Vancouver housing troubles make for hot summer reading

Open this photo in gallery:

A recent report ranks Vancouver as the world’s third most “impossibly unaffordable” city, behind Hong Kong and Sydney. The American firm Demographia has been doing this ranking for 20 years and Vancouver has consistently made the top three.

How the city’s housing has become so unattainable for local income earners is a constant debate, as is how to fix it. The authors behind three new books, released in time for the summer reading season, have their own theories. CBC journalist Gregor Craigie offers a host of solutions after searching for answers in cities inside and outside Canada in his book Our Crumbling Foundation. University of British Columbia professor Patrick Condon, James Taylor Chair in Landscape and Liveable Environments, explores the inequality that has arisen from unprecedented increases in land values in his book Broken City. And historian, artist and author Michael Kluckner delivers an illustrated overview of Vancouver’s evolution from a sleepy but charming port town to “a much harsher, more stratified place” in his new book, Surviving Vancouver.

Nobody could write about Vancouver without recognizing the recurring themes of land speculation, soaring prices and displacement. Mr. Kluckner points out in his book that it would take 28.5 years for a Vancouverite on a median income to acquire the down payment on a house, based on National Bank of Canada data.

“The money made all over the world and brought here, it doesn’t seem to be starting businesses, it doesn’t seem to be creating good wages for people,” he says in an interview. “That’s where our huge disconnect is.”

“And secondly, it’s this planning dogma, that in order to make our city grow, we upzone property. So you have to build 12, 20, 30-storeys here, and all it does is cause land assembly and speculation.”

He’d like to see restrictions on what can be built, such as huge houses.

Prof. Condon sees high urban land value as the underlying culprit, a fact that has increased the equity of homeowners, who represent around 65 per cent of Canadians. The point he is making is evident to anyone who has reviewed their home assessment – that the land is much more valuable than the home that sits on it. Between 2006 and 2022, Vancouver building values stayed the same while the land value increased by more than 500 per cent, he writes. He argues that high land values aren’t the result of a lack of supply, but rather the monopolization of urban land. He shared his views at a House of Commons finance committee meeting last week in Ottawa.

In his telling, as speculators bid on urban land, prices go up. As density is added, land values only increase. It’s a scenario playing out in the Broadway Plan area, where significant boosts to density have increased land values of older three-storey walk-ups and replaced them with higher-rent buildings. Only the intervention of city policy protects a portion of tenants caught in the dynamic.

Such policy tools, he says, “can reverse that flow of value away from the already overstuffed pockets of land speculators and towards the social benefits that lead to a truly sustainable city.”

Mr. Craigie was surprised by the progress the French government has made in the Paris region, where policy makers embarked on a great deal of intervention. As the result, the billionaire owner of a luxury department store had to build 96 units of affordable housing on the top floors of his newly renovated store. Mr. Craigie interviewed a nursing assistant who had been living in public housing before landing a new, 860 square-foot apartment for her family, with spectacular views. The family’s rent is the equivalent of about $2,000.

Mr. Craigie writes that the transformation has resulted in “hundreds of thousands of new homes” in the past decade.

In 2017 alone, more than 98,000 rental units were built, one-third of them social housing.

How did they do it? All levels of government agreed they needed a lot of public housing, they made public land available and they introduced financial incentives for developers to build, after decades of them not building much.

Not only did local governments have to meet housing quotas, but 30 per cent of the new housing had to be affordable.

They retrofitted and repurposed barracks, offices, warehouses, parkades – not just for housing but for transit.

By comparison, Mr. Craigie thinks of his own experience, watching a solid government health building next door to his Oak Bay home get knocked down.

“I kept thinking to myself, ‘How is that past its useful lifespan?’” he recalls. “Why couldn’t we have repurposed it?”

Vancouver’s Empire Landmark Hotel tower, on Robson Street, was only 43 years old when it was demolished five years ago to make way for a new tower – because of high land values.

Paris hasn’t achieved perfection, says Mr. Craigie. There are still demolitions, high rents and waiting lists. But there are lessons. And Mr. Craigie notes that there are echoes of the French way in recent provincial policies, such as forcing municipalities to deliver on housing.

But Paris has not had the disproportionate amount of foreign wealth that Vancouver has seen.

“There aren’t many other cities that have gone through what Vancouver has gone through,” says Mr. Craigie, who calls Canadian and Australian cities, as well as London, England, “outliers” because of global wealth.

He ends his book with a 37-item “list of repairs.” His suggestions include more federally funded public housing, the retention of publicly owned land, protection of existing affordable housing and an end single-family zoning.

As well, the federal government needs a housing plan that’s in sync with their ambitious immigration plan, he says, otherwise, we’ll never keep up.

Mr. Craigie is hopeful that, with effort and ingenuity, Vancouver could find affordability again.

“It honestly astounds me how we as a country have really just mismanaged this so badly,” he says.