Video of the day: Vancouver vs. Edmonton
Also posted to TikTok and Instagram:
I asked why housing in Edmonton is so much cheaper than in Vancouver. Quite a few people said, because it’s Edmonton. Someone commented, have you ever been to Edmonton?
In fact I did live in Edmonton for most of the 1990s, and I have friends there. I moved to Edmonton after university for work, and I only moved back to Vancouver after my employer closed our Edmonton office during a downturn.
It’s true that Edmonton has harsh winters, with a couple weeks when it gets down to -30 and your tires freeze flat on the bottom. But people move where the jobs are. Edmonton’s a real city, the sixth-largest city in Canada. It’s got a good university. It’s got a population of 1.4 million, and it’s growing faster than Metro Vancouver.
It’s natural to think that housing in Vancouver is scarce and expensive because demand is high. But demand is only one side of scarcity. The other side is supply. The real difference between Vancouver and Edmonton is that Vancouver doesn’t have much land, so we need to build up. That doesn’t just mean high-rises. We could go a long way by making it legal to build single-lot apartment buildings, like Montreal does.
If you’d like to know more, take a look at morehousing.ca. Or, as always, if you think I’m on the wrong track, let me know in the comments.
The real issue is that Edmonton is Edmonton and it, like Calgary, continues to expand outward like a blob engulfing once rural communities. I was born and lived there for some years and still have family there. Vancouver isn't Vancouver ... well, Vancouver is Vancouver BUT Metro Vancouver is Vancouver, Burnaby, North Van (x 2), West Van, New West, Richmond, and on and on. Each community has it's own identity and a desire to protect that identity. Do you think that, perhaps, an amalgamation into a Megacity (as was done in Toronto decades ago) could provide a more cohesive housing strategy?