Vancouver city staff downplayed housing crisis in Amazon bid

Affordability data left out of HQ2 proposal

VANCOUVER• As city staff scrambled last fall to put together a proposal to woo Seattle-based Amazon to build a second headquarters here, they were faced with a major potential weakness: how to make the city attractive in the midst of a housing affordability crisis?

Internal email records obtained by the National Post through a freedom-ofinformation request show that the issue was top of mind for staff within the city’s economic development agency, the Vancouver Economic Commission, some of whom discussed leaving out certain housing data that could make the city “look bad.”

One analyst, for instance, sent out an email saying that a colleague didn’t think they should use data showing the number of condos available under half-a-million dollars because there were so few of them.

“He doesn’t think we should use it because it will make Vancouver look bad. I agree,” she wrote. “For example, there are only around 1,000 units in Metro Vancouver available right now under $500K. Greater Toronto is roughly 2,500 in comparison.”

Similarly, when a staffer at the Deloitte consulting firm, which was helping the city put together its submission, suggested to James Raymond, the commission’s manager of research and analysis and the person overseeing the bid package, that they cull data comparing the number of homes for sale under US$500,000 across different cities, Raymond responded by saying it could take time and “might not make us look that good.”

In the end, the data set was not included in the final document sent to Amazon in October 2017. Instead, staff chose to emphasize that Vancouver had “three times the number of homes for sale under US$500,000 compared to Seattle,” that housing supply was increasing at a record pace, and that all levels of government were working to “tackle housing affordability concerns.”

In a written statement, Raymond told the Post through a spokeswoman that while housing affordability was a challenge for his team, it was “no more so than for our other competitors,” such as Toronto, Los Angeles and New York.

The decision to exclude those housing stats, he said, was “because it proved too difficult to generate apples-to-apples data” in the short time frame they had.

He added that “this was not an academic paper” but a “marketing document, where we — like all the other cities bidding — reserved the right to include the data that showed Amazon our ‘best face.’ ”

In January, Amazon announced that 20 cities were in contention to be the home of its “HQ2,” which the online retail giant said could employ as many as 50,000 people. Toronto was the only Canadian city on the list.

In subsequent conversations with Amazon, Raymond said, Vancouver officials heard that housing affordability did not really factor into why they were turned down; instead, it had more to do with the city’s close proximity to the company’s existing headquarters in Seattle.

He noted that even though Amazon decided not to open a headquarters in Vancouver, it has since announced plans to grow its satellite operations here and expand the current 1,000-person workforce to 5,000 over the next five years.

“We have already all but won the silver medal in the race for HQ2,” he said.

Still, the issue of housing affordability was clearly top of mind for city staffers as they assembled the bid package last fall, records show.

An email outlining topics that were important to Amazon mentioned that housing affordability was a “growing challenge” in Seattle and that Vancouver’s submission would need to demonstrate where the 50,000 new employees would be housed and include a variety of housing options within a 30-minute radius.

Speaking notes prepared for a senior commission staffer prior to a media interview last September anticipated the following question: “What about the cost of living — how can Vancouver sell itself when it’s already very hard for residents to find homes here?”

The speaking notes suggested an appropriate response would be to note that cost of living is an issue wherever tech hubs are located, from Sydney to Silicon Valley, and that “unprecedented action” was taking place by government to address the issue.

Records show that early on in the process, city staff circulated an unsolicited report from a Vancouver consulting firm that had concluded the city had “very little chance” of being a finalist. Among the weak spots identified was housing.

City officials dismissed the findings and pushed forward with their bid package, ultimately spending about $157,000 on the effort.