Expansion of Laneway Homes in Vancouver
Household acceptance and builders’ choices
This study builds on an intriguing result in a prior paper of ours. Laneway homes are less common in more expensive neighbourhoods, where their presence appears to adversely affect neighbouring property values.
Do some neighbourhoods bear more “missing middle” than others?
Laneway homes, a “missing middle” infill form, appeal to policymakers as housing that both expands renters’ choices and may be tolerable to incumbent owners. Vancouver’s experience allowing laneway homes raises questions regarding spatial equity and the challenge of modest take-up.
Project Lead(s):
Home Organization:
University of British Columbia
Other Participants:
Tsur Somerville, Andrey Pavlov
Community Partner:
Jake Fry, Smallworks, Bryn Davidson, Lanefab
Funding Stream:
Community-Focused Project
Project Status:
Ongoing
Background
This study builds on an intriguing result in a prior paper of ours. Laneway homes are less common in more expensive neighbourhoods, where their presence appears to adversely affect neighbouring property values. Selection is thus positive because laneway homes are commonly situated where neighbours mind least, but adverse because expensive neighbourhoods have received few new rental homes.
Methodology
We will analyze owners’ and builders’ choices to add laneway homes to existing and newly built homes. Transaction and building characteristics data, along with input from our community partners allow us to explore both the choice to build and the consequences for own and nearby property values. Specifically, we will ask:
Why are laneway homes uncommon on the West Side? Are affluent owners less willing to trade off lost privacy and space against rental income? Or do neighbourhood characteristics operate independent of demographics? Casual observation suggests laneway uptake has moved west with time. We will test whether this is true statistically, and whether adverse effects on neighbouring property values have weakened with time in the West. How do home builders decide whether to add new laneways? A conjecture is that speculative builders will add laneway homes only where homes with laneways command a large premium, but custom built homes and laneways added to existing homes may be more equally distributed spatially, reflecting owners’ idiosyncratic preferences.
Research Outputs
Existing reports, presentation materials, podcasts, webinar recordings and research summaries.
Journal of Urban Economics
Journal Article
The final output of the study: “Not in my neighbour’s back yard? Laneway homes and neighbours’ property values” published in the Journal of Urban Economics.
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