COUNTERPOINT | Gary Mason’s “Living in Vancouver comes at a price”

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.

ON THE RADIO | Little Mountain & the multimillionaire developer affordability Czar

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

Little Mountain | Why the Struggle for Social Housing is More Pressing Now than Ever

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.

The Politics of Vancouver’s Homeless Shelters

Over the past weeks, Vancouver’s homeless shelters have been over-flowing. In this article Maria Wallstam and Nathan Crompton argue that this year there are no new homeless shelters, despite government claims to the contrary. On the one hand, the few shelters planned to open this week are the same ones forcibly closed down last spring, when the Province made the empty promise to regularize funding for the shelters. On the other hand, there are fewer available spaces than last year, while the housing crisis becomes worse than ever before. In addressing “the politics of Vancouver’s shelters” — and the mutually beneficial publicity fights that break out between the city and the province at the beginning of each shelter season — this article reveals why the city and the province cynically do not want to see the regularization of shelter funding. -ML

Last night, just like the previous night, every shelter in Vancouver was full. Yet again Central Shelter, First United, Lookout, New Fountain, Belkin House, Crosswalk, Triage, Yukon, were each filled to maximum capacity. First United, Vancouver’s largest shelter and the city’s “shelter of last resort” has been turning away hundreds of people since last week.

Over the past years, First United church has sheltered up to 300 people each night and is the last place where a person without housing goes when turned away from all other shelters. But last week the building was hit with a city-enforced occupancy limit of 240. The by-law forced First United to turn away dozens of people and triggered, for the third year in a row, a publicity battle between the provincial government and the city. Like last year and the year before, the disagreement was only a disagreement on the surface, concealing the repeated formula that garners support for both for the city and the province.

On the province’s side, the formula is simple: each winter Minister Rich Coleman refuses to re-open shelter spaces closed down at the end of the previous winter, while at the same time threatening to withdraw funding for existing shelters like First United. In place of lost shelters, the province opens a handful of scattered ‘new’ shelter beds, while maintaining that the remaining shortfall will be filled in with new housing opened under the arrangement to build fourteen sites of social housing. None of these supposedly new housing spaces are new at all, since the desperately-needed fourteen sites were supposed to be completed by 2001 in some cases, and December 2009 at the latest. Neither is it the case that the shelters can be considered new, since they should not have been closed the previous spring in the first place.

Each time the shelters close and open there is ritual infighting between parties of the 1% — Vision and the BC Liberals. We have to consider why the city is so willing to play this seasonal political game. The answer is complicated but also simple, because shelter closures represent the only time of the year when the city can give an on-the-ground appearance of fighting against homelessness. In a brief but highly publicized pause on the city’s harsh neoliberal housing agenda, shelter closures provide a window for Gregor Robertson and Vision to play devil’s advocate.

All too willingly, Minister Coleman performed his side by giving the appearance of a dispute: “We seldom ever hear ‘thank you,’ and we seldom ever hear ‘we’re working with you.’” The truth is that ever since the election of Vision in 2008, the housing issues that matter to people’s lives — tenancy legislation, rent controls, tax cuts, the demolition of social housing, years-long delays of promised social housing — have been marked by consensus and a “tight bond” between the province and the city. The two sides have collaborated on making the situation worse: the province has done nothing to compensate for its decade freeze on the construction of housing, while the city has ramped-up gentrification and displacement in areas with the highest existing stocks of low-income housing.

The city’s criticism of the province’s foot-dragging is pretend, ending with, “Big thanks to the Minister and the Premier for coming through in the crunch here and making sure that we have adequate beds to meet the needs.” The fact is that there will not be adequate beds. Gregor Robertson knows that as well as the service providers and the people living on the streets.

Just as it happened last spring, the shelters will be 100% full on the day they are scheduled to close. And just as last spring, too, Vision and the Mayor will be equally willing to arrest those who refuse to move into the streets when those shelters close. Far from failing to thank the province, the city is the unquestioningly loyal enforcement arm of the housing crisis, using the police to guard empty buildings, criminalizing the poor every day, and — in lieu of housing — putting people in jail.