Vacant home hot spots to be tracked by Vancouver
The City of Vancouver is using data collected from empty homes declarations to build a detailed heat map which will reveal areas of the city that have the heaviest concentrations of vacant units and houses.
While the city’s data — derived from the self-declarations of 98 per cent of residential property owners in the city — is granular enough for a home-by-home depiction of Vancouver’s empty home syndrome, it is unclear what level of detail will be released to the public.
City staff confirmed they are using the declarations for maps and analytics, but would not say if or when any such maps would be made publicly available.
About 4,000 property owners have yet to submit their forms, having blown the city’s initial filing deadline of Feb. 2, according to city staff. That deadline has since been extended to March 5.
Vancouver’s one per cent empty homes tax, a nationwide-first, was approved by councillors in 2016 as a tool to spur owners to rent out their empty homes. Property owners are required to self-declare whether theyhaveanemptyhomeinthecity and are thus subject to the one per cent tax. Any property owner that fails to declare by March 5 is subject to the tax plus a $250 fee. Declarations will be subject to an audit process and false declarations could result in fines of up to $10,000 per day, according to the city.
The latest census counted more than 25,500 empty homes in Vancouver. That amounts to more than eight per cent of the city’s total housing stock. The results came in while residents continued to grapple with a rental vacancy rate resting just above zero.
A heat map based on the city’s new empty homes data would likely be the most detailed visual depiction of the problem released to date.
A 2016 city-commissioned report that relied on B.C. Hydro data found some 10,800 Vancouver homes sit empty through the year. The methodology used in the report appeared likely to undercount the true number of empty homes and the 2016 census count seemed to confirm that.
The report included a map that divided the city into five large areas. It showed Point Grey, Fairview and Kitsilano in the lead for empty homes with a 7.4 per cent vacancy rate.
Those neighbourhoods were followed by the downtown peninsula (six per cent) and Mount Pleasant, Strathcona, Grandview-Woodland and Hastings-Sunrise (4.5 per cent). South Cambie, Shaughnessy, Arbutus Ridge, Dunbar-Southlands and Kerrisdale came in at 3.4 per cent and Renfrew-Collingwood, Kensington-Cedar Cottage, Riley Park, Oakridge, Marpole, Sunset, Victoria-Fraserview and Killarney were at 2.9 per cent.