Temporary Urban Farms Used for Tax Evasion

Along the north eastern shores of False Creek, between Science World and BC Place, lies a vast expanse of land owned by developer Concord Pacific. The parcel of land hosts Concord Pacific’s sales centre and is used primarily as rental space for special events.

Recently however, the lot has become host to an urban farm run by a group called SOLEfood. SOLEfood is a self-described “social enterprise” that grows produce in order to sell it at farmers markets, as well as directly to local restaurants. While initially funded by grants and donations, the project aims to be self-sustaining.

While Concord Pacific is leasing the property to SOLEfood for three years at no cost, the farm is highly profitable for the developer. Under the City of Vancouver’s tax classifications, the property would normally be designated class six: “business or other,” with a taxation rate of 1.75 per cent. The presence of the urban farm re-designates the lot to class eight, or “recreation and non-profit,” which lowers the tax rate to 0.56 — less than a third of the original rate.

Concord Pacific’s project map shows that the company intends to develop a number of sites on the lot, near where the Georgia Viaduct now sits, by 2020. The SOLE in SOLEfood stands for Sustainable, Organic, Local, and Ethical. With a three year lease on a lot intended to be developed in less than a decade, it would seem that sustainability is not its strongest feature.

Concord pays around half a million dollars per year in taxes on the property, 10 Pacific Boulevard. In a recent interview with Zoe McKnight of the Vancouver Sun, the company estimated their savings via SOLEfood in the $15,000 range. However, if the new urban farm tax rate is applied to the entire property, Concord will pay only one-third of its taxes, saving instead over 300 thousand dollars per year.

VPD continues illegal shopping-cart demolitions in Downtown Eastside

On Saturday, September 2 2012, the Vancouver Police Department once again demolished the cart of a homeless DTES resident. The cart contained personal belongings and all the necessities for surviving on the streets: clothes, bedding, tools and other essential objects.

The VPD prohibits the demolition of a homeless persons’ property under the Abandoned Property Policy, but officers have repeatedly violated the policy.

Last summer the Mainlander published an article on VPD shopping cart demolitions. In response to a documented VPD removal of a shopping cart in the DTES on June 25th 2011, the Mainlander criticized the VPD’s continued contravention of their own operating guidelines. The article noted that by the summer of 2011, nothing had changed since lawyer David Eby documented the removal of a shopping cart in February 2009.

In response to the complaint of the June 25th 2011 incident, the VPD issued a statement on July 5, 2011, admitting the misconduct: “The Vancouver Police Department has taken steps to remind every officer that if they come across items that appear to be abandoned, and that need to be removed from the street for the safety of the public, or for the safekeeping of the items, the property is to be safeguarded until the owner can be identified and retrieve their items.”

This Saturday’s demolition took place at 8pm near Insite on East Hastings. Against a crowd of protesting DTES residents and neighbors, the officer responsible stated that the removal was justified by the fact that the owner of the cart had been absent for several days. But according to staff at Insite, the cart had been there for less than 12 hours.

The cart contained bedding and tools neatly tucked away into separate containers under a meticulous rain-proof cover. The owner of the cart had been in Surrey for the day and for obvious reasons was unable to bring the cart with him.

Across the street from the cart incident lies an abandoned site owned by private real-estate developer Marc Williams. The site contains garbage and rubble, all of which were allowed to ferment for more than a year despite numerous formal complaints against the smell and presence of rats from DTES residents and tenants of neighboring hotels. The city’s message is that a rich person’s garbage is outside the law, while a poor person’s livelihood is garbage.

From their current actions, it is clear there has been no change in VPD’s practice of handling abandoned property in contravention of official policy. This violation of basic rights should come as no surprise. The city’s aggressive revitalization plan for the DTES is being pushed ahead by city hall, despite overwhelming opposition and protest by residents. Vision Vancouver’s Revitalization Strategy for the DTES is part and parcel of the criminalization of poverty and neither can be considered in isolation. As such the demolition of poor peoples’ homes and property is not only a failure on behalf of the VPD but a systematic failure of the city.

New policy emerges in Vision’s saga to produce housing affordability

Yesterday the City of Vancouver announced that it will be leasing some of its land to rental housing developers. The initiative is part of the city’s larger attempt to solve the housing crisis by giving market incentives for the construction of affordable housing in Vancouver. Private developers have been given tax breaks and fee exemptions under Vision’s two terms; this latest policy is a significant change because it adds subsidized land as part of the larger incentive package for the industry.

In the next few months the city will be taking proposals from developers for a total of five hundred new units of rental housing on six city-owned sites, mostly in South-East Vancouver. The submissions will be the first step in the life of 3-year projects slated for completion in 2015. According to city documents, the six sites initiative is slated to fulfill the city’s “non-market housing/social housing” section of the housing continuum. Recently the Pantages development saw the city approve “social housing” units in the DTES scheduled to rent at $900 for a one-bedroom per month.

Re-financing the Housing Bubble: Strategies of the Neoliberal State

In the four years since the financial crisis of 2008 brought a North American-wide collapse in housing prices, the Canadian government has successfully taken measures to bring real-estate prices back to their pre-crash levels. Following in the tracks of the American effort to rescue financial capital, the past four years have seen a joint effort by all levels of Canadian government to re-inflate the housing bubble by deregulating finance, extending new lines of direct investment into real-estate and lowering interest rates. The Canadian government has effectively called on the real-estate industry to lead the economy out of the recession, facing down typical historical patterns in which real-estate is the last industry to recover from system-wide crisis. Next to resource extraction, the only real growth industry in Canada since 2008 has been real-estate.

Yet today, as in 2008, the real-estate bubble is reaching a “tipping point,” according to a recent report by Canada’s Royal LePage. In cities like Vancouver and Toronto, housing prices have climbed to unprecedented levels, with Vancouver prices reaching up to 11 times the city’s average family income. The Bank of Canada has identified the Vancouver market as “ground zero” for the coming financial crisis, and from its perch at a distance, The Economist observes Canadian housing is “more overvalued than it was in America at the peak of its bubble.” All forms of debt are multiplying, but household debt in particular is currently higher in Canada than it was in the United States prior to the subprime crisis, with debt-to-income ratios reaching 153 per cent.

Federal exit from recession

In the two years following the global recession, federal banks across the world lowered interest rates in an effort to loosen the credit crunch and stimulate new rounds of investment. In September 2010, Mark Carney and the Bank of Canada lowered interest rates to 1 per cent, where they have since stayed. By the summer of 2011, the Canadian housing economy was showing obvious signs of escalation, and by June local prices moved well above their pre-recession peak. Having not only stimulated but “over-stimulated” the housing economy, Carney began issuing strong warnings about the unprecedented risk-exposure of Canadian mortgages. In reality, the central bank actually did everything in its power to continue the growing flow of cheap, low-interest money into the real-estate economy. Out of fear of exacerbating the underlying weakness of the recovery itself, the Bank of Canada took the position of searching out ways to buoy housing finance.