Although the Mayor’s “affordable housing task force” is unlikely to drive real change, it could have the positive impact of triggering public debate around the mechanisms and causes of Vancouver’s permanent housing bubble. Much of the conversation, like the task force itself, includes only elites — a monologue of the 1%. The Mainlander‘s COUNTERPOINT series aims to take the conversation out of the board rooms.
This Tuesday, the Vision-controlled City Council struck a developer-run “affordable housing” task force. The public debate surrounding the affordability crisis has begun in earnest – and that is a great thing. Unfortunately, the discussion has been largely limited to pundits in the corporate media and rich people who work in the development industry — none of whom have have direct experience dealing with the affordability crisis. The vast majority of their professional and friendship networks are totally disconnected from the front lines of eviction and tenure insecurity.
As a result, much public commentary has been out-of-touch and condescending. The quality of recommendations has been substandard, the argumentation lazy, all this grounded in a position of apathy. For example, Gary Mason published a piece in the Globe and Mail this morning entitled “Living in Vancouver comes at a price,” which begins by recognizing that we are in the midst of an affordability crisis:
“Most of the world’s major cities are trying to solve this problem – in the most politically palatable way possible. In Canada, the issue is particularly acute in markets such as Toronto and Vancouver, where real-estate prices long ago made home ownership a dream for everyone except the wealthy.”
First we should note that Mason’s main, though concealed, argument here is that Vancouver’s housing problem is no different from that of any other major city. This is decidedly false. The disparity between median income and median market housing price is larger in Vancouver than every other city on the planet except for Hong Kong. But then Hong Kong has 1.2 million units of public housing, which house 40% of the population. Just this week, a report came out showing that Vancouver has the highest rent in Canada. While most readers will know all this intuitively — many of us adapt to the crisis by multiple-subletting and by sleeping in attics, basements, on couches, floors – it’s necessary to cite these figures to remind out-of-touch elites that the crisis is systemic. The situation in Vancouver is not healthy and normal. It is pathological and exploitative.
Mason then addresses some policy approaches he has heard circulating in elite circles: 1) “subsidized” housing on city land, 2) rezone certain areas for more townhouses, and 3) co-op housing.
The Mainlander is featured in the civic politics segment every Tuesday morning between 7am-8am on Vancouver Co-op Radio 102.7
This Tuesday Dec 13 2011, The Mainlander’s Tristan Markle spoke about:
a) Holborn Group’s recent plans for the redevelopment of Little Mountain
b) Mayor Robertson’s appointment of multimillionaire developer Olga Ilich as co-chair of the city’s affordable housing task force
Click here to listen
The new plan for the redevelopment of Little Mountain neighbourhood in East Vancouver has been released to the public. The plan calls for wholesale gentrification of the Riley Park-Little Mountain neighborhood. The 15-acre site that previously held 224 units of social housing will be replaced with 2,000 units of market condominiums.
In exchange for a zero-percent increase in the amount of affordable housing on the site, the neighborhood will be transformed by luxury condos and retail, putting upward pressure on local property values. Like in other working-areas of Vancouver, this new high-end development will usher in rent increases, more renovictions and even more demolitions.
In Vancouver, there are on average two home demolitions per day. The Little Mountain plan ensures that the rate of demolitions will be particularly high in the Riley Park area. In addition to the demolition of Little Mountain social housing, the city has its sight set on demolishing all single-family homes at the north-east corner of the Little Mountain property.
Even though evictions and displacement are systemic throughout Vancouver, the city has not conducted a social impact study to understand the possible social effects of these demolitions and mega-projects. When asked at Thursday’s press conference whether the City plans to conduct such a study, Senior Planner Ben Johnson said “No,” claiming that there are no impacts because “homes are going for $1million in the neighborhood.” According to the city, the renters who make up large part of Little Mountain, Riley Park, Kensington-Cedar Cottage, Sunset, and Mount Pleasant are not part of the equation.
The new plan announced by the private developer, Holborn Group, consists of sixteen towers of luxury condominiums. There are nine towers planned at ten to fourteen stories, while the rest of the density is spread out between four to nine stories. It is assumed that Holborn bought the property from the provincial government for a price fixed to existing levels of zoning, at four stories, while committing to replace the 224 units of social housing.
This “one-for-one” deal is a coup for Holborn because on a mega-project of this size, the city would normally apply its mega-project housing policy requiring that 20% of all units be social housing. The planned 2,000 units would normally accompany at least 400 units of social housing, but in this case the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed between the City and the Province assures Holborn that only 224 units are necessary. Furthermore, low-income tenants have been forced into the precarious waiting room of history. The first phase of the project will now not be completed until 2017 at the absolute earliest, even though all replacement housing was promised to be completed by 2010 at the latest.
When Holborn bought Little Mountain, the land was zoned for four stories. Holborn claims to have paid an above-market rate because the Province promised that the land would be upzoned in the future to allow more condo units. Of course, rezoning is a City power, outside the Province’s jurisdiction. If the Province indeed made a guarantee to Holborn that the land would be rezoned, then the Province was on the one hand attempting to undermine the local community planning process (including the existing Riley Park Community Vision), and on the other hand seems to have misrepresented the Province’s powers to Holborn. However, there is no reason to feel sorry for Holborn. Holborn has more than enough lawyers to know exactly what they were getting into. The most likely scenario is that the Province and Holborn colluded to strong-arm the City and undercut local planning processes.
