HECTOR BREMNER
MAYORAL HOPEFUL'S HOUSING PLAN
One of the 20th century’s great urban planners, Harland Bartholomew, left a lasting mark on Vancouver. He prepared the city’s first comprehensive town plan in the late 1920s, making recommendations for the streetscape, parks, schools, and zoning. His plan also incorporated Point Grey and South Vancouver into the urban framework, setting the stage for the growth of these single-family neighbourhoods.
It’s a blueprint that served Vancouver well in the 20th century, but now one of the city’s mayoral candidates says it’s time for a radical rethink to prepare residents for “the next 70 years”. According to Yes Vancouver’s Hector Bremner, the reluctance of previous councils to seriously amend Bartholomew’s plan is at the root of the city’s housing-affordability problem. The Yes Vancouver standard-bearer likens it to driving around in the 21st century in a Model T, because the type of housing does not suit the needs of the public.
“It’s unequivocal that we’re building less housing today than at any time in the last 40 years,” Bremner tells the Straight during an interview in the Gallery Café. “And our population has been increasing steadily the whole time.
“Economic prosperity has also been increasing the whole time,” he adds. “That means that a higher number of people have had more buying power. Yet we’ve had less housing choice. That’s directly led to this housing crisis.”
Bremner has prepared a detailed plan to respond, one that is rooted in sharply increasing the supply of homes in Vancouver. He thinks city politicians must think boldly about how to integrate services, jobs, recreation, and affordable housing into neighbourhoods. He emphasized that this isn’t going to be accomplished by simply adding more duplexes, though he suggests that’s a step in the right direction.
“We need to be looking at a model that looks more like Paris than Saskatoon,” Bremner says.
Paris is home to more than 21,000 residents per square kilometre, making it one of the densest big cities in the world. But it maintains spectacular livability, due in part to its extraordinary publictransportation system and its thin streets, which leave more land available for housing. As a result, the city isn’t filled with skyscrapers, yet the streets are bustling with commercial activity.
Bremner is calling for 50,000 to 75,000 housing units to be approved within the first three years after he’s elected mayor. This, he adds, would include a nonprofit component in every building. On False Creek Flats and elsewhere, city-owned land would be leased for 99-year terms with no stratatitle ownership. He thinks more small businesses can be encouraged if the city can persuade the province to allow split assessments, which would value commercial spaces at lower rates than condos for the purpose of taxation.
Moreover, he wants to name a senior bureaucrat who can work across departments to ensure that social-housing projects get through the system with a minimum of fuss and no fees.
“We’ve been told I’m attacking the character of neighbourhoods,” Bremner volunteers. “Character is not the spindle of a porch or the slope of a roof. It’s defined by the people who live there.”
To him, character is building housing to accommodate seniors close to their families rather than forcing them to move to a suburb. But he insists that this isn’t happening. “We force you out of the city you’ve known and built your entire life,” he says. “And I think that affects our character. We need to be thinking about how we keep grandparents closer to their grandchildren.”
To accomplish all of this, Bremner’s housing plan is anchored in the idea of “four storeys and a corner store in every neighbourhood”. By four storeys and a corner store, he’s talking about looking through previous plans and examining where it’s possible to add density “in a reasonable way”. Then, he hopes, council will pass a zoning plan for the entire city based on this research.
When asked if that means fourstorey buildings on all streets, he demurs, saying this would be determined after public consultation.
Ultimately, he hopes to end spot rezonings, in which developers negotiate density in return for community-amenity contributions (CACS). Instead, they would know the rules in advance and would build accordingly.
Bremner acknowledges that this could present financial challenges for the city, which has become heavily reliant on CACS to fund operations.
“We’ve got a practical problem and an ethical problem,” he says of CACS. “A practical problem is onethird of our budget is CACS. But we have an ethical problem in that we are doing this illegally.”
That’s because, according to Bremner, taxation cannot be a subject of negotiation, which is what’s taking place now between developers and the city in return for additional density.
“What we need to make sure is that the flat-rate CAC is put into place that accurately projects and is regularly reviewed, based on our needs,” he says. “It generates the revenue and captures the land lift to a point that’s fair.”