Exodus to the east: How Vancouver home prices have driven a surge of migration to the Fraser Valley

This is the third story in The Changing Valley, an ongoing data-driven series on how housing and migration are changing the Fraser Valley. Click here to read our other stories on how house prices, migration, and changing demographics are changing the region.

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The evidence is everywhere. So are the anecdotes. In one of Canada’s fastest-growing regions, it isn’t hard to meet someone who has recently moved to the Fraser Valley from Vancouver.

But it takes more than anecdotes and observations to decode the exact relationship between how house prices are driving migration and changing smaller communities around Canada’s largest cities.

Last winter, as residents in the Fraser Valley noticed homes selling for previously unheard of prices, a housing analyst thousands of kilometres away was pouring through spreadsheets related to the last big home-buying surge just a few years prior.

Anthony Passarelli and his colleagues at the Canadian Housing and Mortgage Corporation wanted to know how those prices influenced where people moved within this huge country. And there, in cold, hard data, they found evidence of something many people in the Fraser Valley have seen first hand. In both Toronto and Vancouver, the figures showed waves of people fleeing places with high home prices in favour of communities where they could buy (or rent) more with less. As prices rose in the two cities, large numbers of people began moving out of them into neighbouring cities and regions.

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