Rezoning not the answer on affordability

A place to live is a human right, Derrick O’Keefe and Anne Roberts say.

The renters and workers we’ve talked to over the past months are scared — and angry about the looming 4.5-per-cent rent increase. They feel Vancouver will soon have no place for them.

Our party, COPE, is fighting for a rent freeze to keep rents down during and between tenancies. Meanwhile, the outgoing city government has rushed through a plan that could displace thousands of renters. On Sept 19, they approved a policy to rezone large parts of the city for expensive duplexes, allowing landowners to cash-out big time.

While these neighbourhoods include singlefamily homes, many homes are subdivided and rented out as relatively affordable units.

In some of these areas, especially on the east side, more than half of residents are renters.

But the city’s tenant relocation and protection policy doesn’t apply to these kinds of rentals, meaning that when tenants are displaced, their moving costs aren’t covered and they can’t return to renovated units, never mind at the same rents.

Shockingly, the city admits they haven’t even collected data on how many tenants in these relatively affordable areas are likely to be displaced.

In the midst of the city’s rental-housing crisis, how could city council push through a massive rezoning plan like this without first studying the impact on renters? If elected on Oct. 20, COPE councillors would work to immediately broaden the city’s tenant-protection policy to include all parts of the city, including those affected by last week’s rezoning.

It should also be said that this rezoning doesn’t provide housing for those who need it most. New developments will be only for people earning more than about $100,000 a year, while the people who are desperate for housing earn under $50,000.

For-profit developers will never build housing most people can afford, no matter how many taxes or regulations we waive for them, no matter how many carrots we dangle in front of them. A recent report from the U.S. claimed that Seattle and other U.S. cities that have had luxury building booms like Vancouver have seen rents drop slightly — but only for expensive homes. Rents for working-class people have continued to climb.

If we want truly affordable homes, the city’s housing agency should step up as a public developer where for-profit developers have failed. To subsidize public housing development, the city needs revenue sources. COPE’s proposed mansion tax of one per cent on homes over $5 million and two per cent on homes over $10 million would provide a major source of revenue.

The city’s new rezoning will also trigger a wave of speculation, escalating property prices without any means of recapturing the windfall. COPE councillors will ensure the city captures this unearned value and targets it toward building desperately needed, city-owned housing.

Given that high land prices have been a barrier to building truly affordable housing, the city can provide or acquire land using its $5-billion property endowment fund.

To be clear, this rezoning risks displacing thousands of tenants and it won’t provide truly affordable housing. Exclusionary, west side neighbourhoods, in particular, do need to take more density, including social and supportive housing. But when COPE broadens tenant protections, taxes mansions and windfall profits, provides city-owned land and invigorates the city’s housing agency, we can stop this wave of evictions and build the social and rental housing many Vancouverites need.

This is how we can ensure that rents have a real relation to incomes and that a majority of new buildings in the city are affordable rentals, co-ops and social housing.

Only then can we start talking about housing as a human right, not a commodity.