Committed and “Won Over” Parents in Vancouver’s Dense Family-Oriented Urbanism

Abstract

Problem, research strategy, and findings

As North American cities revitalize, policies generally assume high density will attract the childless, overlooking the needs of families with children. Here I examine the case of Vancouver (British Columbia, Canada), where since 1989 policies have explicitly supported parents in central densifying areas. Between 1996 and 2016, the city overall had a slight decline in children under 15. In contrast, the Downtown peninsula experienced a 171% increase for this age group, which is double the percentage increase for total neighborhood residents. In this research I ask how Vancouver parents perceive their central high-density neighborhoods in terms of childrearing. Through interviews and focus groups with parents from 39 families and 5 weeks of environmental and participant observation, I find that many consider amenity-rich, dense, diverse neighborhoods ideal. Some are committed to city living. Others are “won over” by the policy-provided amenities and well-programmed public realm. Limitations include potential biases in the sample and issues of policy transferability to other North American cities. I provide U.S. examples modeled after Vancouver’s policies to support the feasibility of policy translation.

Takeaway for practice

Other North American cities can promote dense family-oriented urbanism. Amenities achieved through policies concerning building design, community centers, parks, protected cycling, and pedestrian infrastructure directly contributed to the “won over” parents’ decisions to stay. By focusing on parents, planners can shift the downtown revitalization narrative toward family-oriented densification. Planners must consider the needs of diverse parents to avoid a class- and age-segregated city. Cities today have a fragile opportunity to build dense and diverse in both land use and types of residents. Central areas can be reconceived as ideal places for people of all ages, incomes, and life stages.

Keywords:

• density
• parents
• placemaking
• urban design
• Vancouver

Acknowledgments

This article draws from a dissertation submitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in August 2019. It has benefited greatly from comments by Neal LaMontagne, Brent Ryan, Lawrence Vale, Annette Kim, John Arroyo, Michael Smart, and five anonymous reviewers.

Research Support

This research was supported in part by MIT’s Sagalyn and Hack DUSP Grant and Rodwin travel fellowship.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be found on the publisher’s website.

Notes

1 Planners cited school quality as reason for excluding parents (T. A. Gibson, 2005). Notwithstanding, sociology of education research suggests “[f]or many White parents of privilege, school quality and racial composition are inextricably linked” (Sattin-Bajaj & Roda, 2020, p. 3; see also Saporito & Lareau, 1999). This reasonably applies to planners’ perceptions of schools as well. Furthermore, a childless rebranding of the city’s image is corollary to the suburban childrearing ideal.

2 Perry (1939) qualifies he is “naturally biased in favor of [a single-family house] form of living” (p. 108) when discussing a multifamily version of his neighborhood unit.

3 Missing middle housing is represented as 2 or 3 stories in height (Parolek, 2014; Wegmann, 2020), a categorically lower density than studied here.

4 New Westminster pioneered a 10% 3-bedroom-plus requirement less than a year prior to Vancouver (City of New Westminster, 2016).

5 One 6-year-old counted 16 resident children as friends. Because she likely only counted children near her age, the full count could be higher. This in-building peer network appears presumably greater than a comparable suburban block peer network.

6 For a discussion of affordance, see J. J. Gibson (2015) and Lang (1994).

7 For questions about community, see Wellman (1979) and Newman (1980).

8 A Washington (DC) parent interviewed lamented they could not use their 9th-floor common space because their son would throw stones onto the street below.

9 Regarding cycling infrastructure and equity, see Stein (2011) and Hoffmann (2016).

10 Personal interview with Ramona’s developer, Ed McNamara. McNamara visited Vancouver to research high-density family housing.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Louis L. Thomas

LOUIS L. THOMAS ([email protected]) is a postdoctoral scholar in the Urbanism Lab at the University of Chicago.