Residents of building plan to appeal mass eviction notices by Hollyburn Properties

Gerry Bellett and Chantal Eustace
Sun

VANCOUVER – Tenants living in the Glenmore Apartment building on Barclay Street say they are planning to appeal a mass eviction by Hollyburn Properties Group.

Twenty tenants have received eviction notice from Hollyburn, which claims it needs to do extensive renovations to their bathrooms that require them to leave.

But Craig Adlard, who has lived in the 40-suite building for over four years, said Tuesday the evictions were predatory and designed to get rid of tenants paying lower rents, so they can be replaced with others who would pay more. “It’s no accident that the only people to get eviction notices are those who have been in the building the longest, including a woman who has lived here for 20 years,” said Adlard.

Tenants who have moved in within the last two years weren’t evicted, he said.

“When a tenant leaves, Hollyburn have been renovating their suites and putting up the rent. What we have here is a mass eviction of people paying the lowest rents,” he said.

“They don’t need to replace my bath or plumbing, it’s fine and I’m happy with it. And if they did I would gladly move out for a few weeks while they fixed it and then come back at my present rent.”

He pays $1,176 a month to rent a one-bedroom suite in the building, west of Denman Street in a quiet corner of the West End near Stanley Park and close to English Bay.

“I’ve been told that if I left they could rent the place out for $400 to $500 a month more. This is nothing but a money grab,” Adlard said.

Adlard and 13 other residents planned to file an appeal with the Residential Tenancy Branch later this week asking the branch to overturn the eviction order.

“Hollyburn can do it because of a loophole in the regulations that allows a landlord to evict people if they plan to carry out renovations which make it impossible for tenants to continuing living in their suite,” he said.

Martha Lewis, executive director for the TRAC Tenant Resource and Advisory Centre, said the onus will be on the landlord to prove that tenants need to move out so repairs can be done.

“The landlord is going to have to bring the evidence showing they can only do these repairs if people are moved out,” Lewis said. “The courts in B.C. have said that if the landlord requires vacant possession to do the repairs then so be it, the tenants will be evicted.”

However, Lewis added, it can’t be solely about convenience.

When Hollyburn tried to evict tenants from another West End apartment building two years ago, a dispute resolution officer with the residential tenancy office said the renovations were not significant enough to warrant the evictions.

“By the landlord’s own testimony, the proposed renovation of the rental units requires nothing more than an electrical permit … [and] no drywall is being removed,” the November 2006 ruling noted. That building was in the 1400 block of Harwood.

Hollyburn Properties did not return The Vancouver Sun’s calls Tuesday.

Adlard said that with a near-zero vacancy rate in Vancouver, it would be unlikely for him and the other evicted tenants to find similar accommodation in the West End at the same rents they are paying now.

In the eviction notices, Hollyburn said the displaced tenants could reapply for their old suites.

But Adlard said he expects the rents will go up substantially.

“We have one tenant who’s got AIDS and is living on a medical pension. How can he expect to be able to afford a heavy increase in his rent? This is his home and he is close to where his medical help is. Why should he be evicted?”

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

The public wants to hear more about affordability, top planners tell council

Frances Bula
Sun

Vancouver residents need to hear more about how EcoDensity is going to provide affordable housing, the city’s top planners told city council Tuesday.

That means a new draft of the city’s EcoDensity Charter — which will set directions and guidelines for making the city denser with more environmental design — will have to show that not all the new housing is going to be more condos for the rich.

And it will set the city in a direction towards ways to “manage the market” in order to create lower-cost housing, said chief planner Brent Toderian and housing-centre director Cameron Gray.

They were speaking to council about where the city’s ambitious new policy goes from here, after seven nights of public hearings that attracted a record 150 speakers.

Gray acknowledged that many who came to council to present their views on the last draft expressed worry about the kind of housing that has been and will be built in the city.

“The concern is that the city is in danger of losing its social diversity and becoming a city of house-rich if cash-poor empty nesters, double-income-no-kids couples, yuppies, second-home owners, etc., with everyone else scrambling to make ends meet, paying too much, living too far away, or living in housing that is inadequate and insecure,” said Gray.

“The [revised] EcoDensity needs to address whether the market needs more direction regarding the kind of housing being developed.”

Gray said that means every aspect of the charter will be looked at and potentially rewritten to clarify what the impact on housing affordability will be. As well, the charter could ask staff to explore ways to regulate the market to create types of low-cost housing that are in short supply now.

The city could, for example, require that all new projects require a certain number of three-bedroom units, or that a certain percentage be designated as rental units instead of being sold.

The city could also look at whether to move to inclusionary zoning.

That’s a policy that requires developers to build into major projects units that rent at affordable rates.

It’s an idea that was pioneered in some American cities in the 1970s and has since spread to many others, including Richmond.

Toderian said planning staff will be making some serious revisions to the charter to answer the public’s questions about that issue, along with others about how the city will include parks, community centres and other public services in increasingly dense settings.

Council debated whether to hold another set of public hearings or ask for public views by e-mail on the next draft, with responses posted on the city’s website.

Opposition parties and EcoDensity opponents argued there should be live public hearings, which allow for dialogue and exchange of information.

But councillors from the ruling Non-Partisan Association said it would be just as good and less wasteful of people’s time to get public input through written submissions.

The new, third draft of the EcoDensity charter will be made public May 13 and people will have four weeks to send in their written comments on the revised document.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

 

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Anxiety grows over EcoDensity in Vancouver

Charlie Smith
Other

A major difference between municipalities and higher orders of government is the level of public participation before decisions are made. In Parliament or in the B.C. legislature, bills routinely become laws without public input. At the municipal level, there is sometimes a legal requirement to hold public hearings.

At times, elected officials will listen quietly to public input and do what they intended all along. On other occasions, hordes of speakers will descend on a council chamber and force politicians to take notice if they want to keep their jobs after the next election.

It happened 12 years ago when more than 1,000 speakers showed up at Chilliwack city council and forced then-mayor John Les to abandon a proposal to create a new community of 40,000 people on agricultural land at Ryder Lake. Public pressure also stopped another major development on the Spetifore agricultural lands in Tsawwassen in 1989 after the longest public hearing in Canadian municipal history.

The City of Vancouver has been going through a similar exercise—and hearing considerable public angst—over EcoDensity, which is a plan to enhance sustainability with more concentrated, ecologically friendly development. Scores of speakers showed up in the council chamber for a public hearing that lasted over seven evenings. On Tuesday (April 15), Vancouver city council will vote on a staff recommendation to instruct the director of planning, “in response to public input”, to revise the draft EcoDensity Charter and 16 proposed “initial actions”.

<>Mayor Sam Sullivan launched the EcoDensity Initiative in June 2006, suggesting that it could help improve environmental sustainability, enhance housing affordability, and improve livability. “Many people who are upset about building decisions, zoning decisions, blame EcoDensity for any new developments,” Sullivan told the Georgia Straight in an April 8 phone interview. “In fact, we’ve gone two years since I announced this process, and not one bylaw has been changed. So we have the most extensive public-consultation process that I’ve seen in my 15 years on council.”

Brent Toderian, the city’s planning director, says EcoDensity will help residents cope with rising energy costs and the growing impact of climate change. “Right off the bat, higher density reduces your energy signature: the amount of energy you use and the amount of greenhouse gases you generate on a per-unit basis,” Toderian told the Straight in an interview after the public hearing concluded on April 3. “Smaller units with shared walls—right off the bat—emit less greenhouse gases per unit and per square foot. The density also creates a critical mass of economics that allows you to do greener technology, district energy systems, et cetera.”

Toderian said that the “vast majority of our carbon footprint” results from buildings and transportation. “The density, of course, makes the other modes of transportation work much better—the sustainable modes—starting with walking, biking, transit, et cetera,” he said. “Density is necessary to make those more sustainable modes of transportation viable.”

The draft EcoDensity Charter calls for environmental sustainability to become “a primary consideration in decisions about density, design, and land use”. It also calls for “a range of housing types, needs, and costs”. The three-page draft charter emphasizes improving environmental performance and sustainability, suggesting that this is “critical for Vancouver’s long term resiliency and is the foundation for future social, cultural, and economic sustainability”.

“The need for deeper and more rapid change has become clear as our achievements are being challenged by accelerating environmental threats,” the draft charter states.

The draft actions include such things as: requiring LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Silver equivalency rating in rezonings for buildings larger than 600 square metres; providing incentives, such as excluding space for “green” mechanical equipment from a developer’s floor-space ratio; allowing site-specific rezonings in low-density areas for EcoDensity demonstration projects, including on city land; and providing more options for secondary suites, new options for laneway infill housing, and new options for mid-rise housing on arterial streets.

The Straight presents the following report about the final night of the public hearing, on April 3, to provide some insights into why EcoDensity has aroused such passions. On this evening, the speakers included developers, a former city planner and development consultant, neighbourhood and heritage advocates, a construction manager, and political activists, as well as ordinary citizens.

The first two speakers were Robert Brown and Heather Tremain, partners in reSource Rethinking Building Inc., a green development firm that included a car cooperative at the Verdant, a 60-unit townhouse development on Burnaby Mountain. Brown, who said he shops in his Main Street neighbourhood and uses transit, said that he strongly believes density and livability are “very easy bedfellows”.

He cited a project at 11th Avenue and Yukon Street, just two houses away from Vancouver City Hall, where his company built four units on a 50-foot lot. It added 25 percent more density than would exist in a single-family neighbourhood. He then mentioned a six-unit townhouse project that his company developed in Strathcona that provided 50 percent more density than a single-family neighbourhood. His own home is in a multi-unit complex at 27th Avenue and Quebec Street that has 100 percent more density than nearby single-family areas.

Brown suggested in his own understated way that the rhetoric around densification had gotten a little bit out of hand. “It’s interesting that we move from discussions around coach-house infill to eight-storey high-rises right next to single-family [homes],” Brown noted wryly. “I don’t think that’s what the EcoDensity Charter is about.”

Tremain said that some of the draft actions, such as requiring LEED Silver designation through rezonings, are quite readily achievable. “These things won’t be a stretch for folks,” Tremain said. “It will be kind of a base-line requirement.”

She urged council to pay attention to affordability, emphasizing that this can be achieved through creative zoning. She cited one example on the West Side in which the city gave additional density for a 10-unit project. She noted that this enabled four of the units to be sold at below-market prices. “So you have some precedent here already,” she said.

COPE councillor David Cadman then asked Tremain if there should be energy-rating systems for buildings similar to the energy-rating systems for appliances. Tremain replied that it’s very costly and complicated to reduce energy costs in green buildings. “The rest of the pieces are fairly easy to achieve,” she noted.

Next up was blunt-speaking heritage advocate Anthony Norfolk, chair of the Gastown Historic Area Planning Committee. He told council that his committee supports the draft EcoDensity Charter but opposes two draft actions proposed by council that are “targeted at Gastown”. One is to set up a panel to advise on furthering the goals of EcoDensity; the other is to develop a program that will provide a citywide context for determining where and how to make land-use changes “beyond existing plans and policies, in order to further improve sustainability, affordability, and livability”.

“Now it seems someone wants to blow the lid off Gastown again,” Norfolk said, referring to previous efforts to develop a soccer stadium and build a freeway through the historic district.

Norfolk was followed by East Vancouver resident John Colenutt. He claimed that he was a “victim” of EcoDensity two years ago—even though EcoDensity hadn’t been proposed at that point—when his annual property taxes increased by $1,000. The land in his neighbourhood near Kingsway and Knight was rezoned. He cited this rezoning as the cause of a 50-percent tax hike.

“The shock hit me a couple of years ago,” he told council. “I sort of saw the writing on the wall.”

A few minutes later, in the lobby outside the council chamber, Colenutt told the Straight that he thinks EcoDensity will cause homeowners’ taxes to increase across the city after their land is rezoned and B.C. Assessment slaps on higher values. “What I see is a massive tax grab disguised as EcoDensity,” Colenutt declared. “It has already happened to me. I’m one of the first people locked into this new zoning.”

The speaker after Colenutt, Katherine Reichert of the Shaughnessy Heights Property Owners Association, told council that her group opposes the draft EcoDensity Charter because it would override existing policies. She specifically mentioned the First Shaughnessy Official Development Plan, Shaughnessy Design Guidelines, and the neighbourhood’s single-family zoning, “which currently serves Shaughnessy, its residents, and the city with great success”.

“The EcoDensity Charter has the potential to change the historical character of Shaughnessy and ruin its streetscape,” she said.

Reichert also claimed that the charter is “not transparent”, and then she said a few words on her own behalf, not speaking for the association. “The city needs to ask itself why the EcoDensity Charter has created a fear—and a letter opposing the charter signed by 25 neighbourhood groups,” she said. “The charter should be written to alleviate fears and have the neighbourhood communities work together to create EcoDensity initiatives.”

The next speaker, Harvey Des Roches, ramped up the criticism of EcoDensity. He described the CityPlan Community Visions process as a democratic exercise and wondered why EcoDensity was being pushed through the initial stage so quickly. “Is it because it’s an election year?” he asked. “Is it because of the lobbying power and campaign funding provided by…developers?”

He was followed by Elizabeth Murphy, a former city employee in the housing and properties department and a board member of Heritage Vancouver. “Last year, I won a City of Vancouver heritage award for a project I completed in Point Grey, which includes a restored heritage house with secondary suite and infill,” she said. “However, I oppose the density charter and initial actions because they use density as the number one tool to reduce our ecological footprint—with density having priority over affordability and livability.”

Murphy delivered a detailed criticism of EcoDensity, emphasizing that the city should simply rely on its existing Community Climate Change Action Plan and the CityPlan Community Visions process. The city’s climate-change plan calls for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in residential buildings and supporting the principles of smart growth, including increasing density around rapid-transit stations.

She argued that the “density charter” and the proposed initial actions are skewed toward new construction and the demolition of existing structures. “The greenest building is one that is already built,” Murphy noted. “What is the point of recycling our pop bottles if we throw out our largest consumer item, our buildings? Retaining and reusing existing buildings is recycling at a grand scale.”

Murphy went on to say that there is already greater zoning capacity than is necessary to house the number of residents expected to live in Vancouver by 2021. She noted that the Community Visions process was undertaken to identify more housing types and would likely add more capacity in the future. She pointed out that there are 18,000 vacant suites in the city and thousands of homeless people. “It shows we are building the wrong product for the wrong demographics,” she said.

The next two speakers were quite concise. Robert Angus said he was neither for nor against EcoDensity. He claimed that he just wanted to warn council to make sure that the federal and provincial governments are onside to ensure there will be adequate public services, including hospitals and judges, to cope with a larger population. In one of the shortest presentations ever before council, Angela Woo took only one sentence to state that she doesn’t believe the draft EcoDensity Charter represents the wishes of a majority of Vancouver residents.

After Woo, COPE’s Ellen Woods-worth delivered a much longer address. She focused a lot of attention on homelessness and claimed that there is no “eco” in EcoDensity. Woodsworth also maintained that EcoDensity is a plan to enrich developers and put more density into poor neighbourhoods, leading to more evictions and more homelessness.

She was followed by former COPE council candidate Mel Lehan, who spoke on behalf of Neighbourhoods for a Sustainable Vancouver. Lehan brought up the mayor’s roundtable meeting with 20 Dunbar residents last February. “Mayor Sullivan said about EcoDensity: ‘If neighbourhoods don’t want to be involved in this, it’s not going to happen,’ ” Lehan said. “The neighbourhoods want to make it clear that we do not support the EcoDensity Initiative.”

He read from a letter submitted to council by more than two dozen neighbourhood groups that urged the city to withdraw the draft EcoDensity Charter and proposed initial actions. Lehan was followed by development consultant Jim Lehto, who questioned whether or not the city has the authority in the Vancouver Charter to link zoning to improved environmental performance. Lehto, a former city planner, suggested that desirable environmental objectives should be made mandatory in the city’s building bylaw rather than be left to the zoning process.

“The negative side of EcoDensity is the elevation of so-called green technology to a righteous moral plateau at the expense of meat-and-potato issues affecting the city, such as affordable, nonmarket rental housing, homelessness, health care, employment, and expeditious rezoning and permit-processing,” Lehto said.

After the meeting ended, NPA councillor Suzanne Anton told the Straight that she thinks there has been sufficient debate on the actions and that it may be time to vote on them. “Each action item itself requires more process,” she noted. “If the lane-oriented housing is one we move forward on, we’re not going to start building lane-oriented housing the next day. It has to go out again [for public discussion] to figure out where it should be built.”

Anton claimed that it would take another decade and a half to implement new housing forms through the Neighbourhood Centres Program, and the EcoDensity Charter is necessary to accelerate the process. She added that she is “totally convinced” that many more people will migrate to Vancouver because of environmental problems elsewhere, including in “those dry American cities”.

“That will drive our prices really high,” she predicted, noting that the only way to address this is to ensure there are new supplies of housing.

COPE’s Cadman told the Straight that Sullivan has always supported higher densities, and he put the eco prefix in front of it to make this concept more friendly to residents. When asked about Anton’s comments, Cadman replied, “I would love to believe that Councillor Anton is thinking about the future of the city. I think she is thinking more specifically about her donation base.”

Sullivan later told the Straight this was “a cynical comment” by Cadman. “It is not easy politically to support density,” Sullivan insisted. “There is no mayor on the continent that I know of that is willing to put their name with the word density. So no one who knows municipal politics would ever believe that a mayor would endorse higher densities for political reasons. It’s ludicrous.”

 

Statistics Canada reports activity lower in first three months of 2008 than in 2007

Sun

Non-residential building activity in B.C. declined in the first quarter of 2008 from the last quarter of 2007, Statistics Canada reported on Monday.

And B.C.’s dip, some $31 million to $1.42 billion from $1.45 billion in the last quarter, was the biggest drop among the provinces, which on balance, saw non-residential building increase.

The reason, the statistical agency said, was that large industrial and institutional projects begun in 2006 and early 2007 are reaching completion.

“The industry expects this kind of ebb and flow,” Philip Hochstein, president of the Independent Contractors and Business Association of B.C., said in a news release.

He added that Monday’s report from Statistics Canada represented “just a snapshot of a strong construction market.”

And while non-residential construction dipped during the start of this year, the pace is still ahead of the $1.41 billion invested during the first three months of 2007.

Hochstein said buildings are expecting to start on a number of projects, both public and private sector, that are still in the planning stages.

The Vancouver Regional Construction Association, in a news release, said that while some areas of non-residential building might have seen a dip, investment in commercial buildings across the Lower Mainland hit a record $620.5 million in the first quarter of 2008.

And the total investment in non-residential construction, while down from the last quarter, remains 6.5 per cent above the first quarter of 2007 at $836.2 million.

“Strong growth in the commercial sector indicates strength in private investment and confidence in the economy,” says Keith Sashaw, Vancouver Regional Construction Association president. “We anticipate this sector to set more record highs this year and next.”

Across Canada, major building activity in Alberta and Ontario lifted investment in non-residential construction 1.6 per cent to $10.3 billion in the first three months of the year, Statistics Canada reported.

Investment increased in all three segments of the sector compared with the previous three months, representing the 20th-consecutive quarterly gain.

The biggest provincial increase occurred in Alberta, with investment rising 5.1 per cent to $2.5 billion from the fourth quarter of 2007. In Ontario, it rose 3.1 per cent to $3.8 billion.

The federal agency credited low office vacancy rates, a vigorous retail sector and strong corporate profits for the gains.

Of 34 consensus metropolitan areas, 15 registered quarterly growth, with the biggest gains in Toronto, where investment rose 4.2 per cent to $1.9 billion.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

 

The number of B.C sales last year were more than five times higher than in 2000

Derrick Penner
Sun

British Columbia experienced a residential land rush in 2007 with buyers snapping up more than 12,000 vacant properties over the year worth more than $3 billion, according to research by Landcor Data Corp.

Vacant land sales were only a fraction of the 158,272 properties worth a record $62.2 billion that traded hands in 2007, but sales of lots rose substantially while overall residential sales waned.

That $62.2-billion value, however, eclipsed 2006 by 15 per cent.

And the number of vacant-land sales in 2007 were more than five times higher than the 2,011 properties that sold in 2001. The value of land sold in 2007 was more than 11 times higher than the $250 million sold in 2001.

“What’s really happening is there is a heck of a pile of developers out there making vacant-land subdivisions,” Landcor president Rudy Nielsen said in an interview.

Landcor compiles the data from the B.C. Land Title Registry, which registers all sale transactions in the province, not just those conducted to the Multiple Listing Service operated by realtors.

Nielsen noted that overall residential real estate sales have grown from 90,704 properties worth just under $19 billion in 2001. Total sales peaked at 164,315 properties in 2005, though their total value of $47.6 million was below 2006 and 2007.

“We’ve really come a long way in the last several years,” Nielsen said.

The province has also seen some growth in the amount of the land base being carved out and turned into residential real estate. Nielsen said the inventory of vacant properties jumped by some 21,000 over the last year.

Most of those new subdivisions, he said, would have been started two to three years ago, which is typically the length of time Nielsen said it takes to bring a piece of land through the regulatory steps to turn it into housing.

Nielsen added that his own associated firm, NIHO Land and Cattle Co., subdivides about 100 lots a year itself.

“When you look at all the subdivisions around the province [in] Prince George, Kelowna, Vernon, Penticton with a couple hundred lots here, a couple hundred there, it adds up quickly,” he said.

In the Lower Mainland, however, vacant residential property is more rare, and comes at an increasingly steep price.

“Right now it’s a little tough [to find land], because we’re approaching, if we’re not already at the peak of the market. And land owners see their land as quite valuable,” Ross Gurney, first vice-president of the Greater Vancouver Home Builders’ Association said in an interview,

In the Fraser Valley, asking prices are around $1 million — $1.5 million an acre in Surrey and Langley, Gurney added, which is too high for a lot of developers.

Broken down to building lots for detached houses, 3,000 to 3,500 square-foot lots go for the $270,000 range in Surrey and Langley. Move to south Surrey and they’re more than $300,000, Gurney said.

In Port Coquitlam, a new development in the Burke Mountain area has lots for $350,000 — $450,000, and in Burnaby, Gurney said a quick scan of the MLS system turned up lots ranging from $493,000 to a 6,000-square-foot property with a “breathtaking view” of the North Shore mountains for $868,000.

Gurney, whose day job is manager of business development for TD Bank, said he hasn’t arranged a sale for just vacant land in the last three to six months.

“Right now, land owners’ expectations are probably a bit high,” he said.

Other highlights from the Landcor B.C. 2007 residential sales summary are:

– The median price for vacant properties rose 50 per cent to $150,000.

– B.C.’s Kootenay region experienced the biggest increase in the value of its total sales, 37 per cent to $1.9 billion for 8,021 properties.

– Detached-home sales in the Kootenays declined 9.3 per cent to 3,579 units in 2007, but the median value of homes sold rose 37.4 per cent to $250,000. Condominium apartment sales in the region rose 33.9 per cent to 1,449 units, and their median value rose 23.7 per cent to $190,000.

– Detached-home sales in Greater Vancouver declined 9.3 per cent to 22,730 units, while condominium apartments increased 6.7 per cent to 27,793 units. Median house values, which rose 15.1 per cent to $605,000, however, beat out the rise in median apartment prices of 14.9 per cent to $310,300.

– At least 9,375 out-of-province people bought property worth $3.8 billion in B.C., as measured by where property-tax assessments were mailed.

– Albertans, who bought 6,319 properties worth $2.2 billion were the most prolific purchasers. Calgarians were the most prolific of all Albertans, buying 3,057 second homes worth $1.2 billion.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008