Achieving a  Mixture of Housing Types, Tenures and Costs.

        Historically, housing development in Greater Vancouver has been predominantly single-detached dwellings (SDD’s) and apartment housing, and to a much lesser extent, ground oriented medium density dwellings. The LRSP contains a policy aimed at expanding the supply of a variety of ground-oriented housing units, such as town houses, row houses, and duplexes. In terms of land use, the predominance of SDD’s in the region means that they consume by far the largest amount of land (on average between roughly 2-5 dwellings per acre) compared with other dwelling types, and new SDD development requires significant consumption of rural, agricultural, and previously undeveloped ‘greenfield’ sites, a fast disappearing commodity across the region.
        Between 1991 and 1996, the GVRD added approximately 83,500 dwellings, by far the largest 5 year increment on record. Encouragingly, 51.5 per cent of this growth consisted of apartment dwellings, 33.2 per cent consisted of ground oriented medium density dwellings (GOMD’s), and only 15.6 per cent consisted of SDD’s (GVRD, 1998). However, in 2000, the traditional regional preference for SDD’s re-emerged, when of the approximately 9,100 new dwellings completed in the region, 36 per cent of them were SDD’s, a significant increase from the 91’ to 96’ rates, but still below earlier rates (GVRD, 2001). Although this is less than the historical mix of housing completions across the region, SDD developments are still consuming far more land on predominantly ‘green field’ sites than the other types of housing developments, particularly in less developed and built up municipalities such as those in the south of Fraser sub-region where there is still a fair bit of un protected rural, agricultural, and open and undeveloped land.
        The extent to which there is a mix of housing types throughout the region is shown below based on 1996 census data.  The map shows those residential areas where there is a mixture of low, medium, and high-density dwellings of at least 20% each.

            The map that follows shows those residential areas where the predominant (over 80 per cent) residential type is the single detached dwelling (SDD). We can see that residential areas across the region are predominantly low-density SDD developments, and that there exists a regional imbalance in the spatial distribution of residential dwelling types.

           
           

The map below shows the spatial distribution of income across the region, illustrating a fairly significant degree of spatial polarization across the region based on income.

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