A BIG ISSUE TO ADDRESS
Filmmaker takes closer look at city’s housing market
When was the last time you talked about Vancouver real estate? If you live in Vancouver, you probably just did. The topic is as omnipresent as rain, athleisure wear and fish tacos.
Who is buying? Who is selling? And who the heck can afford to live here? These are topics that have hijacked many a dinner conversation.
Like the rest of us, filmmaker Charles Wilkinson found himself in the constant conversation about real estate. He heard about people cashing in and moving out of the city and people moving out of the city because they didn’t have the cash to buy in the first place.
Wilkinson decided to look closely at the runaway train of Vancouver real estate, and what he found is chronicled in his new documentary No Fixed Address. The film had recent success at the Hot Docs and Doxa festivals and is set to enjoy a full theatre run at Vancity until June 8.
“You say, ‘I am working on a movie about Haida Gwaii,’ and they say, ‘Isn’t that somewhere near Alaska?’ They don’t really connect to it,” Wilkinson said recently. “You say, like with this movie, ‘I am working on a movie about housing,’ and they are: ‘Oh my God, don’t get me started.’ ”
Wilkinson is known for his trilogy of environmental documentaries: Peace Out, Oil Sands Karaoke and Haida Gwaii: On the Edge of the World. His latest film fits squarely into this oeuvre.
“I’ve been making a series of environmental films and it occurred to me that we’re making films about places that people say are under threat from over-commercial exploitation, so we are all over the north and stuff,” Wilkinson said. “It suddenly occurred to me my immediate environment, which is Vancouver, is a place that people are saying is under a real threat for commercial over-exploitation, so the parallels are pretty direct. It is an environmental story.”
It is a human-rights story, too. “The United Nations seems to think so,” Wilkinson said, referencing the UN’s stance on adequate housing as a basic right. “So I will go with them.”
Wilkinson’s film is broken into chapters. Each block sticks to a theme. From outlining the problem to following the money, the pillars of the issue are laid out and clearly discussed by those close to the situation.
“I don’t like pointing the finger at anyone — that’s not our job. What we are trying to do is explain what is going on and have people come to their own conclusions,” Wilkinson said.
One conclusion is we need more housing, but different types, so people can afford to buy and rent and live in with families. Towers of one-bedroom and studio suites are mostly serving investors — nothing more than “stacked safety deposit boxes,” legal analyst and journalist Sandy Garossino says in the film.
“Vancouver in many ways is a manufacturing centre. We manufacture and market condos. They just stay here.”
“The housing market is broken, and when you are dealing with a core essential need in our lives, simply leaving it to the market to decide what gets built, how much and what kind produces the failure before us,” Seth Klein, the director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, said recently.
The CCPA has done studies, and according to Klein, it’s not about stopping development, but doing it with the citizenry in mind.
“We need to sustain the building, but in a more and deliberate and better way,” Klein said. “(The CCPA) said the government should do something really bold and have at the heart of its strategy to build out 10,000 units a year of social and co-op housing.”
The government, 15 per cent foreign buyers tax aside, has dragged its feet on this one. Because of that, the issue and the stories in the film forever point back to political will, or the lack of it.
“This story is having a direct physical impact on every single one of us, rich or poor, yet it hasn’t been debated in any kind of meaningful way,” Wilkinson said.
In the film, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson states: “We are sliding towards having way too much inequality. We are letting the market determine the future.”
“I don’t think our society or political parties have tackled this … as we need,” Klein said. “I think our politicians deal with it like the third rail in politics: They don’t want to touch it.”
The CCPA’s job studies have found that job growth is in the Lower Mainland, where people increasingly can’t afford to live.
“It’s easy to think that you as a young person don’t have a longterm future here,” youth facilitator Rosalind Sadowski says in the film.
Without a chance to buy into the real estate market, the film points out that younger people are looking to alternatives. One highlighted in the film is an east Vancouver house dubbed The Shack, where five people between the ages of 26 and 32 share the rent.
“You kind of see it as a bit of joke. Buying a place doesn’t really enter my mind as a realistic option. At the minute, I am converting a van to maybe live in and the folks I work with are maybe moving up to Squamish,” said Piers Bonifant, an apprentice carpenter who has lived at The Shack for 18 months.
Bonifant works in the housing trade — the irony is not lost on him that he can’t afford the products he builds. He said he and his friends talk about housing and try to come up with other solutions.
“Yeah, we talk about it,” Bonifant said. “The joke is a Squammune — we’ll move up to Squamish and buy a plot of land and put some houses there or something.”
The staggeringly high property prices have been wealth-makers and wealth-breakers for residents of Vancouver and the area.
“I think it is one of the biggest questions before us,” Klein said. “In British Columbia, that wealth story is driven by real estate, and the question who won the lottery and who didn’t.”
Wilkinson said the “elephant in this room is inequality.”
“You have a very small number of people who are so determined to keep their jets and Maserati, no matter what the consequence is to the rest of us. Until we can find a why to bring those forces to heel, you and I are just flapping our gums.”