New report shows affordability crisis deepens, blames foreign investment

A study released yesterday shows that Vancouver’s affordability crisis is deepening. The study, released by BMO Capital Markets, shows that Vancouver’s unaffordability score (a ratio of median house price to median household income) has increased to 11.2.

Affordability is defined as a ratio of 3, meaning that the median house in Vancouver is almost four times the affordable rate.

In 2009, Vancouver scored 9.3 on Demographia’s annual affordability report, making it the most unaffordable city in the world out of 272 studied. In 2010, Demographia showed that Vancouver’s unaffordability score increased to 9.5, with only Hong Kong and Sydney competing for most unaffordable spot out of 325 global cities studied. BMO’s report suggests that Vancouver housing prices have spiraled further out of control.

The report states: “Vancouver’s house prices have nearly tripled in the past decade, spiralling beyond the reach of most first-time buyers or non-lottery winners.”

‘Renters Roundtable’ puts PR before policy

It wasn’t til the next day that I realized what had happened the day before. I went to the City’s Renter’s Roundtable at the Downtown Library [May 26 2011]. I thought it was supposed to be a place to comment on the city’s draft housing strategy, which I’d read. I thought there were some problems with the strategy. For one, it seemed to have backed down from the Homeless Action Plan’s goal of getting 800 units of social housing a year between 2005 and 2015. The new strategy was only talking about a goal of 1200 units between now and 2020, less than 200 units a year. And it was only talking about supportive social housing, not social housing for people who have low incomes but don’t have other issues.

So off we went, me and 4 people from Carnegie. We signed in. Then the people at the sign-in table asked us to sign a waiver because the event was to be filmed. I took a look at it and it said the film might be used for a number of things including advertising. I didn’t want to be in an advertisement for something I might not agree with so I didn’t sign and walked into the room.

Whose Village?: A Brief History of the Olympic Village Development

Habitat 67, on the shore of of St. Lawrence seaway in Montreal, was originally designed to be an affordable community. Similar to Vancouver’s Olympic Village, Habitat 67 has since been sold off to the private market and is now considered a ‘failed dream‘.

The Olympic Village was initially designed as a mixed-income housing complex capable of offsetting the displacement and surge in real-estate prices associated with the 2010 Olympics. The original development plan called for two-thirds affordable housing, with a full half of that set aside for those who need support through social (“deep core”) housing. The Village was set to be an ‘inclusive’, socially sustainable community that Vancouver could be proud of. Now, the project has turned into the opposite – an exclusive, luxury complex. Today, few would argue that the Olympic Village has been a success for Vancouver.

A brief look at the history of South East False Creek shines some light on why we have the Village today. The land upon which the Village sits was once an industrial zone, but starting in the 50s and 60s there was increasing industrial disinvestment until eventually the land fell out of use. Taking advantage of unused urban space to create room for people to live, in 1970s the City actively consolidated multiple lots and rezoned the area for housing. The City then remediated the soils and made other public investments.

EDITORIAL | Evicting History at the American Hotel

Vancouver historian Michael Barnholden has written that there are at least two recurring themes in Vancouver’s political discourse. The first is a theme of revision, where low-income and working-class lives and stories are erased from the history of the city. The second is a history of criminalization, where the poor are associated in the political imagination with crime and police control. A truly contemporary example of the use of these two motifs occurred today in a Globe and Mail article on the conversion and upscaling of the American Hotel.

In the coming weeks, the American is set to open with almost 50 market-rate apartment units and an entrepreneurial “izakaya-themed” bar below. The project at 938 Main Street will establish the building as part of trendy developments extending the “Crosstown” area beyond Chinatown South. The Globe piece, written by Frances Bula, sets out in journalism’s formulaic terms to booster the development. Most notably, the article gives a vivid documentation of the history of petty crime and drug trafficking at the American hotel, and it is in light of this dark past that a bright, “revitalized” future is posed for the American.

Yet in all of its emphasis on crime, Frances Bula fails to mention the biggest crime of all: the illegal eviction of all low-income tenants from the hotel in 2006. In contrast to the “grunge” of the city, Bula chooses to write exclusively for the quasi-artistic retail bourgeoisie, making it “hard to mourn the American Hotel and its bar that died in 2006, unless you were into super-cheap blocks of stolen cheese, cocaine, motorcycle gangs, grunge or all of the above.” The list excludes the low-income history while at the same time making it so that if the history were to be included, it would have to do so only by being inserted into a predetermined list of crimes. But for a moment let us remember – mourn – the true history of the American Hotel.