Vision flunks Vancouver housing challenge
Just as Nero fiddled while Rome burned, Vancouver's mayor is addressing a conflagration that is the city's housing-affordability crisis by facing the flames with a water pistol.
Gregor Robertson and his Vision councillors have been in power now since 2008, promoting themselves as the champions of ordinary Vancouverites. Yet they have done little to address basic housing needs.
If anything, housing is significantly less-affordable now than it was in 2008. You can blame low interest rates, foreign buyers, the region's livability, rigours of supply and demand. But the city's government also is hugely to blame.
Vision Vancouver has failed to recognize the urgency and enormity of the issue, failed to enlist the help of senior governments, jurisdictions that have always been in a far better position to address the affordability conundrum.
Instead, the current mayor has alienated himself from those senior governments by consistently taking strong positions against various policies they have advanced. Robertson's stand against the Kinder Morgan pipeline favoured by Justin Trudeau is just the latest example of such imprudence.
For how many more years are we going to sit around and complain about the cost of the city's housing? For how long will we continue to watch as our children, elderly parents, the city's nurses and teachers, firefighters and artists, and even our doctors, leave Vancouver in search of housing they can afford?
Mayor Robertson has tried hard to look like a housing activist. But he has utterly failed to create the political linkages so essential to the building of affordable housing; partnerships with Ottawa and Victoria, levels of government with the ability to do something meaningful about the lack of affordable-housing stock.
Vision will point out that, in 2011, it devised a Housing and Homelessness Strategy to be implemented between 2012 and 2021. In 2014, it created the largely ineffectual Vancouver Affordable Housing Agency.
It has been doing homeless counts every year and better regulating single-room-occupancy hotels. It has allowed for laneway homes and coach houses. It has offered developers bonus density incentives to encourage more market-priced rental construction.
On May 25, it announced the contribution of eight municipal sites for the development of 1,350 new, affordable, rental units.
But homelessness isn't decreasing in Vancouver, it's growing. And so is the lack of affordability.
In the same vein, the nearly non-existent rental-vacancy rate hasn't improved one iota. Chances are, developers will not be willing to take up the city's latest offer of the eight, city-owned building sites because the resulting units, offering rents at below-market rates, will not generate sufficient profit.
We can't wait any longer. It's time for bigger hitters to get involved. Senior levels of government have intervened before.
Indeed, a National Housing Act was passed in 1938. In 1978, Ottawa started encouraging cities to create municipal corporations to build and manage social housing.
Throughout the 1970s the federal government was active in housing, offering tax-exempt, registered home-ownership savings plans and assisting construction of private rental housing through grants, preferential loans and tax concessions.
Likewise, by the mid-'70s, all 10 provincial governments boasted housing departments. The provinces offered home-ownership grants and financed non-market housing. Some provided tax credits or shelter allowances to renters, or rent control.
Between 1974 and 1986, governments were funding non-profit groups such as churches, co-operatives and municipalities for the provision of affordable housing.
The truth is, cities simply do NOT have the financial capacity to create affordable housing — and they should stop telling us they do. Cities are limited to making zoning changes and offering developers carrots and sticks to encourage construction of “affordable” units.
The real answer to the intractable problem of how to provide reasonably priced housing will come from senior governments.
It's past time for Robertson to moderate his partisan ideology long enough in order to secure federal and provincial help in addressing Vancouver's housing crisis.
George Affleck is a Vancouver city councillor representing the Non-Partisan Association.