People exit the Broadway-City Hall SkyTrain station in Vancouver, in 2025.Isabella Falsetti/The Globe and Mail
An ad hoc coalition of Vancouver planners, professors and architects has released a list of 14 ideas to generate housing for average-income earners who’ve been shut out of the market.
It’s not the first time the roughly two dozen experts have penned a letter to government, but it’s the first time they’ve distilled their best ideas into a list for all three levels of government to consider. Planner, author and former city director of planning Larry Beasley released the list on behalf of the group at the end of August.
The theme that runs through the list will be no surprise to anyone who has been following the group’s letters over the last couple of years. The Housing Reset group – consisting of high-profile names in the Vancouver housing debate – advocates for affordable housing solutions without assuming that market-rate private development alone will generate affordability.
The list includes some new ideas, such as creating a three-government housing initiative that would purchase existing affordable rental buildings and consolidate publicly held properties. Mr. Beasley said that idea got the easiest consensus.
“We need something special. We need a strategic plan to deliver affordable housing,” he said.
“If you had all governments working together in a coherent organized way, you could think up many other ideas.
“Once government does that, they can make strides, especially if their fundamental thing is not just to think they can deliver this middle-income housing, but they can do so many things to partner with the private sector to do it, because as we say in our preamble, leaving it to the private sector is not going to work any more.”
Housing advocates protest as Vancouver doubles down on densification plan
The letter is a shift away from previous letters over the last year, which were in reaction to policies such as the federal ban on foreign property ownership. This time, signatory Andy Yan, an urban planner and director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program, took a pro-active approach, drawing on “a culmination of hundreds of years of experience, practice and research within the group.”
Another signatory, University of B.C. urban design professor Patrick Condon, has argued that the City of Vancouver has tripled its housing inventory over the past 50 years, while failing to lower prices due to high land costs. Higher densities, he argues, often lead to higher prices because of inflated land values. A central theme of the list is therefore avoiding “land value escalation and speculation through upzoning.” They also call for a return to the days of community engagement as opposed to the current climate of top-down policy-making.
They recommend a moratorium on upzoning where affordable market housing currently exists and repealing blanket upzoning in those areas.
“No upfront expansive rezonings long before development need or interest,” they write.
As well, prioritize creative housing infill solutions and land banking, which is government acquisition of properties for public ownership.
“Because land is the single most volatile and difficult factor in a development, to get the levels you need,” said Mr. Beasley.
Publicly owned land doesn’t have to be subject to rising prices because it’s held over time, such as the leasehold and co-ops of False Creek South, an innovative community created in the 1970s.
UBC architecture and urban design lecturer Erick Villagomez said the idea was to move beyond the usual vague conversation around housing supply.
“You have a bunch of informed and very engaged people talking about this and not necessarily agreeing on everything,” he said of the process behind the list. “The central argument is a critical one around this document, and it’s generally that we don’t have a general housing supply problem – we have an affordable housing supply problem.
“And that is the main argument, which I think in a certain way is groundbreaking. It begins to differentiate different types of supply. It needs to be scrutinized as a term, because it’s become so overused it’s now very broad.
“We have become very good at asking, ‘how many units can a policy theoretically produce?’ The harder questions are, ‘is it affordable, and to whom, and for how long and under what tenure?’”
For example, Vancouver has tinkered with infill housing by way of laneway homes and more recently, conversion of single-family detached zones to multiplex buildings. But the group suggests taking infill further by finding density within existing zoning that doesn’t jeopardize existing affordable rentals. It’s an approach that Paris has recently tried when that city adopted a controversial planning document that requires about 1,000 large buildings, including office buildings, to devote 10 per cent of their square footage to residential space. The group recommends rezoning low-use areas for affordable housing and adding housing to unused parking lots in strip malls, or above “vast warehousing roofs or atop public utilities sites; or on obsolete street rights-of-way.”
“There is a lot of land out there that isn’t effectively used,” said Mr. Beasley. “A little bit further out in the suburbs you have these strip malls with these huge parking lots. You could add three-storey walk-ups on an edge of it.”
The Kingsgate Mall in Vancouver.Kerry Gold/The Globe and Mail
Michael Geller is a member of the group with direct property development experience. He is also a planner, real estate consultant and retired architect. He agrees with the idea that older affordable apartments inside the Broadway Plan need protection from redevelopment. Also, the focus on housing needs to include other tenures that aren’t private or government-run, such as community land trusts, equity co-ops and co-housing developments.
The question is whether their ideas will get the attention of government. Mr. Geller said their pro-active approach should be less controversial than their previous letters.
“Many of our previous letters have been saying what not to do, and I think part of Larry’s underlying motive for doing this, and certainly mine, is to say there are things you should be doing, and here are some of them,” said Mr. Geller.
“There are some down-to-earth, practical things here that can be done, and some people will criticize our suggestion that the private sector can’t do this on its own, but it can’t. Right now you just can’t build any ownership housing.
“Nobody wants to buy a presale, and that’s going to get worse. All these lovely people who bought units in Surrey, Coquitlam and Burnaby, and the units are worth 20 per cent less on completion, and they are losing their deposit and may well lose another $50,000 or $100,000 or more, because the developers are suing them for the difference between what they were supposed to pay, and what the developers can now sell the units for.
“This is going to kill the presale market.”
Mr. Beasley said leadership around the housing crisis is needed more than ever.
“We are known for being critical, but we said to ourselves, ‘that’s not enough. We want to come out with 14 new good ideas that are positive.’ They are only first directions. They need discussion, public involvement, all of that, and we need to get the discussion going – seriously – because this is becoming an iconic crisis in our communities.”