, and where we live. This is the single loudest message coming from industry experts, and it is such a jarring reality check; one that I often feel unprepared for. In speaking to many of my friends, they too are unprepared, and in fact, still in the denial phase of grief. In these
early days of a housing paradigm shift in Vancouver, many of us still reject the notion that we may never be able to live in Vancouver proper. Certainly not when the city ranks number 15 out of 17 cities in terms of affordability and economic competitiveness – a solid D grade that puts it below Toronto, Los Angeles and Sydney.2 What is the recommendation then? First, we have to begin to believe and internalize that the currently missing middle housing, duplexes, townhouses, live/work spaces, can also be a home. According to a survey released by Vancity in May 2016, most millennials who buy a home in Metro Vancouver will go deeper into debt every year.3 The report states that millennial couples who buy condos are better off, acquiring a relatively healthy disposable income each year rather than being in the red with a detached home. There is a plethora of old adages that I can quote to back up the sentiment that a house is simply that, a house – a thing that we make into a home. It is where we live, raise families, renovate kitchens and store our high school yearbooks. It can be a laneway house, a low rise, or an Airstream; we need to move beyond boxing our notions of a house into the typical single detached, excessively largeyarded home. Second, and perhaps the hardest to accept, Vancouver living may not be in our future. This pattern is already beginning to manifest itself, with millennials choosing municipalities such as Whistler, Fort St. John and Victoria to call home.4 Though we want the so called ‘happy ending’ of a sprawling detached single-family home in Kitsilano, through our own deliberate but unsure
18 | CONSTRUCTION ECONOMIST | www.ciqs.org | Summer 2017
choices we may end up in the alternative ending of owning a courtyard apartment in Port Moody. This is not the depressing ending that many of us feel it may be, in fact, quite the opposite. A Stats Canada study on the average life satisfaction across census metropolitan areas from 2009 to 2013 saw that Vancouver ranked dead last, losing out heavily to cities like Kelowna and Abbotsford.5 Books such as Happy City by Charles Montgomery have long touted the negative effects modern cities have on general health and wellbeing and call for a radical change in the way we view urbanism and design. We must now embrace disrupting the traditional markers of adulthood and perhaps eschew a more ‘traditional’ path in life. And are not millennials the best suited for this? We are the most educated and culturally diverse generation yet.6 To return to Table of Contents CLICK HERE
