In Grandview, a rapidly gentrifying “streetcar suburb” from the Vancouver of a century ago, I have a neighbour who’s an obstetrician – evidence of gentrification in itself, I suppose. She made the comment one day that she could deliver all of ‘her’ babies to their parents on her way home from BC Women’s on Oak Street on the edge of Shaughnessy.
I imagine her driving north and east, dropping off babies in Mount Pleasant, Cedar Cottage and Grandview. For readers unfamiliar with Vancouver’s geography, these are mixed areas with some apartments, but are mainly old wooden houses – many pre-World War I examples are large enough to be divided into suites. The majority have basement suites, at the very least. They are medium density neighbourhoods, I suppose, with very diverse populations; they’re the kind of Edwardian-era districts that a respondent on PriceTags yesterday suggested I had ‘sentimentalized’ in books like Vanishing Vancouver.
My question is, what kind of neighbourhood do parents look for when they’re starting or expanding families? I am witnessing stroller gridlock on the sidewalks here, and notice it in Mount Pleasant and Strathcona, as I used to see it several years ago in Kitsilano before the infants aged out of their prams. Obviously this requires financial horsepower, whether it’s their own cash from condos they’ve sold elsewhere, their own significant incomes, and El Banco de Los Parentos. But it’s totally changing the demographic here.
You see it on The Drive, too. When bong and bead shops close, chances are they will be replaced by a tidy shopfront selling children’s clothes and toys.
Thomas Beyer’s post of March 10th showed a range of maps including this one:
Is any reader clever enough to find data about the age of children in different neighbourhoods?
In my opinion, you could learn a lot about (young) peoples’ vision of an ideal neighbourbood by analyzing where they want to raise their families; it is a period of life when you’re both fragile yet optimistic and hopeful. The evidence, based on the pram count, is that Vancouver’s old neighbourhoods, close to shops like Main Street and The Drive, not too crowded, are as close to utopia as they can get.
After 18 years near Main Street, the pram count is still pretty high. The local park has two playground structures and they are always filled at lunch hour with all the Filipino nannies in the neighbourhood visiting each other with their little charges whose parents are working. It’s quite a delightful daily event.
I live in the DTES / gastown with two small children. Our building has quite a few kids. The problem is that there isn’t enough bigger apartments with multiple bedrooms nearby, so after the kids get to a certain age people move out. For a lot of families I know, they would totally be fine with an apartment, rather than a stereotypical “place with a yard”, as long as there is enough space in the apartment. One bedrooms don’t cut it.
So in relation to looking into patterns of where families live, the opportunities they have to live in certain neighbourhoods has to be taken into account.
Purpose-built family housing in apartment complexes wouldn’t do any harm in devoting some space (preferably both indoor and outdoor) to kid’s play. Having lived in both adult and family-oriented complexes in the inner city, I have to say that older adults also need an equal amount of quieter common space of their own to balance with the more active and far noisier kid’s spaces. Relatively unexplored spaces like rooftops could be programmed more for the social needs of the residents if ground area is limited. And there are always nearby parks that in many cases offer a good and even superior alternative to private backyards especially if loaded up with things like playground structures, unprogrammed open lawns, and quiet, shaded areas with lots of seating.
Looking at the demographics, singles of all ages hover around 50% of the population, and that’s bound to grow as Boomers age. Maybe that’s why the market hasn’t responded with anything more than an over-abundance of one and two-bedroom units. The financials also work against three-bedrooms, which if built in more abundant numbers results in fewer units sold. However, it stands to reason that three-bedroom units in apartment buildings need to come on stream in increasing numbers in urban areas along with the above amenities side-by-side with senior’s housing if our densifying cities are to become more family-friendly and accommodate ageing-in-place.