Gregory Dean Answers

Affordable Housing

1. What could Vancity do to create more affordable housing for both low- and middle-income Vancouverites?

Vancity could help leverage co-op housing assets (many of which are almost paid off) by organizing them into one large scale asset class, that in it's diversity allows risk to be dispersed. Many of the housing co-ops are mortgage free or near free. It could then re-develop some of the buildings which are in rough shape (mold for the most part) into higher density (taller) buildings. It would have to work with the city to secure rezoning where necessary, and interim housing for current residents during re-construction on their co-op site. But then we'd move the old resident-members back in as well as %50 new resident-members.

It could (have) also work(ed) with the city to finance smaller projects on city land in increments, instead of a massive risky plunge, like the Olympic village. But now that the city is so far into the hole this is an unlikely idea. But with all the real-estate entwined experts on staff at city hall and Vancity, a new, not-for-profit development society (co-op) could likely have been born (at least before the Olympic plunge was taken – but of course ifs and buts are not candy and nuts and Christmas is long past this recession).

2. How can Vancity use financial products or services to support the creation of more rental housing units in Vancouver?

Vancity is already a significant financier of commercial real-estate development projects in the region. It could reduce the cost of capital for projects which will agree to hold a certain percentage of the units as rentals.

Transportation

1. What can Vancity do to provide incentives to its members to use alternatives to private vehicles in the same way it has facilitated alternative transportation programs for its 2,400 staff?

Vancity could also support the expansion of the car co-op by offering to buy out it’s members’ cars who are having trouble making payments on both the automobile itself and/or the insurance. Vancity and the Co-operative Auto Network (CAN) could then offer to buy out the paid up equity of the car owner’s in the form of paying for the car co-op deposit ($500) and credits towards car co-op use fees. Vancity and CAN could swap shares in their respective co-ops in proportion to additional debt obligations taken on by Vancity to help grow CAN’s car count (although via this arrangement, Vancity has probably been able to reduce it’s write downs for defaults to some degree).

Note: We’re pretty sure that we’ve proofed how B.C. co-operative associations can adopt share structures much like that of Canadian Private Corporations. Certainly with so many jobs now dedicated within the assumptions of the personal automobile, we’d have to look at our responsibility in undercutting all those jobs; that is if our programs were that effective in undercutting the use of personal automobiles. For even though there is value in moving a population around more quickly (via mass transit alleviating the congestion of all the space taken up by the personal automobile), if another %7 of the population have no jobs to get more quickly to we see the mooting of the de-congestioning “gain”.

2. How can Vancity use financial products or services to support the widespread adoption of alternatives to private vehicle use in Vancouver?

Continuation of #1: So let's say Vancity could quickly attain 250 cars into CAN in the above outlined manner. This would be a %50 jump in CAN's capacity (I believe they have 500 cars currently). CAN would then need to market itself in new neighbourhoods where it has been able to add cars for new demographics. Vancity could offer incentives to it’s workers to get them using CAN and Vancity could certainly join CAN’s company fleet program to help get Vancity workers (and their families and friends) into the habit and culture of CAN.

Vancity could also work with the Housing Co-ops (which Vancity’s already engaged with via it’s affordable housing projects) to all become users of CAN cars which CAN parks on the respective co-ops’ properties. Moreover, Vancity could have translink passes as a Visa reward product, or offer bulk passes for reduced rates to banking customers who do a certain scale of patronage with Vancity.

Citizen Engagement and Involvement

1. What could Vancity do to include more citizen engagement in its decision-making processes?

 2. How can local branches engage citizens more directly in Vancouver's 23 neighbourhoods?

Vancity could do a lot. But first let’s look at what additional (sub) question this question almost never prompts in our society: How do we get large cross sections of society the time and the inter & intra personal skills by which they might more regularly participate in a meaningful manner? Part of this rare question is answered by pointing to new economic assumptions.

First people need to have the constitutional power by which they have say. Even historic co-op models have never achieved this, indeed if we look to the most developed stand alone industrial co-op economy in history – post WWII Yugoslavia - we see that widespread co-operative networks resulted in a corruption of the democratic process by the wealthiest worker co-ops (who boxed out new worker members), just the same as we have today with corporate-capitalism. (The basic dynamic of a developed co-op economy turning into workers’ capitalism is what makes so much of the Bologna cheer-leading clap-trap if the bar is meaningful change.)

So we need participatory co-ops which have multi-stakeholder categories of membership. This means that power should be dynamically balanced amongst workers, consumers, community groups, etc. Then we get a chance at a meaningful balance of power, that we might someday achieve the principle of say-proportionate-to-stake. We should also require the boards of co-ops to be more directly accountable to the membership on an issue to issue basis.

This of course needs to be tempered by meaningful participation by diverse cross sections (statistically representative) of the membership. And we must be explicit that only socialized ownership and equitable remuneration (i.e., remuneration based on effort and sacrifice and balanced rotation of roles(Albert, M & Hahnel, R. 1998) in a participatory co-op network (where a unit of pay is a mere divisor of total wealth-productivity in the co-op economy) can distribute incentives to workers so they innovate efficiencies which reduce the overall amount of work that humans need to do.

Only such an arrangement can make technology and automation our friend by distributing the wealth of automation to do so much work, instead of technology currently replacing human workers and reducing our salaries via structural unemployment and lower wages. Only then do diverse populations get the time and capacity to participate regularly and meaningfully (in socially governed assets at least). In short if you’re serious about making political participation a participatory process you must first be concerned with the big politics, namely those of political economy. Which means we need to stop apologizing for and “re-rationalize” market “logic” (which even the Austrian school acknowledges as tending towards monopolies and consolidation of ownership and thus control). And no we can’t have the state effectively govern the economy because the economic sphere will always be bigger than the political sphere which regulates it…

Just look at how it went with Roosevelt, we tried that already. Additionally, we must do away with the conditions which require a coordinator class (i.e., executives, elites. Representative institutions, and central planning apparatchiks). Balanced rotation of roles get rid of this so that everyone, while maintaining a specialized focus, does a fair mix of conceptual and menial work. Only once everyone has equitable access to the macro, conceptual information, can we all achieve intelligent say.

Other

1. What else would you like to tell Think City supporters about your candidacy?

I will work to develop such a participatory process for transitioning from this political economy to that of the methodology of participatory economics (by Noam Chomsky' protege from MIT in the late '60s).

I have already spend 5 years pre-figuring such a participatory transition strategy. That has merely been the pre-figuring of a methodology by which participants in Federated Participatory Co-ops determine the direction of their own revolution. Not what some new group of Turks determines as 'valid change', but what broad sections of society determine via new methods of governance for themselves.

Vancity and other large co-ops and credit unions could be great spring boards in this process... for systemic change is only likely by using the means which represent that desired change which we practice together in our day-to-day as communities. Change is not the ends we reach for with arms corrupted by expedient grabs of power. We must change the very nature of power to be co-operative and power-with, not executive based power-over.