City has an empty bedroom problem
Larger homes housing fewer people than in the past, says Sam Sullivan.
Metro Vancouver has had five decades of mostly “economics-free” planning decisions.
We have the third-most unaffordable housing in the world, bringing distress to young people and homelessness to thousands with low incomes.
Our most productive companies are stymied as they can't recruit the people they need. Sprawl mandated by planning rules harms our environment.
During this time, as households reduced in size and prices rose alarmingly, lot sizes didn't adjust. Instead, thousands of bungalows were replaced with larger homes with more bedrooms.
Today there are fewer people living in Vancouver's single-family neighbourhoods than 50 years ago, with more than 70,000 empty bedrooms.
We don't have an empty house problem; we have an empty bedroom problem.
Today, Alain Bertaud's “Three Principles for Metro Vancouver” will be unveiled, offering possible reprieve.
Ever since his nine-day visit to Vancouver, Bertaud, who is one of the world's most respected urban planners, has been honing his Three Principles for Metro Vancouver, which has a grand total of 15 words. Bertaud's Three Principles do not tell us what to do, they prompt questions about how we do it. This is an approach that by its very nature will result in a healthier city. It will be up to municipal leaders and engaged citizens to ensure the principles are honoured.
They are as follows: Principle 1: Urban managers must know economics
There are people in control of our cities who have never taken a course in economics. And it shows.
Every decision has tradeoffs, opportunity costs and unintended consequences. Cities are complex systems that need to be cultivated like a garden, not engineered like a machine.
When a senior planner is being hired, politicians, urbanists and especially young people who have the most to lose need to insist that candidates have a strong grounding in urban land economics.
This one move could revolutionize our cities
Principle 2: Quantitative goals, not qualitative goals
Planning documents are full of words like affordable, sustainable, neighbourly, et cetera. The problem is no one defines what this really means.
Municipal leaders must commit to achieving specific targets. Then we will know if we have succeeded or failed.
Just having these measurements public will be salutary in itself. What gets measured, gets done.
Principle 3: Ongoing monitoring, not master plans
It is very Soviet to see the city as a kind of construction site that needs a blueprint.
One problem is that by the time all of these processes get approved, the world has changed. And cities often stop all development applications until the perfect master plan has been finished. Valuable time is wasted.
While our housing crisis deepened, desperately needed development applications were not accepted until the Vancouver and Broadway plans were completed.
We missed unprecedented years of unbelievably low-interest financing that could have transformed our city.
Now, high interest rates are crushing the opportunities we once had. It is difficult to calculate the harms that were done to our city because of that delay.
Bertaud has noted that our Metro Vancouver regional town centre concept defies the laws of economics and can never be achieved.
It assumes that people will work in the same neighbourhood in which they live. It goes counter to economic forces and the reason that cities exist in the first place: to support a job market that is as large as possible, a precondition for a prosperous city.
Technology is available so that we no longer need master plans. We can get realtime data to tell us when prices are going up in one area, or travel times are increasing in another. For example, when the critical price-toincome ratio measurement of housing affordability exceeds four, municipal governments need to swing into action to resolve the problem. That should have happened decades ago.
The price-to-income ratio is median home price divided by the median annual household income in a region.
Today the price-to-income ratio number in Metro Vancouver is over 12, one of the highest in the world, with shockingly little response by local governments.
Councillors need to be informed when measurements are in the danger level so they can demand action.
Bertaud's Three Principles can help us achieve housing affordability and solve a host of other urban problems.
They have been distilled from Bertaud's five decades of working in more than 50 cities around the world. As the principal urban planner at the World Bank and author of the internationally acclaimed Order Without Design, he has seen it all.
He wisely refrains from telling cities what to do. Rather, he encourages them to ask the right questions.
Our Global Civic Policy Society think-tank is reaching out to municipal councillors and engaged citizens to work together to ensure that Bertaud's Three Principles are honoured.
Vancouver's companies and young people need to know that help is on the way, that we can once again have a dynamic, resilient and affordable city.