VANCOUVER — While more than half of homeowners have given up their dreams of owning a single-family home, experts are urging the city to follow suit and make zoning easier for families to access higher-density homes.

According to a new report by luxury real-estate firm Sotheby’s International Realty Canada and research firm Mustel Group, 55 per cent of homeowners in Vancouver who do not own a single-family home have given up their plans to do so, which is the “highest abandonment rate” among Canada’s major cities, including Calgary, Toronto and Montreal.

Nathanael Lauster, associate professor at the University of British Columbia and author of The Death and Life of the Single-Family House, said “it’s a good dream to give up because it’s this anti-urbanist dream. It’s very unaffordable and very costly for the environment. It’s very unsustainable for everybody to live this way.”

The finding confirms his study on home ownership showing residents are shifting their expectations and adapting to alternative types of housing with 22 per cent of Vancouver respondents having the highest preference for “higher-density housing alternatives” for condominiums, duplexes, triplexes, and multiplexes.

Lauster said building more supply of multi-unit housing is key to making the city more accessible for families.

“We still protect so much land for this very low density form of housing that people are starting to give up on unless they’re millionaires.”

The current zoning, which he says still favours single-family homes in Vancouver, is caused partly by policy-makers often overlooking people who don’t own homes, those who are not included in this report.

“People don’t get a vote in the (housing) market if they don’t have money. On the policy side of things, planners and politicians themselves often come from middle-class backgrounds and have themselves enacted a kind of lifestyle trajectory where they become homeowners themselves, and they kind of lose sight of the diversity in our city in terms of all these other ways of living and going through life where you don’t necessarily end up as a homeowner.”

Paul Kershaw, associate professor at UBC and founder of Generation Squeeze — a non-profit advocacy group for young adults — said that density is currently underutilized and zoning needs to change to ensure more supply for families.

He added that a third of Vancouver residents occupy 75 per cent of the land, thereby “squeezing” the remaining two-thirds of residents into 25 per cent of the city.

It’s an “unfair use” of the land zoned for residents and impeding the necessary density to welcome a young generation to continue to stay in the city, said Kershaw.

The report was generated using an online survey of 1,743 families in the four metropolitan areas between Aug. 9 to Sept. 6 this year with a focus on adults ages 20 to 45 matched with data from Statistics Canada census. The margin of error on a “random probability sample” of 1,743 respondents is 2.3 percentage points.