real-estate

This past week newspapers reported on Vancouver’s high number of empty condos. The reports were based on new research by Andy Yan of BTAworks. Yan is known for an earlier 2009 study that used BC Hydro statistics to track the number of empty condos in downtown Vancouver. Yan’s new research essentially confirms the 2009 study: as of 2012 Vancouver has an average of 7.7% empty condo units, with an exception for downtown’s Coal Harbour, at 23% empty.

Many of the empty units in the ultra-luxury towers of Coal Harbour are seasonal homes and secondary suites for Canada’s high net worth elite. Canada’s tax cuts have unleashed billions of dollars into luxury real-estate near to home. After ten years of neoliberal reforms since the election of the BC Liberals in 2001, an unprecedented amount of wealth has been freed up for circulation and reinvestment in British Columbia. Profit rates have soared while the corporate income tax rate in BC has been reduced from 16.5 to the current 10%. Today the upper 20% of BC pay a lower total provincial tax rate than the remaining 80%, and the provincial government now collects more revenues from a regressive sales taxes than from income tax.

Since the election of Gregor Robertson and Vision Vancouver, the city has boasted the lowest corporate tax rate in the world, combined with millions in targeted tax breaks, subsidies, and fee exemptions for local billionaires. In each of the next four years, corporate profits in BC are projected to continue climbing and reach $31.3 billion in the year 2015 alone. Over the course of three decades, billions of dollars of surplus capital have produced flat wages, growing inequality and bloated financial markets. Is there a lot of freed-up capital moving into Vancouver’s speculative real-estate economy? Certainly.

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BC Rooms hotel, across the street from the proposed condos at 557 E. Cordova, was where MLA Jagrup Brar stayed during his welfare challenge in 2012.

The Vancouver Development Permit Board will hear yet another Downtown Eastside condo project proposal on Monday. The low-income community has already spent much time and energy on futile trips to City Hall to protest their displacement by more and more condo developments in the DTES. All protests have fallen on deaf ears – at both Development Permit Board and City Council public hearings. In lieu of protest in person this time, our frustrated community is sending our opposition by email to see if it will help Development Permit Board members and City Councillors to actually consider the reasons why people oppose the 24-unit condo project at 537 E. Cordova. Perhaps their reading abilities are better than their listening ones… Wishful thinking we know, but if you are interested in joining this opposition, please send a letter to mayorandcouncil@vancouver.ca or go to the Development Permit Board hearing, Monday March 25, 3pm at City Hall Town Hall meeting room. While we continue to come up with other strategies for protest, we support all efforts to continue speaking in person. Register to speak by calling 604-873-7469 or lorna.harvey@vancouver.ca.

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Daniel Boffo is a young developer born into a family real estate development company far from poverty and the streets.

That’s why, at last month’s public information meeting about the condo project he wants to build on the block between Oppenheimer and the UGM shelter, I was astonished to hear him compare himself to people on welfare living in nearby SRO hotel rooms.

Herb Varley, a young Nuu-chah-nulth and Nisga’a man who lived in a hotel down the street for two years, told Boffo that hotel residents are there because they have no choice. “No one wants to live in hotels,” he said, “but the other option they have is the street. If you build a condo here, it will push up land and rent prices and you will push those people out on the street.” Daniel Boffo didn’t flinch. He said that people don’t get to choose where they want to live; “I want to live in a mansion on the water and I don’t get to do that.” Then he said that if low-income people want to be comfortable in other places besides the Downtown Eastside they should get out there and stop being prejudiced against higher income people.

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Up until recently, Pam Burge was one of the few remaining tenants in the city’s Olympic Village social housing on False Creek. Since moving into the Olympic Village almost two years ago, problems with rent, utility bills and tenancy rights accumulated “without end.” Burge has been forced out of her housing in a post-Olympic drama containing many lessons but little in the way of answers and accountability.

Burge had been living in her one-bedroom apartment at 80 Walter Hardwick in the Olympic Village since April of 2011. The building is one of three city-owned buildings in the Olympic Village managed by COHO property management. The same company also manages The Athletes Village Housing Coop and 121 Walter Hardwick. All of these buildings are meant to provide a mix of market housing and non-market housing for low-income tenants. However, Burge states that a mix of housing simply does not exist in her former community: “There is no social housing at the Olympic Village.” Most of the units are more suited to higher income tenants, according to Burge, and she estimated that there were only about five tenants, including herself, who were “genuinely in core need of social housing.” However, she said that these tenants were in the process of being “forced out.”

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The Pidgin picket has pressured the city government to declare its stance on the gentrification of Vancouver’s most affordable neighborhood. City Councilor Kerry Jang has thrown his support behind gentrification in general, and has made a point of making personal appearances at the Pidgin/21 Doors project in particular. This has revealed a contradiction of the city’s policies: the mayor claims to oppose homelessness, but at the same time promotes a targeted gentrification policy that is causing the rapid loss of affordable housing in the DTES. The Pidgin restaurant itself is part of the 21 Doors condo project, which displaced 30 low income families when tenants were evicted in 2008. Pidgin is only blocks from the Woodward’s project, which resulted in the direct loss of eight hotels and 404 low income units in a 1-block radius since 2010. Today Woodward’s is flanked on all sides by high-end boutique stores instead of affordable housing.

Against the visible facts on the ground, Kerry Jang is arguing that gentrification is not causing the loss of low income housing in Vancouver’s Eastside, stating, “Gentrification is a problem if people are being displaced. But no one is being displaced.” As evidence, Jang points to a statistic from a recent city hall report — a statistic also used in an article published today in the Tyee by Doug Ward: “The study found that the number of low-income housing units in Vancouver’s downtown core not only stabilized during the gentrification boom that came before and after the 2010 Olympics — it’s on the rise.”