There's a conventional school of thought that the best place to raise a kid is in the suburbs. Walkable, urban centers are great for young singles, but when it comes time to grow your family, the default assumption is that it's time to move on. Anecdotally, I can tell you that, now that we're expecting, some people assume we're obviously going to move from our condominium in the city to a low-rise house somewhere else.

But this viewpoint also shows up in the data. According to a recent article from The Economist, between 2010 and 2024, the total population aged under 18 declined by 22% in Chicago, by 23% in Los Angeles, and by 12% in New York. These figures are the sort of thing that lead some people to conclude that the suburbs are simply a natural market outcome. It's what families want, right?

However, it turns out this isn't universally true! The same dataset also reveals a clear exception: rich white families. Over the same time period, the number of white children grew by 6% in Chicago, by 13% in Brooklyn, and by a staggering 62% in Washington, DC. In certain inner-city neighbourhoods in Chicago, namely Wicker Park, the number of white children has increased by 39% and 94% (based on the two zip codes that make up the area).

Here's what's going on:

Families are mostly not moving in; rather people are moving to suburbs less once they become parents. Eric Johnson, a software engineer who grew up in Elgin, an outer suburb of Chicago, now has a ten-month-old baby in hipstery Logan Square. “We love the farmers market…I like not having to drive,” he says. Sara Weston-Shea, a social worker, grew up in suburban New Jersey and now has two children in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. “We can just easily access the wonderful resources that a city has, the arts, music, whenever,” she says. She likes that her kids are growing up in a multicultural neighbourhood, and that she can cart them around on a cargo bike.

What this tells us is that, no, the suburbs aren't necessarily a de facto market outcome for everyone. There are families who have the means to live wherever they want, and they are choosing walkable, transit-oriented urban communities. These are crucial data points because if rich white families are making this decision, how many others would do the same if only they had the means or, more importantly, if we were able to deliver more housing within their means?

This is a core city-building thesis of mine. There are families who move to the suburbs because that's what they prefer, and that's totally cool. But there's also a segment of the market that moves because they have no other choice. How big this segment actually is can only be accurately determined by figuring out how to meet that demand. And that's why addressing this need is one of the great opportunities and challenges facing large cities today.

Cover photo by Brad Knight on Unsplash

One of the common criticisms of electric vehicles is that, because they generally require more carbon to make than gas cars, they aren't really "greener." Well, here's a chart from Bloomberg that looks at lifetime emissions per vehicle for both gas cars and EVs:

The orange bars represent carbon emitted during manufacturing and scrapping (i.e., the dismantling of the car and the safe disposal of the battery). These processes are carbon-intensive. But it's during the driving/fueling phase where EVs shine.

The above chart assumes a vehicle life of 200,000 kilometres. Over longer mileage periods, this chart of course looks even better. At the same time, companies are actively working to reduce the orange bars. Polestar is targeting a net-zero car by 2035.

Importantly, this isn't going to be done through offsets. It's being done by greening their supply chain, which they record on a blockchain for transparency and finality. Each and every car comes with a Life Cycle Assessment.

My current car is over 8 years old, and I remember thinking when I bought it that it would be the last gas car I ever owned. That's right.

Cover photo by Kenny Leys on Unsplash

Chart from Bloomberg

According to recent data from CMHC via the Globe and Mail, here's (at least part of) the housing situation in Vancouver and Toronto:

• Metro Vancouver has 4,919 newly built unsold homes on the market (including houses, duplexes, row houses, and condominiums).

• Of this total, 3,195 are unsold condominiums. All of these figures exclude homes that were sold but where the buyers failed to close.

• Across Metro Vancouver, 37% of the unsold condominium inventory is priced above $1 million.

• In the city of Vancouver proper, 81% of the unsold condominium inventory is above $1 million, with more than 14% priced above $3 million.

• In the Greater Toronto Area, there are only 701 newly built unsold units on the market, and in the city of Toronto, 61% of these are priced at or above $1 million.

Initially, the 701 figure seemed low to me, but the way I interpret this "unsold" metric is that it's strictly a best attempt at a moment-in-time snapshot of developer inventory in newly completed projects that have never been subject to a purchase agreement.

Missing from these figures are unsold homes currently under construction, and recently closed homes that have never been occupied and are now on the resale market or are simply sitting empty. Again, if a buyer failed to close, these homes would not show up in the CMHC figures.

It also doesn't include homes in the pre-sale phase. However, I think this supply is mostly irrelevant because if the developer doesn't get to construction then that inventory quickly disappears from the market. It's not sitting there needing to be absorbed (though we developers would love for it to be).

The Globe and Mail article talks about how there are over 40,000 housing units that have been approved in Metro Vancouver but have not yet proceeded to construction, and that "newly built condos in Vancouver are too pricey to sell." But the salient question is one of product-market fit: What housing do customers actually want, and can afford, today?

As we have talked about many times before on the blog, I think we need to view this moment in time as an opportunity to reset our housing markets. In other words, it's an opportunity to look at how we regulate and tax new housing, and at what and how we build, all with the goal of better serving the housing needs of Canadians.

My specific view is twofold: We need to cut the regulatory fat around delivering new homes, and we need to better optimize for medium-density housing.