Encore Episode: Family-Friendly Urbanism with Louis Thomas

Shane Phillips 0:04
Hello, this is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast and I am your host, Shane Phillips. Every episode we take a research paper on a housing related subject, invite its author to come on the show, and we talk about what they found and what it tells us about how to make our cities more affordable, equitable, and just overall better places to live. My co-host today is Mike lens, and our interview is with Dr. Lewis Thomas of Georgetown University. This conversation is about family-friendly housing, which we'll be looking at through the lens of downtown Vancouver, BC, and the truly incredible growth of their under 15 population over the past 20 years or so. Many cities across North America have been losing kids as housing prices rise, and that actually includes Vancouver, downtown is just the exception. And ever since the rise of the suburbs, there's been a pretty strong cultural sentiment that cities just aren't a proper place to raise children. As we discuss that sentiment is something of a self fulfilling prophecy. Our belief in the superiority of suburbs for child rearing leads us to under invest in the housing and social infrastructure that could make city living more desirable for parents and their children. And the result is that cities lack the things they need to become desirable. Vancouver has taken some very intentional steps to move in the opposite direction, and the results have paid off. Dr. Thomas has catalogued many of the policies and investments that have made that possible, and listen to actual parents living in downtown Vancouver to learn what's working for them, and what isn't. Cities tend to be more economically productive and environmentally sustainable. And at least in theory, they should offer kids much greater freedom and mobility than the car-oriented suburbs. And frankly, a lot of prospective parents just don't want to live in the suburbs, but feel like they have no choice right now. Making cities appealing to people of all ages and life situations is incredibly important for society's future. So we were excited to give it some attention on our show. The Housing Voice Podcast is a production of UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, and you can contact me with questions or research paper ideas at Shane phillips@ucla.edu or on Twitter @ShaneDPhillips. Now let's talk to Lou.

Joining us this week is Dr. Louis Thomas, lecturer at Georgetown University and author of a recent article in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Committed and Won-over Parents in Vancouver's Dense Family Oriented Urbanism. This will be our first time talking about family-friendly housing policy on the podcast so we're really excited to talk to you, Lou, thanks for coming on the show. And welcome.

Louis Thomas 2:46
Thanks so much, Shane and Mike for having me. I'm really excited to be on this podcast and part of these larger conversations you're having about housing policy in the US. So thanks.

Shane Phillips 2:59
Yeah, great to have you. So the first question we always start things off with, if you were giving us a tour of your city, what would be the number one thing you'd want to show us? You know, what are the must see places and things. And it can be where you live now, which I know is in the DC area. Or it could be Vancouver, which is what your paper is about, or anywhere else you feel you have a connection to?

Louis Thomas 3:19
Yeah, um, well, I do live in DC. If we were here, I'd take you to the drum circle and Malcolm X park every Sunday afternoon, which is amazing. I'm also originally from Baltimore, just up the road, which I stand by their former official city slogan as the greatest city in America. But from the point of this talk, let's talk about Vancouver because that's, you know, where I ended up doing most of this research, though I have done preliminary research in other cities that we'll get to. But let's go to southeast Falls Creek, which is alternately known as athlete's village, it was built for the 2010 Olympics and then converted into a pretty successful urban neighborhood. And I would take you to the community centers that are there that really, they have a mandate to serve a broad spectrum of the population, which is different than a lot of community centers in the US even though we still have them. So they serve low-income residents, and they serve middle-income and professional-class residents in a really interesting way, you know, preschool up through preteen and teenager programming. So that is a huge important part, then that take you to some of the buildings where people live, and parents live and get you to talk to those parents and see, you know what they like about living in these buildings and these neighborhoods. You know, they're like anywhere you live, there's pros and cons, but there's a lot of pros I think in those neighborhoods that we don't talk about a lot. And then we'd hop on a train or car or whatever and go down to Portland, Oregon, and I'd show you how actually this model has been already built in a small scale in the US. So there's ways we can do it here. Obviously, there's adaptation, you know, that happens with policy transfer. But I don't think just has to be a Canadian thing. So I would emphasize that.

Shane Phillips 5:16
Yeah, yeah, I I'm originally from Seattle, and I would have accepted Vancouver or DC because embarrassingly, I have not been to either. Having grown up my whole life in the Seattle area, I've never been to Vancouver is a great shame of mine to this day. And sometime soon, I'm going to actually need to go up there and visit it. Mike, we haven't really given you the chance to say hi, it's been a little while, how are you doing?

Michael Lens 5:41
I'm doing well, Shane. It is great to be back on the podcast. Still coming to you all from from London. So we've got at least three countries represented in this discussion in some way, shape, or form. I have been to DC but not Vancouver.

Shane Phillips 6:00
Have you been in London long enough to give us like a brief tour of anything yet?

Michael Lens 6:05
Oh, my goodness. Not really, because I just came from the countryside. So you know, I've already escaped the city, and it's funny to hear people in the country like junk on London. You know, like right now, London is the greatest place I've ever been in my life. You know, just as this like, you know, weird expat having a good old time on a sabbatical, and then you go to the country, and they're like, "Oh, my God, why would you want to live there?"

Shane Phillips 6:38
Okay, thanks. Thanks for not doing the accent by the way.

Michael Lens 6:42
Yeah. That's best skipped, yeah.

Shane Phillips 6:47
So we can we can get into this. We'll try to set some context here first. And one of the stats that you lead with, which makes Vancouver an interesting place to study this topic, is how the city has actually grown over the past few decades.

Louis Thomas 7:02
Yeah.

Shane Phillips 7:02
And looking specifically at the under 15 year old population - kids in the city, basically. City-wide, the population of these residents has been basically stagnant for a few decades, it actually went down by 1%, between 1996 and 2016. But in the downtown peninsula, which is really the focus of your paper, the population almost tripled during that same time period from about 2200 to about 6000, almost 6000. So just for, you know, some background here, why is family friendly urbanism important? Like what motivated you to study this, and how does this fit into your broader research agenda of things you're working on?

Louis Thomas 7:46
Yeah. I mean, I think those stats are really important in telling, but I'll tell a personal story about how I came to this research was, you know, I was a young parent, we moved from DC to Boston, so I could get my PhD when my wife was eight months pregnant with our daughter, and our first child. And, you know, even if we had been anywhere else, we wouldn't have had family support, you know, and we were in a new place without family support. And, you know, our daughter had been home from the hospital, like a few weeks, and my wife was like, "you know, I can't do this alone, this is crazy". And, you know, being a planner, I was like, well, maybe there's co-housing around or something, you know, and there was and there was cohousing in Jamaica Plane, and they had an open unit, which is insane and really rare. And we got in there and cohousing is, it's basically a co-op with some... you have your own unit but then you have like there was a kid's playroom in the building and shared kitchen, and this one was a really urban model. It was basically a modified courtyard building. Or like, you know, that was sort of okay.

Michael Lens 9:00
Yeah, to interject here, so when your wife was saying by "I can't do this alone." She wasn't saying like, you're off working.

Louis Thomas 9:12
Like, I need I need a community right.

Michael Lens 9:14
Like I need other parents. Yeah, yeah.

Louis Thomas 9:17
We can't do this alone because I was taking advantage as much as I could have a flexible graduate schedule, which just means I was stressed out all the time. Really never sleeping. Um, but yeah, that was that was her concern. And we got in which we were super lucky, and it was amazing having kids there you know, and there were other slightly older kids at the time that you know, were really kind to our daughter and wanted to hang out with her and then a lot of retired older ladies that you know, wanted to help us walk the kid or walk the dog. And you know, we there were people we got along with better than other people but it was this really amazing place to have a kid. You know, and I had traveled some to Europe and Mexico and Central America and Turkey you know, and I lived in New York, really dense urban places where it wasn't weird to raise your kids there. And that just seemed like what people did, probably like in London, that's more of a norm.

Michael Lens 10:25
Oh Yeah,

Louis Thomas 10:25
Yeah, exactly. And so it got me thinking, you know, "Why is that not how we as planners and builders in the US, you know, think about space?" You know, because at this point, the city had been gentrifying, you know, for a decade or two, and it was mainly studios, and one bedrooms, you know, going up, and that was the marketing and the talk, you know, around these buildings. And, you know, I later dug into the policy documents, and that actually was, you know, like, direct strategies in DC if we get more.... you know, there's reports from Brookings, when Anthony Williams, the former mayor of DC, you know, said he was going to bring 100,000 new people to the city, they actually ran models that families, even middle class and professional class families, cost the city more because of amenities. And so, you know, if you're worried about your city that you know going bankrupt like DC was, having a strategy that targeted singles and empty nesters, you know, it seemed like a better strategy. So I was curious about all that, and I started doing some research, and Vancouver had adopted these policies, really, in 89 is where they started applying the policies to all buildings subsidized and market-rate. And then you see, you know, in the decades following this increase in families with children living downtown, you know, is that a direct correlation? Yeah, I think you can argue it is,

Shane Phillips 12:07
Were those policies unique to downtown Vancouver, or were they city-wide, and it was like, really, just a lot of families ended up there, because that's where most of the housing was being built, or something like that.

Louis Thomas 12:18
So we can get into this more when we get into the weeds of the policy. But, um, you had the great episode of your podcast with Minji Kim, and her research, and basically, every building, you know, Vancouver in the zones that have high density, which really is only the downtown peninsula, and right across it, and around False Creek, and then some transit-oriented development, but most of the city is still single-family detached housing and looks like most of Seattle, you know, as far as like land use, so those areas, pretty much every building is rezoned, and then they do a value capture and to get your rezoning, you follow the guidelines. So you follow the family-friendly guidelines.

Okay, okay. So in short, new, dense buildings, pretty much have to be family friendly to get better.

Shane Phillips 13:13
Okay, in the introduction to your paper, you reviewed some of the biases against multifamily housing, and you sort of, you know, hinted at them just a moment ago, and, and especially as a place to raise children. And I think, you know, a lot of these go back a very long time, but many persists to this day. You know, the first thing I thought it was like, back in the days when urban areas really we're just desperately overcrowded, really unhealthy in terms of sanitation and the spread of disease. What are your thoughts on, you know, go back as far as you like, but to the modern day, where did these biases against urban housing as a family-friendly housing come from?

Louis Thomas 13:54
Yeah, the best source I found on this is Robert Fishman's, 'Bourgeois Utopias', sort of about the birth of the bourgeois suburb in early 1800s, London, you know, and then Manchester, really, that, you know, overcrowding was an issue. But before you even got there, you just had a new idealization and romanticization more importantly of nature, and this idea to, you know, what had been weekend homes for wealthy merchants, and all of a sudden, you had communities being built, where the men would get a carriage together, you know, into the city and the women and children would stay home away from the ills of the city, which had to do with overcrowding and sanitation, but also had to do with just, you know, general ideas of social mixing and vices and, you know, protecting women and children from those. That sort of the dirty city was a man's place so there's like a long gendered history of this, you know, and that gets changed and morphs, you know as as no Olmstead with Riverside brings those kinds of suburbs over to the US and they get popular here. But then you really see a lot of language in the early 20s from planners and other city professionals villainizing multifamily housing, and the National Real Estate Board working with Herbert Hoover, when he was head of the Treasury, promoting single-family detached homes as sort of the moral way to raise your children in an ethical way, you know, the only ethical way to raise your children, even in Euclid versus Ambler, which, you know, is about industrial versus residential. But the justification that the Supreme Court used was to keep multifamily buildings out of single family detached homes because "they destroyed the child", I mean, there are direct quotes in my paper, I should have it here but it's wild, you know...

Michael Lens 16:05
"Multifamily housing is a mere parasite on single-family housing"

Shane Phillips 16:08
We all know the "mere parasite" part.

Louis Thomas 16:10
Yeah, "they're a mere parasite" part. So it's, you know, as far as how Americans were actually using city space, you know, there were a lot of sections of the city that were working class, you know, that weren't horribly overcrowded. That people, you know, kids played in the streets, it's before mass car ownership, that's before TV, it's before air conditioning. So you had a different use of public space. But then you really have the subsidies that went in to build the suburbs, and to get low mortgages for returning white veterans, you have 11, making it really affordable, you could get a... if you were white returning veteran, you could get a home in Levittown with no downpayment, and it was $600 a month in like today's dollars. So it was incredibly affordable for the white working class, you know, and you have blockbusting going on. So I think, you know, the elite class had that ideal for a long time of sort of the detached home, but as becoming a practice and an aspiration for like, working-class Americans of all races now, you know, that ideal comes a little bit later and really follows the suburbs, you know, and like the post-war suburbs, I would think,

Shane Phillips 17:34
I feel like the fact that, you know, this is argue to at least partially come out of London, the UK, like, "isn't that where we got lawns too, so many terrible ideas coming out of there, guys?"

Michael Lens 17:48
Yeah, I think the Americans have taken over the title.

Shane Phillips 17:52
Yeah, we don't really supercharged it. You know, following up on this a little bit. Vancouver is one example but as you said, there are places all over the world where people live with kids in cities. Now, Singapore, Paris, Seoul, whatever, how do they experience child-rearing in these places like, do these biases exist even there, and people just kind of are over them? Like, what's happening in these places?

Louis Thomas 18:20
I mean, that's a great question. I'm glad you mentioned all the cities you did. So the biases are not there, like they are in the US. I think that's safe to say, I think, anywhere you go, there's going to be different preferences for you know, some people want to live in the city, and some people want to live on the edge or outside of it. I mean, that, you know, exists everywhere. But there's some great work by Leah Karsten, and she was interviewing families in Hong Kong. And there was some blog I read where she was talking about the research. And she talks about how it took people a while, cause she was asking the same questions and families in Hong Kong, like, they didn't even understand the question. Like, it took them a while to get like, "Oh, she's asking, would we rather live in a detached home, you know", and they were they sort of thought no, you know, I'm sure there were some that did, but in general, you know, and like that was found in Singapore too buy Yang Ed Ong and some other researchers. So, I do think you can say, you know, in other countries, it's not the same as it is here. And one other thing I want to build off of that, that I think is really important, just like I think you can argue, you know, through back in mortgages and through the highways and the GI Bill, you know, the US government subsidize the building of the suburbs. Fishman and Bourgeois Utopias has this quick passage that I need to research more, or write on it myself on sort of Houseman in Paris subsidizing the new bourgeois apartment life, as sort of, you know, when they built the boulevards and built all the apartments, like, in one sense, that's a government subsidy, you know, and you're creating a new lifestyle families can live in these spacious apartments in the city. And similar things happened with Vienna and the Ringstrasse. So, you know, I think there is a history here with, you know, what we think of in the suburbs in Europe with more central, you know, apartment living, of planners, defined broadly, subsidizing new ideals of where families should be in the city.

Shane Phillips 20:38
Mm hmm. So moving to Vancouver, specifically, let's just start with some of the more technical aspects of what makes Vancouver relatively family-friendly. And then we can kind of move on to the more informal and social elements that do seem to be really important. Yeah. So could you give us an overview of some of the policies that Vancouver has that are intended to make the city a more family-friendly place to live? We already talked about the two and three-bedroom requirements, but you can go into those a little more. I'm sure there's other things here as well.

Louis Thomas 21:09
Yeah, and I'll get into the history of these policies too because I think that's, that's interesting. And I have another paper on that and planning perspectives that we can link there.

Shane Phillips 21:19
Yeah, yeah, we will.

Louis Thomas 21:20
What's interesting about Vancouver, because we did talk about the downtown peninsula, and if you know that most, a lot of it is what's called the 'West End', which first densified in the late 50s, through 70, you know, wild, these sort of mini towers in the park going up. It's a different form than I've ever seen anywhere else. It's an interesting form. But those kind of like most contemporary densification, in North America, those in the 50s, through late 60s, were targeting the childless. And even to this day, that area is 80% studios, and one bedrooms, which is pretty wild. So that's part of the downtown Peninsula. So all that increases on the former industrial land, you know, that they've densified, post 90s. But so, there was a backlash against that, and instead of a pro-business city council that was doing that densification to raise tax money, because they were scared of suburban competition, not quite flight, you know, but like, competition of suburban retail. So they, in the early 70s, TEAM comes to power, which is The Electoral Actors' Movement, which is this new nonpartisan centrist city government, and they're really against this density, but they're also against highways, and they cancel the highway. And then they say to themselves, okay, besides the new housing tower boom, there was the office tower boom, in downtown, you know, in the 60s. So they said, "how are we going to get people to work? If we don't have a highway? Let's build an equitable neighborhood right next to downtown". So that, you know, from the maintenance workers to the executives, they can take the sea ferry to work. Like that was like, actually, their thinking, which is a really different way than we're thinking these days.

Shane Phillips 23:21
Yeah, I was gonna say that they sound like pure NIMBYs just like, don't build anything, but actually, apparently not because they just had a different vision.

Louis Thomas 23:29
So they downzoned the rest of the city, which is so crazy, um, and Lay has a lot of great articles about that. But then this one former industrial land across the creek from downtown, they said, "let's build a medium density", you know, the real missing middle, you know, in today's terms, neighborhood, and they did and at first people weren't moving in, and then the mayor who was an investment banker, he moved in with his family, and then it like, became very popular. So it came became very popular pretty fast, and was considered a success.

Michael Lens 24:05
It's very hard to to replicate that kind of policy.

Louis Thomas 24:08
It's gonna be really, you can't really replicate it, yeah

Michael Lens 24:11
For it to work, the mayor has to move in. You know, not a lot of cities are gonna get that.

Louis Thomas 24:18
I mean, I do think, though... yes, you are correct. But there were some other, I mean I think, this is the 70s when, you know, there wasn't the push to move back to the center city, like there is now, you know, so I think those forces have changed for sure. But they had this planned retail section that failed. And you know, and they went and did a post- occupancy report, and people were saying, "oh, all these green spaces where you thought community before no one's really using those, and your retail failed because there's not enough foot traffic, maybe you should build denser". So then they do this great report, it's like 120 pages long called housing families at high densities, and it's only for subsidized housing. But it's so detailed and beautiful. It's a really great document, and we can link to that online too. And so they had that for subsidized housing, and they built some really interesting products in that era, and then with False Creek north, which is what when people see that picture of Vancouver and all the glass towers, that's the development called False Creek north, that was land owned by the province, not the city. And so the city knew the province was gonna hire a private developer to do it. And so the city revised its guidelines from 120 pages down to 11, to like these really pithy guidelines, so that the new development going in could get the amenities they wanted and be family-friendly. And so along with value capture, which is the main way they do on this, so they zone, you know, half of what they want it to actually be and what everybody expects, and then they call it " the Vancouver, the land lift". So once you get the new density, you calculate what that new value would be. And then the developer has to give the city anywhere from 20 to usually like 75% of that value, either an in kind or in cash contributions, community amenity contributions, is what they call them CAC's. And to get the rezoning, you follow this 11-page document with the guidelines for family friendliness, amongst other documents, but that's one of the big ones, where you have 25% or more two-bedroom units, and now, you know, as of 2016, you have to add 10%. You know, they talk a lot about bicycle storage for children, they talk about sort of trying to do like a mudroom type thing when you come into your condo that, there's a whole bunch of policies like that, then they have sort of a, you know, dedicated play space. And all of these are guidelines so they have, you know, numeric recommendations, but they expect each developer and each architect to do it as appropriate for the site, you know, so it's not like a checklist, which you know, can take more time, but also leads sometimes to better results. So those are sort of the main things. Oh, visual and acoustic privacy is a big one that's really important, and as a side, another thing I found is, once you get into tall concrete buildings, you actually have way better acoustics between units, you know, less sound transfer. So that that helps with family-friendly buildings versus wood frame buildings. So those are all, you know, really big pieces. They get annually $151 million in these community amenity contributions. They also have development cost levies that go on any development anywhere in the city. And they put all that money into, you know, a lot of it goes does go into affordable housing, it's still you know, not enough to make Vancouver affordable. And then they use that money for community centers, which are really well funded, and programmed, they often have daycares. They have a daycare shortage in the city so that's an issue but some buildings have daycares in the building, even when they get built childcare facilities, transportation parks, and they do really smart things with their parks like you were talking about schools. The school they built, Falls Creek North Elementary School, has a public park right next to it, and that's the school's park. So, you know, during the day, the kids use it for soccer games and whatnot. And they have a little playground also, but then it's used by everyone in the city, you know, in the evening, and on the weekends, and during the day when the kids are there too. So it is you know, a little bit of getting used to, it's a different model than we have but um, but it works there.

Shane Phillips 29:10
I did really appreciate in your paper you included some drawings that some kids did for one of the buildings and it was just like a compilation of them. And I learned about Dude Chilling Park in Vancouver, was news to me, not the original name but they like officially renamed the park Dude Chilling Park.

Louis Thomas 29:30
There's a statue that looks like a dude chilling yeah

Shane Phillips 29:36
I'm surprised that didn't end up on your your tourism list. It's gonna be on my list. Yeah, is it?

Louis Thomas 29:44
Its an okay park.

Shane Phillips 29:47
I just need to take a picture

Louis Thomas 29:49
That drawing is the single best piece of data I ever found - just Is this an ideal environment for children. You know, this child obviously loves the building she's in, and you know, it's a drawing of all her friends in the building. Yeah, yeah, there's another story, it made it into the paper, where a kid was out with her uncle who's a developer or contractor, and he's building this, like, 3000 square foot single-family detached home, you know, which is common in Vancouver. And the kid says "that building is so small",

Shane Phillips 30:27
Right

Louis Thomas 30:28
And the guy's like, "what are you talking about? It's huge". And she goes, "but how many families live there?" Then the uncle says one, and the girl just can't believe it. And said, "that's crazy, so many families live in my building". You know, to her, that's what you want a building to be - it's tons of families so you have lots of friends, you know, and that's a great place to her.

Michael Lens 30:51
And I guess so, that's an interesting thing that you should, you know, talk a little bit about, you know, how you design your study, and how you, you know, kind of gathered, not only this very rich history that you share with us, but like the specifics on the different outcomes that you found. But an interesting thing, of course, people will say, "well, you know, if you talk to the families that live there, they're less predisposed to want to live in the suburbs, they're more predisposed to want to live in this city, and they already accepted a certain density, you know, is desirable to them". But the kids, there's no selection bias. You know, there might be a little bit of, you know, ingraining that goes on from one generation to the next that like, "yes, this is normal, and this is good". But another really cool thing about kind of getting that, you know, that information from the kids is like, they didn't choose where to live. They like it, it's normal and good to them, right?

Louis Thomas 32:00
Yes.

Shane Phillips 32:02
Yeah, and so this is a good transition, actually, because you use one of the market rate communities in the city, as sort of a case study, and it's called appropriately 'The Social'. And, you know, one thing that stood out to me was how density seem to help create this critical mass of parents who could support each other for you know, the little things like watching a kid while someone goes to run an errand. And one quote you have in here is from a parent is, "the only thing worse than having a baby is having a baby in the suburbs". And so can you just talk about that a little bit more? I feel like dense housing, you know, is often viewed as sort of isolating, anonymizing, and I think there's absolutely truth to that, and it can be that, but it doesn't seem to be what was happening in this building, at least.

Louis Thomas 32:49
Yeah, no, I think that's a really important point. Um, and I included another quote from a dad in another building who had lived in the suburbs, you know, and he talks about how he would just drive his car in the suburbs and not see his neighbors. And now he lives in the city in you know, 30 storey condo and the top and he doesn't see his neighbors. And, you know, sort of like that, that neighborliness, you know, is, you know, it can be there, it cannot be there, both in the city, and in the suburbs. Right but as far as The Social, there are a lot of particular things about The Social that do make it sort of unique, even in the Vancouver context. So what I found, in talking to a lot of families that lived in market rate, you know, basically condominium buildings, they often loved living in the city and in their building, but they didn't know a lot of their neighbors. And versus Vancouver has, compared to the US, you know, it's just got slightly more social housing, you know, it's still closer to the US than, say, Europe or even England. But it's, you know, it does have a little bit more social housing, and they have these cooperatives, and there, you know, it's a more intentional community, everybody knew their neighbors. But so The Social was really interesting, because it had this sense of community for some of the neighbors, and then I did meet some other market-rate residents who talked about that in their buildings, too. But, you know, what were the particular things that allowed that to happen? That's what I was really curious about. So one of them is, you know, in the guidelines, and in a lot of the buildings that get built, the way buildings get built is you have one sort of playground space, that's often sort of tucked away, you know, and like not very attractive and not a place you would really want to be unless you're a kid who's like at the playground, and then they have like another community space somewhere else in the building on like a roof deck or something. So they're often separated. And you know, when I talked to parents who lived in those, they were like, "yeah, we hardly ever go to the playground because it's like, dark and windy". You know, or like, you know, have weird wind issues come up with towers, or no one's there, you know, so they just use it a little bit. But the common space at The Social, it had, you know what parents called the "crappiest playground", and it was this one dinky little thing. And then the rest of it wasn't too fancy, which is another thing, you hear complaints about, like the common space being so fancy that you don't want to take your kids there, because you're scared, they're going to break stuff. So like, I interviewed a guy in a building in DC, and you know, he was renting, and then they love the building, and they bought a unit there, and I was like, "oh, do you use the roof deck?", and he said, "no, there's pebbles so we can't take our toddler up there, because he throws the pebbles off the roof deck". Exactly, these really simple designs, you know, like, no, horizontal fencing, you know, like no pebbles.

Michael Lens 35:56
They also put the pebbles in their mouths, too.

Louis Thomas 35:58
Exactly.

That's not as bad as hitting someone on the sidewalk. But so The Social had, it was just kind of a space, you know, and there are some nice planners, and there were some benches and there was a barbecue and it had a bathroom, you know, inside off of it. So people would hang out there with their kids. And the way it got started, was one mom had actually lived in a cooperative before, and had her kids at the cooperative for her one kid. And they said they really loved it but like, you know, she said, people were a little intense. You know, it was sort of the impllication I got...

Shane Phillips 36:45
A little too cooperative.

Louis Thomas 36:46
Yeah, exactly, different levels, and they wanted to build equity, you know, which is like her husband was older, and you know, they were worried about retirement. So they moved in there, into The Social, and she said, "I really miss that sense of community" so I went to the condo board and said, "can I get money to have a barbecue?", and they said, "Sure". And then she did it, and then she organized, you know, and she had some fliers up. And then she did the same thing for a Halloween event. And then after that, like those two things were all she really needed to do. And then people just started saying, "oh, let's go up Friday night, and hang out, you know, on this common space". And it was on the fifth floor so it sort of raised above traffic, if you have real little kids, you're not worried about them running out into the street. It's a nice space to be in. So it became really well used. I mean, it's interesting, you know, I think it's like a 100 some units in the building. You know, probably there's four families out there, you know, on the weekend, you know, or something, maybe a few more, but you don't need that many people, you know, for it to be enough, but you need that many units today, to get that that small amount of people to form a unit

Shane Phillips 38:07
That is only like a 20 unit building might just be the one.

Louis Thomas 38:11
Exactly, exactly. So there really are these advantages to density. And then the other interesting thing about the social in Vancouver's guidelines, and if you go back and read urban design literature, there's a lot of talk around, you know, parents should be on the first four floors, so they can see their kids playing and be connected to the street. And you don't want parents in towers. What I found that The Social is most of the floor five through nine were, two bedroom and two bedroom plus dance, so they were the bigger units in the building. And there, all the parents of the focus group that I conducted, who lived there said, "oh, we love living there", and you know, only one little wing, like only four units, could actually see into the play space or the courtyard, the rest couldn't. And it was a double -oaded corridor. But when you have a double loaded corridor, if you have all family units along it, no one's gonna care if your kids are running down the hallway, and you leave your stroller in the hallway. So during the focus group, there was this moment where people like, "oh, yeah, we use the hallways, and we don't care". You know, I'm like, everyone thinks it's great. And then one family was like, "wait, we've gotten three noise complaints". That family lived on the one floor where there were just two bedrooms on the corners and then studios, you know, in bedrooms in between because they didn't have a critical mass of families on their floor. And that actually comes into policy issues a lot because of the borrowed light issue in buildings, like to do two-bedroom or larger, three=bedroom units, in a double loaded corridor plan, except for the corner units, it's hard to get those units without doing what's called "borrowed lights" where you have, you know, one of the bedrooms has a interior window that, you know, gets light from the exterior, okay, which some zoning codes and guidelines, changes city to city, like don't allow that. So whereas I mean, you know, you'd have to research this more, but I don't think most kids care if their bedroom has a window or a bunch of glass bricks at the top, you know, as long as it's fire safety and all that is accounted for, you know, that doesn't seem actually like a huge issue.

Shane Phillips 40:32
Yeah, so moving outside of these buildings, you know, proximity to daycare and community centers, schools, libraries, parks, and other things that you describe as social infrastructure seems to also be really, really important here. So do you have a sense for the scale of these investments being made in downtown Vancouver? It does strike me that, you know, the new buildings alone, even if there's quite a bit of development, probably can't pay for all of this stuff. And so, you know, do you have to have a broader commitment to you know, that the government is going to invest in these things with its own money, not just with developer money?

Louis Thomas 41:11
Yeah, I think that's a great point, and I think that that is true. That said, you know, with the density that Vancouver is building, you know, they get between community amenity contributions and development costs levies, they get almost $220 million a year, you know, out of these funds. So I do think you can do a lot, you know, with developer funds, more than we tend to do in the US, and by changing, by doing even denser buildings, you can get even more money from them. So, you know, that's where it gets complicated. I do think also, a lot of US cities have a lot of underutilized community centers and public land that they can use to build things like this, like, you know, right behind The Social, there's one building, and this was built using developer money, but it has a library, a community center, a daycare, a coffee shop, and then 98 market rate units above it, which in Vancouver is rare to have market-rate rentals. So the city's able to own them as an equity thing, even though they're market rate, which is interesting. But I know in DC, they can't, like they've tried to build public housing on top of libraries, and they've been fought by an organization that believes libraries should be their standalone building. And just if you can change the ideal to like, you know, what's good urbanism to something denser, and more like actually more mixed. And, you know, the parents that I talked to at The Social, and the parents everywhere I talked to, loved these community centers, and, you know, like one family who had teenagers talked about how their daughter had gone through all the programs, and now as a counselor in the summer, you know, at the community center, and had a whole cohort of friendship, and then with her whole life, you know, around the community center, and he described it, he said, it was like his small town and rural British Columbia, you know, in the middle of downtown Vancouver. So, you know, how do you get that? And I think I think we have a lot of resources we're not using to their fullest that would, you know, cost some money, but would maybe cost less than we would think it would.

Shane Phillips 43:49
Well? Yeah, I know that I know that the use of like, our public schools in the evenings as parks is one thing that comes up a lot here that, you know, traditionally they're just closed off after school's out. And it's just, it's often the biggest open space in a lot of neighborhoods, especially in a place like LA, and there's been a push to open those up and program them during the evenings and weekends and so forth. That's a really good point.

Michael Lens 44:15
That's a bizarre Los Angeles you know, like I where I grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, it's not like that at all. I constantly found it bizarre that you lock just the defenses are there at first. Yeah, in some parts of where I've grown up, they just don't exist.

Shane Phillips 44:38
I wonder how much of it has to do with like, the cars too, you know, and keeping kids away from the streets basically. And then once the fences use it for other stuff.

Michael Lens 44:50
Yeah, I mean, we have a whole conversation on like what makes schools so lockdown?

Louis Thomas 44:57
Yes, yes. Yeah.

Shane Phillips 44:58
There's other things going on there too for sure.

Louis Thomas 45:01
There's a whole community Schools Initiative. You know, that's working in cities like Baltimore, and I just saw a talk at AACSB about it that, you know, are trying to use schools, even in other cities, you know, that have a different speciality than LA with that same idea, which I think is great. Yeah.

Shane Phillips 45:20
And you mentioned in the paper how, even when families with children leave the downtown for more suburban neighborhoods or don't go, it's not necessarily because they want to leave or don't want to be there. You quote one parent who really did want to stay, and even rented a house that was under 900 square feet in the place that they did ultimately move because they said a larger home would just feel weird to them. But they ended up leaving because the waitlists for daycares which you mentioned, were too long in the downtown area. And I bring that, you know, I bring that up partly to just kind of opine on how big of a bummer that is. But did you get a sense for that this is something Vancouver city government is trying to address or is it just a matter of like too much change too fast? Or have they really not been as responsive as they should be?

Louis Thomas 46:07
Um, so that's, that's really a great and important question and a really complicated one, that quote is actually from an article this parent wrote, it wasn't an interview I had, but it's a really important telling, I think story. And so Vancouver's trying to build a lot of daycares. And I mean, they're proposing really interesting things like, building on top of existing city parking garages, you know, and I mean, they're trying to get like, I think, really creative with it. And so a lot of the issue, you have this crazy issue with the schools downtown, where the school board is controlled by the province, not the city. So you know, it's a separate issue. And then as we said at the beginning, you know, the number of children in the city overall is flat, which actually means in the outer single family detached areas, because they've gotten so expensive, and they got super expensive before the condos got crazy expensive. It was always all crazy expensive, but the condos were relatively more affordable, and then around 2017 shot up to be as expensive as the detached homes. But so those school districts have lots of empty seats in the outlying parts of the city, so that the city can't get money from the province to build new schools in the overcrowded downtown. Because the province says, "well, you have all these empty seats", right, if you send your kids really far, you know, so it's a that's like a huge mess in the way that the city works there. As an alternative policy, this is an anecdote I learned well not an anecdote a policy I learned from a colleague of mine who's a transportation planner, and take students to Amsterdam every summer and studies suburban Amsterdam. And they have a policy that the national government that if the municipality approves a new housing development, there has to be an elementary school within walking distance. So if they approve, you know, anything sprawling, then they're on the hook to build an elementary school that kids can walk to, which I think is, you know, another way to like, how do we rethink neighborhoods and schools and equity and development? You know, whereas in Vancouver, a lot of parents complained about how far their commutes for elementary school were, because there aren't enough schools downtown. And then the daycare situation, it's wild. I mean, there's such a shortage of daycare facilities, I think, because it got so expensive, so fast, you know, that there aren't the sort of private sector, you know, daycares that we rely on, you know, and they rely on in Canada, too.

Shane Phillips 48:52
Yeah. And it's not, it's not like daycare shortages are unique to Vancouver is like a nationwide thing in the US. And, and I do, I want to take a step back in here. And just like state, clearly, we're talking a lot about daycares. And schools, and this is a housing podcast, maybe people were kind of wondering why that is. But I do think, you know, there's a pretty clear connection, like we want a lot more housing in our cities, we want for affordability reasons for environmental reasons, for access to opportunity reasons. And if you don't have this social infrastructure to support them, there's not going to be the demand to move to those places.

Michael Lens 49:29
Yeah, exactly.

Shane Phillips 49:30
And so, you know, it seems like maybe a bit of a tangent, but I do think this is really central. And if we can't solve these problems, it's going to be really hard to get the housing where it needs to go. Yeah. So in the title, you talked about one-over and committed parents, and I found that categorization really interesting. So you have people who were sort of committed to urbanism and living downtown, and others who were more sort of one over to that lifestyle and didn't come to it with like this strong desire, and it sort of reminds me of how we classify bicyclists, you have like the enthused and confident, you have the interested but concerned and so forth. Could you tell us a little more about those two categories, the committed versus one over? And sort of what we can learn from both? And I'm curious if you think there's sort of a sequence, if we should, you know, kind of try to get the committed parents first and then move on to the winning, move on to winning over more of them? Or is it really kind of the same thing that both groups need?

Louis Thomas 50:33
Yeah, those those are great questions. And I think the answer also speaks to Mike's question about the potential sample bias, you know, like, are you just hearing from the people who would be living in the city anyway, regardless of these policies? And you know, and it's true that my sample was heavily you know, biased towards committed urbanists. But in my interviews in Vancouver, this came up repeatedly, and I interviewed a lot of parents in Portland, Oregon, and Boston and Washington, DC, because originally I was gonna do big comparison case, or across-city case. And I heard it there too, this, you know, sometimes it's the couple just, you know, was moving to the city in their 20s, because that's what they did. And, you know, they figured they would move to the suburbs once they had kids. So I mean, that's a really common story...

Yeah

...you know that we hear all the time. So you can think about one-over urbanists of like, how do you capture that demographic and those people and keep them in the city, raising their kids, and then, you know, versus, you know, I'm not sampling people who never moved to the city and aren't going to move to the city and, you know, don't want to move, I don't think you're going to convince them to move to the city to raise their kids. But, so the categories, you know, you interview a lot of parents or I interviewed a lot of parents, who, they sort of had the self-identification as "not suburban", you know, and as like an urbanite, and they talk about how they don't like the suburbs. One mother said, I asked her where she grew up, and she said, "suburban, yuck, I hate it". You know, that was her like visceral response. And then she said, I could live in the wilderness, or I could live in the city. And you sort of have that, you know, dichotomy going on, which is interesting. But so, you know, I've met a lot of those parents, for sure. But then I repeatedly kept hearing these parents say, you know, we were going to move to this city or I thought I wouldn't like raising my kid in the city, but I love it, you know. And then in Vancouver, they often talked about how easy it was to have the community center, like a great example is they have all these drop-in taught gyms, where they take the basketball court, and they fill it with, you know, like a bunch of soft pads and plastics, slides, and big balls, and little trikes. And you know, parents are like, these are great, we can live in a small condo, and not have to have all that plastic crap in our house, in our condo. And our kids still gets it three or four days a week.

Shane Phillips 53:17
Someone else gets to clean it up too

Louis Thomas 53:19
Exactly. I mean, the parents help put everything away, it's a pretty nice run program but it's free...

They're Canadians

Michael Lens 53:31
They're mannerly?

Louis Thomas 53:32
Yeah. Yes, that that definitely is part of it. But you also heard, and this was something I didn't expect but a lot of parents of teenagers talking about the bicycle network and the transit for their teenagers and how like that saved them having to shuffle their kids all around. And they were like really grateful for that, that there were these protected bikeways and that there was you know, good bus service and they have a light rail, so that their kids could get around and explore and see their friends on their own once they are teens. So I think the categories are really helpful because you hear a lot you know, a lot of this is more in popular lit(erature) than in housing research, but you know, preference surveys, you know, they interview millennials or young professionals in the city and they say, Oh, we're going to move to the suburbs when we have kids. And so then the city says, Oh, we don't need to build housing for them because they don't want to live here. Whereas I think if you if you build the housing and build the amenities, you're going to get the committed urbanists first to really adopt it. So your your projects not going to fail, especially at first because you know, there's so few of these projects, but then you're going to get a lot of the one over urbanest in there and you even get you know, usually or often within a couple You know, if it's co parenting happening, you have, you know, one's leaning more towards moving to the suburbs, one's leaning to staying in the city. So these policies and these amenities that really cater to parents, you know, sway those discussions, I think a lot when you make it easy for parents to stay, right, they will. And once they build social connections, you know, then they're going to not want to lose those. Yeah. And they'll they'll think about that, they'll think about, do we get the bigger yard? Or do we, you know, and have to spend 30 minutes to see our friends? Or do we just see them, you know, a few times a week bumping into them in the hallway or in the park?

Michael Lens 55:39
Yeah. And I mean, you brought up kind of preference surveys, like, so much of what people express is their preferences, but also so much of what people reveal, as their preferences through where they choose to live and mobility is wrapped up, or, you know, we researcher dorks say, and godliness, but are constrained by what's possible. Yeah. So like, if if, you know, really a city is, is generally offering you a relatively pastoral, you know, low stress, suburban environment and a, a highly urban environment that's not really conducive in a bunch of different ways, you know, to raising a family, then like, it's not really a choice in the way that we kind of, you know, try to frame it, or design a survey or study on, you know, and so this at least gets us something more on the menu to choose.

Louis Thomas 56:49
Yeah, exactly. And I think that, you know, back to Shane, bringing up the story of the daycares, like the, the demand, so easily exceeded the supply, you know, that the city has been able to offer at this point. So I, I think once that that change starts to happen, you know, like, it happens really?

Shane Phillips 57:09
Yeah, it does seem, I mean, sort of in the same way, as the individual buildings like that critical mass is really important. Exactly. I want to move on here and and kind of challenge some of these policies a little bit, because I think, please, I've had, I've always had my my hesitations with these requirements, that buildings have very specific, you know, shares of two or three bedroom units or provide, you know, whatever facilities on site. And, you know, you hear, it's pretty common for politicians and others, talking about making urban areas, more family friendly to advocate for things like a minimum share of units of buildings being two or three bedrooms. And just to go through some concerns I have, you know, one is that in many cities, the housing type we're most lacking, isn't actually family sized housing, it is the one in two bedrooms that we just didn't build a lot of in the past, clearly not the case in downtown. But I think that's often the case. Another is I just have this sort of general ambivalence about this idea that every building needs to be like a microcosm of the entire community, as opposed to just having them specialize in different things. And you know, the third, and I think this is probably the most important, and most concrete is the question of whether these family units are actually going to be occupied by families, it seems like what often ends up happening, or certainly what could end up happening, at least, is that the two and three bedroom units just end up being rented by two or three roommates who might actually have more income less costs, at least, and have to worry about daycare and things like that. And so you're getting larger units, but it's maybe not actually leading to more families. So I'm sure you've heard all these concerns before. And I'm curious, you know, what your reaction is to them?

Louis Thomas 58:56
Yeah, no, I mean, I think those are all really valid points. What I would say is, I do think, you know, we're not lacking family sized housing, if you're talking about detached houses. But if you're talking about multifamily buildings, and dense neighborhoods with lots of amenities, we really have built very little of that. Yeah, you know, so, I think I think that's safe to say where we're really lacking those kinds of neighborhoods and areas. You know, I agree on one hand, I agree that I definitely agree that not every building should be a microcosm, you know, of the regional demographics, or whatever. But I do think there's interesting room for mixing within buildings. Like I mentioned this in the paper, co op and athletes village, which co ops are different, you know, they're more intentional. They adopted adopted an internal policy of right of first offer to relatives of new units. So it's not a right of first refusal. There's no like, you know, ability to counteroffer and and take it to court. But there's when a unit becomes available you, you're supposed to send out like an email and say, Hey, does anyone have a grandparent or a parent, you know, that wants to move into this unit? Yeah, at that point, you have an 84 unit building, you have three, three generational families, or three sets of grandparents and moved in which there's this idea of the sandwich generation, which which I've personally experienced, where you're taking care of young, your young kids, and then you're taking care of your second time. Parents. And it's, I mean, it's a lot of stress and spatially, so. And also, you know, some grandparents are healthy, they can help out with young kids, right. So I think there's, there's, there's some kind of mixing in buildings that that can be really beneficial and great. I mean, I interviewed people in DC, who lived in a condo they loved and there was an open unit. And when they had kids, their parents rented it for a year, you know, and then moved out. I didn't get into this in this paper, but Vancouver and Morton Burnaby, which is a suburban municipality, with Simon Fraser University, they've experimented in what they call ad use in the sky, or granny flats in the sky, where you attach a micro unit indeed, to a one or two bedroom condo, that then you can expand into it and contract as you need and get, you can get a mortgage easier, because you've got rental income, you can factor and so I think there's a lot of room for experimentation with form. And I do think if we, if US cities focused more on the the whole package, you know, of the neighborhood, you would get a lot of families moving into these buildings, even if they were a market rate, and not having the the roommate effect. Like that's what's happening. I'm in Mount Pleasant, DC, which is, you know, built in 1900 townhouse neighborhood, they were all cut up into multiple units during World War Two, and then functioned as huge group houses in the 70s. I mean, it's a really complicated racial and class history, and I oversimplify it. But now you've got, and this is happening in Chicago, where they're being converted back to single family homes for,

Shane Phillips 1:02:22
you know, like the TRIPLE DECKERs that are becoming one unit, that kind of thing.

Louis Thomas 1:02:25
Exactly. So I think that that roommate phenomenon, you know, is the economically, you know, viable thing for a time, but once a neighborhood becomes attractive enough, then professional class families start taking that housing back. And if you haven't got enough, you know, public housing or, or mixed income housing in there, and you're gonna, you know, lose the economic diversity in the neighborhood.

Shane Phillips 1:02:50
Okay, so I think we'll, we'll close it out with this question. And, you know, you've mentioned this a few times, Vancouver is just a phenomenally expensive city. Yeah. And, and also, new multifamily housing is really strongly weighted toward owner occupancy rather than rental, especially compared to US cities, where it's really kind of the opposite. So I'm curious how all of that factors into this, what influences both just the cost, and this, this emphasis on owner occupancy has on the family friendliness of Vancouver and downtown in particular?

Louis Thomas 1:03:25
Yeah, that's a that's another really important point. In Vancouver, all buildings are all tall buildings are pre sales, which is a really interesting, you know, phenomenon. So you buy a building, based off, you know, looking at the architectural drawings,

Shane Phillips 1:03:42
like you put down hundreds of 1000s or a million dollars or whatever, five years before it's ever built.

Louis Thomas 1:03:48
Not even that much, but you put down a down payment. Okay. Um, so yeah, and, you know, and they mean, when I was doing my research, you know, units in the social work, like 700,000, you know, they've shot up I think, between a lot of people got in for like four or 500,000. You know, so, you know, like I said, around 2017, the condo market took a huge jump, an exponential jump in price, but from what I've understood, talking to developers and planners in the US, there's nothing illegal about doing pre sales, it's just sort of not culturally what people in the US are used to doing. So I think if, if you could figure out a way to do that, you know, that would be a way to get the model attractive to professional- class families. I do think the reason it's been adopted so readily by professional-class families is because they are condos and not rentals. You know, I do think in the US, you're not going to get families that could be, there's such an idea of we should be building equity in the house that we own, that's so central like for better or for worse? You know, and we can, have another discussion

Shane Phillips 1:05:02
if you're going to spend all the money living downtown because it is expensive, no matter the circumstances, rather pay a $4,500 mortgage and get a lot of equity than a $3,500 rent and get, you know, nothing in the end.

Louis Thomas 1:05:18
Yeah, exactly. So, and, you know, in a lot of US cities that it's even like your monthly payment goes down once you buy, you know, I mean, it's really crazy. So, you know, either we could tweak policy to adjust that, or we could figure out a way to encourage pre-sales as a model. I do think, you know, as neighborhoods really gentrify, you know, looking into other models, like co-ops and limited equity housing and mixed-income housing, there's ways to make it attractive in that way, for sure, especially if you start to do that before prices get out of control. But those are sort of where, you know that's where, like, I'm going in this research agenda, this sort of the all age city trying to (figure out) , you know, how do we make affordable neighborhoods? And how do we have mixed-income public schools? Just to end on schools, since we talked about schools a lot. You have a lot of like new research. It's not quite articulating this, but this is seems to be sort of what's happening, you know, a neighborhood gentrify, and then 10-15 years later, the elementary school finally gentrified, because the demographics have already changed, you know, and once gentrifying parents, you know, except the school, which is a whole complicated argument, you know, then all of a sudden that the neighborhood demographics have changed enough that it can go from 75%, free and reduced lunch to 25%, free and reduced lunch. And we see the opposite happening in the suburbs, where suburban schools are going from hardly any low-income students to majority low-income students, right? So you have this, you know, because we're not building equitable neighborhoods, and we're not planning for that around schools. So that's, you know, how to do that is really hard, I think, yeah but something we should be trying to figure out.

Shane Phillips 1:07:15
Ending on the fact that it's very hard and we don't quite know what to do, I think is a very good place to end very appropriate. So it's always so hard. Louis Thomas, thanks for being on the show.

Louis Thomas 1:07:28
Thank you, Shane. I'm a big fan of both your work and it's been such a pleasure to talk to you guys. I really appreciate it.

Shane Phillips 1:07:38
You can read more about Dr. Thomas's research and find our copious show notes and a transcript of the interview at our website lewis.ucla.edu. I especially recommend checking out Vancouver's housing families at high density report, which has an amazing cover page that I really want to turn into a poster and put on my wall. The UCLA Lewis Center is on Facebook and Twitter. I'm on Twitter @ShaneDPhillips, and you can find Mike at MC _Lens. Thanks for listening to the UCLA Housing Voice podcast. And as always, we appreciate you spreading the word about the show. See you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai