Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
At least in U.S., Census-derived housing crowding isn't heavily correlated with income. It's basically a demographic proxy, as certain communities, like South Asians, tend to have multiple generations living with them, so are technically "crowded" whether we're talking Queens tenements or Texas McMansions.
I believe that NE Queens has the highest level of crowding in NYC, and NE Queens is generally middle-to-upper-class (though very heavily Asian these days). Public housing has some of the lowest levels of crowding, as they skew older, with tons of grannies living alone in big apartment units, which is horribly inefficient, and the city is trying to incentive these grannies to move to smaller units. But there's probably some non-reporting here, as many of these grannies have off-the-books boarders.
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I'm not looking at people per room or per sf though, which would make areas with large households seem poorer than they actually are. Multiple generations under a roof wouldn't make a house crowded under the Statscan definition, as long as there's an adequate number of bedrooms, like a couple shouldn't be sharing a bedroom with anyone, and a child over age 5 shouldn't be sharing a bedroom with an opposite gender child, and a single adult shouldn't be sharing a bedroom with anyone.
But if you have parents, grandparents, 3 kids and an uncle in a 3 bedroom unit, then yeah, that would be considered crowded, and I doubt South Asians would consider that desirable even if they're used to having big families under a single roof. They'd probably prefer a 5 bedroom house for that and if they can only afford a 3 bedroom unit despite being able to pool resources from 5 adults, then they're probably on the poor end of things. Maybe the head of the household has a good salary, but if everyone else is not in the workforce or minimum wage, then that's a lot of people relying on one person's salary and still a financially vulnerable/strained household.
A granny living in a big unit would be considered "not crowded" just the same as a couple living in a 1 bedroom apartment. The statscan measure only looks at the % of households that are crowded, not the average.
In Toronto for example, the biggest households are in the heavily South Asian new subdivisions of NE Brampton, and although there is above average crowding, it's still not as bad as in the neighbourhoods with a lot 60s-70s apartment towers where households might be barely half as big but the units are much smaller. The public housing in Toronto also has relatively high levels of crowding.