VANCOUVER—Mountains and public health care are what led 34-year-old Katie Marshall to move to Vancouver this summer, at a time when the pervasive belief is that millennials are fleeing the city in droves.

But Marshall is, in fact, one of thousands of millennials moving to the lotus land despite high housing prices. There’s a lot to love, she explained.

“I’m a distance runner and I love to hike, so a lot of that is much more manageable for us in Vancouver. I don’t want to knock Oklahoma — it is lovely — but there’s a distinct lack of mountains.”

There are so many young people making the move to Vancouver that newcomer-millennials make up a significant percentage of population growth, according to a demographer from the University of British Columbia.

Marshall, a zoology professor, grew up in the Kitchener-Waterloo area and lived in Vancouver for three years after she completed her PhD at the University of Western Ontario in 2013. She then took a job in Oklahoma City in 2016, where she settled into a comfortable life, renting a three-bedroom house for US$1,500 per month with her husband, a research assistant.

But she missed the Canadian waterfront city known for its wildly unaffordable housing prices. So she accepted a job at the University of British Columbia and last week moved into subsidized housing at UBC, where she pays $2,600 per month for a three-bedroom apartment.

She called the rent “mind blowing.”

“We’ve come in far too late to ever contemplate buying unless the housing market were to suddenly crash. It just makes more financial sense to realize we’ll be renting. If we wanted to buy a house, it would have to be really far from UBC and we’ll have that long commute.”

Marshall acknowledged that living where she does, within walking distance of work, is a privilege — and that without the university’s help, moving to Vancouver would be much harder to justify.

“My husband and I, we’re a dual-income family. That makes life a little bit easier, and we don’t have kids, so we have a lot of advantages that other people might not.”

She is one of thousands of millennials arriving in the Vancouver area every year, according to Statistics Canada data. Nathanael Lauster, an associate professor of sociology at UBC, has been keeping track.

The number of people aged 20 to 34 in Metro Vancouver increased by 6,000 from 2012 to 2017 due to immigration, according to Lauster’s analysis. That figure doesn’t take into account people who are born here.

Putting those two together, it’s clear that migration plays a large role.

From 2011 to 2016, migrants made up about 13 per cent of the population growth in the 23-to-27 age group in Metro Vancouver, according to census data. For people ages 18 to 22, that figure rises to about 15 per cent.

This is not new, Lauster added. Vancouver has been a gateway city for immigrants for decades.

“There is a tendency to want people who grew up here to have the ability to stay,” he said. “That makes sense, but at the same time, those other people who keep coming are no less people than the people who grow up here.”

And yet the idea that Vancouver is being drained of its lifeblood due to an entire generation leaving the city to find cheaper housing remains the focal point of countless dinner-table conversations.

Locally conducted polls often reflect this tension. For instance, six in 10 young British Columbians are seriously considering moving to areas where home ownership is less costly, according to an Insights West poll conducted in April.

Lauster, who regularly comments on Vancouver’s housing crisis, does not discount that report or others like it, but says an important part of the conversation is missing.

“There are more people that are moving into Vancouver than are leaving. But (the polls are) only talking to people who are already here.”

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Still, he acknowledged Vancouver housing prices are rising faster than local incomes, pushing some people out of the city while inviting those who can afford it.

“It’s very fair to ask: Are we seeing the rise of Vancouver as this luxury resort community where only wealthy people can live? There is some evidence of that,” Lauster said. “That’s not quite the same as concerns over losing millennials or losing young people.”

Some people adjust their expectations and accept the idea of living in an apartment for the rest of their lives, he said. After all, living in multi-family buildings is commonplace in many cities around the world. But some opt to leave.

Software programmer Chi Hsi grew up in a single detached house in Killarney, a neighbourhood in East Vancouver. Her mom still lives in that home, now worth $1.6 million. Hsi and her fiancé, an electrician, could not afford anything close to that, and yet they firmly believed a house was the best place to raise the children they plan on having.

They looked in Vancouver and the nearby suburbs: Burnaby, Coquitlam and even Port Coquitlam. There were virtually no houses available for less than $1 million.

“It was just very frustrating to see,” the 29-year old said.

Lauster acknowledged the city needs to be more welcoming to everyone, both longtime locals and newcomers.

“I think the way to do that, to resolve both of those issues in terms of stopping displacement and welcoming new people to come here, is to build lots of diverse kinds of housing options so different people can find themselves at home here,” he said.

“We need lots more social housing, lots more co-operatives, lots more purpose-built rental housing and probably lots more condos, too.”

But single-detached houses were notably left off his list — Lauster recently authored a book titled The Death and Life of the Single-Family House — and that’s the kind of home Hsi and her fiancé wanted.

Last fall, they ended up buying a three-bedroom house outside of the city, in Langley. Even with both of their incomes, they needed Hsi’s mother to help them with the down payment. Houses in their neighbourhood, Walnut Grove, are listed for an average of $900,000.

Hsi spends three hours a day commuting to and from work, but to her, the trade-off is worth it.

“I visited my friend’s townhomes or apartments, and I think: How could they even raise a family here?”

She admitted living so far from the city centre has its downsides. Many of her friends have decided to sacrifice square footage in order to stay closer to their childhood home.

“Where I lived in Killarney, it was very central. I would host game days or invite friends over,” she said. “Now, I have to convince them to come out to my place.”

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