About a quarter of Vancouver’s detached homes could be torn down by 2030, says an architecture professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and a collaborator.
Prof. Joseph Dahmen and collaborator Jens von Bergmann, of data visualization company MountainMath Software, have developed a “teardown index,” a tool that looks at a property’s relative building value (RBV) and gauges the likelihood that a house sitting on it will be demolished and replaced with a new one, said a UBC news release Tuesday.
A home is more likely to face the wrecking ball if its value is lower relative to the value of the land it sits on, the research showed.
“An RBV of between 60 per cent and 70 per cent is generally considered healthy for a new building,” Dahmen said in a news release.
“But when a building is worth less than 10 per cent of the total value of the property, the probability of teardown and replacement increases dramatically.”
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The researchers looked at the relative building value of a home built in 1940 as part of their study.
The property’s value grew over 75 years, but the relative building value of the house on it fell to four per cent over that time period, creating a “50:50 chance” that a new owner would tear it down and replace it with a higher-valued home, Dahmen said.
The breakneck speed at which Vancouver home values have grown means that half of the city’s single-family homes could have RBVs of less than 7.5 per cent, von Bergmann said.
“If RBVs continue to slide, one-quarter of all single-family homes will be torn down between now and 2030, replaced by new single-family houses that seek to maximize size,” he said in a news release.
“It’s not clear how that will help affordability.”
The teardown index was created using municipal data and B.C. Assessment records on single-family homes that changed hands between 2005 and 2015.
The tool compared land value, building value and lot size, and took into account factors such as whether a home was torn down within a couple of years of it being bought and sold.
Von Bergmann has also created an infographic showing how many homes were torn down in single-family zones from 1985 to 2014.
The “teardown index” comes amid concern about how many character homes are being torn down in the City of Vancouver, particularly on its west side.
A volunteer with “Vancouver Vanishes,” a popular Facebook page that document such homes that are set to be demolished, last year released a map showing demolition patterns across the city.
But the map was far from complete, said Caroline Adderson, the creator of Vancouver Vanishes.
“If this was done for every neighbourhood, I think the whole city would look like this because those demolitions represent a tiny number of what we’re actually losing,” she said.
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