To the Exurbs and Beyond in Vancouver

The Vancouver Sun reports on the dimensions of the urban to suburban, exurban and even rural exodus fueled by the pandemic. The first dimension is households taking advantage of the opportunity to regularly work remotely, which permits fewer physical commutes. This makes it practical for households to move to more space, both in housing and yards, such as to exurban Chilliwack, in the eastern Fraser Valley, where housing is severely unaffordable but much less unaffordable than in Vancouver, which rated as the second least affordable among 92 major markets in nine nations in Demographia International Housing Affordability 2021 (with a median multiple of 13.0 --- median house price 13 times the median household income.

The article also describes household movement of people from exurbs to even farther away, not only small metro areas, such as Kelowna and Kamloops but beyond to small towns like Quesnel and rural areas. Kamloops is 220 miles from downtown Vancouver (about 190 miles from the edge of the urban area, also called the population centre) and Quesnel is nearly 400 miles. Remote workers choosing locations such as these are likely to be able to work virtually all the time from home.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.