I have a new favorite blog that I think you might all enjoy as well. It’s called BT | A | Works and it is the “architectural and urban research and development division” of Bing Thom Architects in Vancouver. 

I think it’s it’s important to have people in a firm who are researching and experimenting with ideas beyond the day-to-day tasks of a job. So I was excited to discover their work this morning.

Their most recent post is a look at ownership patterns of single family homes sold in 3 west end neighborhoods in Vancouver from September 2014 to February 2015 (a 6 month period). These are some of the most expensive areas in the city and, collectively, they found 172 properties sold with an aggregate value of around $520 million.

Given the presence of foreign buyers in Vancouver’s real estate market, one of the things they then did was identify “non-anglicized Chinese names” on the title records. This means names like “Li Xian”, but not names like “Andrew Shui-Him Yan”, because the anglicized first name suggests that they are probably not a new immigrant or probably not living abroad.

Here’s what they found:

In total, 66% of the properties in the sample (172 properties) were associated with a non-anglicized Chinese name. And for properties over $5 million, the percentage jumps to 88%. The other interesting thing worth noting is that 23% of the registered owners declared their occupation as “homemaker/housewife.”

I thought this would serve as an interesting follow-up to the post I wrote about a month ago called, Is Hongcouver better off than Vancouver? If you’d like to see the full BT | A | Works presentation, click here.

Since 2009 when the U.S. economy started to recover, housing starts (i.e. new residential construction) have favored multifamily buildings over single family housing. Apartment/condominium construction has grown 3 times faster according to the U.S. Census Bureau (via Bloomberg).

A lot of this multifamily construction is assumed to be rental apartments, but this category also includes for sale condominiums. The classification has to do with building typology rather than housing tenure. (I would love to see how the above graph breaks down in terms of the latter.)

The typical explanations for this trend often relate back to Millennials being poor and saddled with student debt. That’s why they’re delaying buying single family homes. But eventually the expectation is that they will resume doing (largely) what previous generations have done.

Money and the economy, I’m sure, have something to do with the above trend. But I’m not convinced that it’s the whole story. 

There are also shifts happening with respect to consumer preferences and with respect to how we plan and build our cities. That’s why I’m very interested in monitoring family formations and housing choices. 

At the same time, I’m also a Millennial. And whenever I catch myself thinking a certain way, I assume that there are probably other Millennials out there who feel similarly.