Quote:
Originally Posted by zoomer
The lens of proportion of single detached was used as I was commenting on CMHC's report of housing starts which used that framework and is probably the most used and easily understood metric for most people. Also people more easily understand a single detached home and what that represents and as goal/desire versus living in a shared building, whatever that looks like.
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Looking at at data on SFH development and understanding it can be complicated, and looking at it over time is even more fraught as definitions of housing types have changed, so aren't necessarily comparable from one census to the next.
With that caveat, the housing starts data doesn't give much of an idea of the changing housing stock unless you know the nature of the building that's taking place. You can observe several hundred new single family homes built in the City of Vancouver every year for the past decade, but if you look at the tenure, you'll see they're almost all rental. That's because they're almost all detached laneway houses, being added at the back of either a new, or an existing home. So you're getting a significant net increase in the stock of detached houses, but if the focus is on ownership, they don't add new opportunities.
Similarly, older single family homes are being torn down and replaced, so they may show up as new homes, but they aren't a net gain to the housing stock. In practice, very few single family homes are replaced with a new single family home, they much more often add a suite 'mortgage helper', but whether the new owners then choose to rent the suite, or use it themselves isn't captured in any data that I'm aware of. No housing data is perfect.
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