Vancouver weighing options
Lena Sin
Province
“Few cities have gone significantly far in really trying to regulate the marketplace in really aggressive ways” – Brent Toderian, Wancouver’s director of planning
“We knew this challenge for our middle class was coming.” – Wision Vancouver Coun. Raymond Louie
Of all the problems facing Vancouver today, few are as complex as this one: Take a finite piece of land and make it affordable for the seemingly infinite number of people who want to live on it.
Other oceanfront cities — San Diego, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle — are still struggling to figure it out.
But Vancouver lawyer-turned-developer Howard Rotberg believes what’s been done in Whistler — or a variation of it — can be introduced in the Lower Mainland.
“The idea that there’s nothing that can be done is very anti-progressive. It’s a matter of social justice that working people can live near where they work,” says Rotberg.
Vancouver is at risk of becoming richer and poorer all at once as its teachers, day-care workers, even accountants and police — many of the occupations long considered the building blocks of communities — are being squeezed out to the suburbs where there, too, they face affordability problems.
Yet anyone who’s tried to tackle affordability knows the massive hurdles that must be overcome.
Whistler’s program evolved largely through trial and error — with mistakes along the way.
“There’s no solution here that you can just transplant to another city,” says Whistler Coun. Tim Wake, who is also an affordable-housing consultant. “But you can take parts of it and modify it.”
In Langford, one of Victoria‘s bedroom communities, an affordable-housing scheme introduced in 2004 has had limited success.
The program requires developers of new subdivisions to build one affordable home for every 10 single-family lots subdivided. But by mid-2007, only a dozen such homes had been built.
Critics say if small communities like Whistler and Langford have experienced problems, just imagine the issues that would arise in a vastly more complex marketplace like Vancouver.
What is ultimately behind the affordability issue is not whether government has the ability or the money to help solve the problem — it’s whether it should.
“Few cities have gone significantly far in really trying to regulate the marketplace in really aggressive ways. Approaches like that always have their ups and downs, and you always have to factor in the unforeseen consequences,” says Brent Toderian, Vancouver‘s director of planning.
Indeed, when Hong Kong announced in 1997 that it was introducing housing schemes with a goal of achieving 70-per-cent homeownership in a city where real estate is among the most expensive in the world, the impact was devastating on the local economy.
A fall in home prices led to huge outcry from business circles and individuals who saw a meltdown of their assets.
To date, EcoDensity is the biggest initiative to come out of Vancouver to address affordability.
The idea is to increase the density of the city — by building smaller homes — to make homeownership more attainable.
But Toderian is frank about who this will help: “EcoDensity was not started to make Vancouver affordable — it was meant to make it more affordable than it otherwise would have been.”
In an ideal world, the federal and provincial governments would lead the way to an affordable-housing strategy. At the same time, Toderian recognizes the city can’t wait forever. The question now becomes how much Vancouver wants to get into managing the market.
“You can’t get more complex than changing the nature of affordability in a city where everybody wants to own,” says Toderian. “You’re dealing with the No. 1 downside of success to a city — everybody wants to be here.”
