Real estate analyst fought for justice on Metro housing right up to his death
One of B.C.’s leading real estate analysts, Richard Wozny, whose passion for housing justice was set out in a Jan. 27 column in The Vancouver Sun, died on Wednesday, surrounded by family. He was 62.
Wozny, who had been receiving treatment for non-smoking lung cancer for 18 months, received wide praise for devoting his fading energy to exposing the dangers of excessive, largely untaxed foreign capital in Metro Vancouver’s overpriced housing market.
The president of Site Economics, which has produced 1,200 studies for the public and private sectors on more than $100 billion worth of mostly commercial real estate projects, believed it immoral that hard-working, taxpaying members of the middle class are being squeezed out of the city.
A second-generation Vancouverite, from the Kerrisdale neighbourhood, Wozny produced a major report last year titled Low Incomes and High House Prices in Metro Vancouver, which concluded “a large, mysterious, untaxed pool of international capital” is being converted into speculative investment in the city ’s residential real estate.
Michael Geller, a prominent Vancouver planner and property developer, said Wozny was highly regarded in the property-development industry as a knowledgeable and professional real estate analyst.
“However, I think he may ultimately be best remembered for his contribution to the affordable housing discussion in the final months of his life. During this time, in his writing and media conversations, he shared what many in the real estate and development industry knew, but were reluctant to say publicly,” Geller said.
“I admired him very much for this and hope that others will take his lead and put the interests of the general public ahead of colleagues and clients.”
Among other things, Wozny’s groundbreaking research revealed that residents of Metro Vancouver municipalities with the most expensive housing tend to report lower incomes than people in less costly municipalities. Many property investors, both domestic and foreign, he suggested, are not paying their share of taxes.
“Canada has become a freeloader society,” said Wozny, in which some mansion owners have found ways to avoid reporting their worldwide incomes to the Canada Revenue Agency.
Wozny’s dedication to housing fairness was also exhibited in a major housing report released Thursday by the Union of B.C. Municipalities, titled A Home for Everyone: A Housing Strategy for B.C., to which he contributed.
The hard-hitting report by the province’s mayors and councillors confronted those who have traditionally tried to deny the role played by speculators in jacking up housing prices. The UBCM came out with its sweeping list of recommendations in an effort to counter the damage being inflicted on average would-be homeowners by factors such as the offshore pre-sale of B.C. condos, rampant property flipping and numerous tax-avoidance loopholes.
UBC geography Prof. David Ley, who worked with Wozny in developing the UBCM’s 32-recommendation report, said he found him to be “a warm and intellectually curious man,” whose hard-earned views were rooted in detailed knowledge of the landdevelopment process.
“After a successful business career, he had acquired a passion for the public good and responsible citizenship. His own research showed an anomaly, a negative correlation between municipal house prices and taxes paid in Greater Vancouver,” said Ley, author of Millionaire Migrants.
“This inequity troubled him deeply, as non-enforcement of tax-evasion laws rewarded unjust citizenship while penalizing just citizens who lived up to their civic duty. He had himself moved beyond the narrow bounds of economic utility toward a much fuller understanding of citizenship and its responsibilities. He deeply desired to advance this view to the development community and beyond.”