OUR VIEW: Leadership Needed on Housing

Leadership is about having the courage and confidence to step forward when everyone else is afraid to take a risk.

In our view, the housing affordability crisis is primarily a crisis of leadership.

The lack of leadership is usually attributed to our politicians, but equally applies to developers, planners, architects, contractors, housing activists, community organizations, and other players in the housing industry.

The average one bedroom apartment in Vancouver rents for $936 per month, meaning that a household income of $37,500 is required to achieve the affordability threshold that housing costs not exceed 30 per cent of income.

The 2006 census revealed the extent of the problem – 21 per cent of Vancouver’s renters, comprising 57,000 households, pay more than 30 per cent of their income in rent. Those numbers are certainly higher now. Last year, average rents in Metro Vancouver increased almost ten times faster than inflation (as measured by the consumer price index).

And this points to larger changes to the social make-up of our city. School enrollments are dropping as families are driven out of the city. Companies report they cannot attract and retain staff in Vancouver. Any attempt to foster innovation, entrepreneurship, green jobs or cultural industries is hobbled. The housing crisis is strangling our economy.

Yes, its causes are many and complex – a very finite supply of land, a growing population, a wave of real estate speculation, the poor economies of scale of smaller households, high development costs and too much red tape, high labour costs during a construction bubble, and the withdrawal of senior government funding for building non-market units all contribute to the housing affordability crisis in Vancouver.

However, these problems are not insurmountable. What’s needed is an effective public policy response that uses market and non-market solutions and involves all levels of government.

In recent years, there has been an understandable focus on the most visible manifestation of the housing affordability crisis – homelessness. However, we believe the pursuit of an answer to housing our poorest citizens is obscuring a more complex problem.

Tens of thousands of low- and middle-income people are being squeezed by rising housing costs, causing massive downward pressure in the housing market, and ultimately, the displacement of the poorest and hardest to house.

What we need is a long-term strategic initiative that involves governments, business and advocates that is focused on the single goal of housing affordability for all citizens, not just those who are destitute and homeless. Instead, we have an uncoordinated tangle of contradictory public policies, goals and market forces.

Vancouver city council is moving ahead with initiatives intended to create more affordable housing, while at the same time adopting policies that restrict other opportunities for low- and middle-income housing development.

Very early in their mandate, the current city council initiated the short term incentives for rental housing program to address affordable housing problems by providing incentives for developers to increase the supply of rental housing. These incentives include exemptions from development cost levies and other development charges, increases in allowable density, and streamlining the development approval process.

However, this past January, council decided that protecting views of North Shore mountains from a few arbitrarily selected locations was a higher priority than taking positive steps to address the housing affordability crisis.

By capping building heights at or near present levels, the view corridor decision will make future Woodwards-model projects much more difficult to achieve. The Woodwards model is based on the policy of trading higher density (extra units) for affordability (non-market units). This model is very suited to dense, urban neighbourhoods like those in the downtown peninsula, and could provide that much-needed mix of market and non-market housing.

Another piece of the puzzle is the role of housing advocates in promoting effective solutions. Unfortunately, recent lobbying efforts by some housing activists not only failed to advance long-cherished social housing goals, but have actually been an obstacle to other low- and middle-income housing development.

Last fall, gentrification fears stoked housing activists’ opposition to any relaxation of historic area height limits in Chinatown, Gastown and the Downtown Eastside prompting city council to cap building heights. Instead of fighting for tools that could provide more affordable units, as well as protect and expand housing for the most vulnerable, activists lobbied for this deeply regressive policy decision, making it unworkable for developers to consider Woodward-model solutions in the three neighbourhoods for the foreseeable future.

More recently, demands for keeping the Olympic Village social housing intact came at the expense of converting the 252 units of Olympic social housing into two or possibly three times as many units of social housing elsewhere on less expensive city land. In the end, the city will only bring 126 units of social housing online. The other 126 units have been earmarked for workforce rental housing that comes at a hefty market price and still requires an additional $32 million subsidy from the city.

Finally, there are too many developers trying to make big profits building overpriced units for the upper end of the market. Few developers are sharpening their pencils, being creative, and building a product priced for middle class families who want to stay in the city. In the current real estate bubble, there’s simply too much easy money to be made.

For example, Concord Pacific and the city could do something innovative with the northeast False Creek site. Unfortunately, the current plan calls for yet more high-end towers to fill up the remaining space between BC Place Stadium and Science World.

Reliance Properties, the developer of the controversial Burns Block project at 18 W. Hastings St., claim to have a solution to the affordability problem – microlofts.  However, these units of 270 square feet (about the size of two parking spaces) will rent for an average of $750 per month, or $2.77 per square foot, making them some of the most expensive rental housing in the city on a per square foot basis. Although the city subsidized the project with grants and tax breaks worth almost $1.5 million, it achieved no guarantees on affordability or contributions to the stock of non-market housing from the developer.

The housing affordability crisis demands more than a single approach. All the players must come together to work on solutions to this problem. It’s long overdue.

We’re not just calling for another meeting where everyone talks about what other people ought to be doing with someone else’s money. We’re talking about an open, transparent process with clearly defined goals where everybody puts something on the table and agrees to be accountable for their part. That makes it a very radical concept.

But who will convene it? Who will step forward? Who will provide the leadership that Vancouver and the region so desperately need?