INTERVIEW | Neighbourhoods for a Sustainable Vancouver’s Randy Helten

The Mainlander’s Sean Antrim sat down with their Mayoral candidate Randy Helten of Neighbourhoods for a Sustainable Vancouver (NSV) to talk about affordability, accountability, the arts, and Vancouver’s future. It is a tall order for a political party that does not receive corporate and developer donations to get candidates elected. NSV has been fighting an up-hill battle.

Sean Antrim: What amount of development do we need in Vancouver right now? And the reason that I’m asking this question is because many people, and the mainstream press, have criticized Neighbourhoods for a Sustainable Vancouver as being NIMBY-based. A lot of journalists have been around for a while, and in the 1990s with Gordon Campbell, NIMBY-ism was quite a problem.

Randy Helten: To tell you the truth, I don’t know the answer. In fact, I don’t think anyone knows the answer. The people who know the answer are concealing the answer. Because the City has removed from public access numbers that show the current zoning capacity. It used to be up and available, but it’s gone now. My understanding is that Professor Patrick Condon at UBC has done some studies, and he’s saying that for construction within the current zoning, the capacity for additional population density is enough for decades into the future. Construction could happen without any rezoning, to fill all of the incoming population.

The City has these numbers, and in January of this year [COPE Councilor] Ellen Woodsworth put forward a motion that was passed, according to which the planning department was supposed to release the numbers of zoning capacity to council some time in February. It’s off the map. Despite repeated requests there’s been no response out of the planning department. So no one knows the answer publicly. The information is concealed. My suspicion is that if you take the West End, for example, I think in the current zoning, without rezoning, we could accommodate another 5,000 people or so. That’s just a sense, because I know the areas that are zoned right now for six stories that are currently two stories. If you take the average of all that and you look at a long term thirty-year plan or a hundred-year plan, and look at the land area in the West End and long term population goals — steady growth, not too extreme, not too rapid — the West End could accommodate several thousand more people.

Sean Antrim: That’s the way most cities do rezoning — blanket rezoning — which is doing an entire neighbourhood at a time. Why do you think we have so many spot rezonings in Vancouver?

Randy Helten: My understanding of the dynamics is that a spot rezoning allows exceptions to happen within the existing zoning. In many cases it offers huge returns to the owner of those specific spots. If you go to the old adage “follow the money” and look at who’s making campaign contributions to our elected officials, it makes sense. They’re making the campaign contributions, the officials get into power, and they have control over land use decisions. They’re supposed to regulate the land on behalf of the entire public and balance all the interests of all of the stakeholders. Both Vision and the NPA as organizations are incapable of avoiding undue influence from that private money, and that’s what we’re seeing as the results of their decisions.

EDITORIAL | Occupy 101

These are notes towards — what? — a manifesto? list of demands? Not really. Just three key thoughts/impressions about the Occupy movement that have evolved over the weeks I have been watching, participating in, and thinking about it. Call it “Occupy 101.” There’s a lot more nuance to these issues than I go into here — but I’m trying to be schematic, conceptual. I hope it might be useful in the on-going and collective attempt to “explain” the movement—both to those of us involved in it, and those who remain skeptical or even antagonistic to it.

1.

The problems we face in the world today are diverse, wide-ranging, and complex. But here’s a (hopefully useful) short-hand that gets us right into the heart of the matter, and that short-hand is found in the nexus formed by these two words: ECONOMY and ECOLOGY. Both words derive from the Greek oikos, meaning “home.” Simplifying to the extreme, economy is how we make our living and our home; ecology is where we make our living and our home. Obviously, these two concepts need to be in harmony and balance. But today they are not: our economy does constant and often excessive damage to our ecology.

Our global economic system is based on, driven by, and in need of constant growth. Like a shark, if it doesn’t keep moving, it dies. Or better, like cancer, it only knows growth, regardless of the consequences for its “host.” As long as GDPs keep rising, it doesn’t matter how unequally distributed that wealth is, or how badly people suffer, or what happens to the environment. So our ECONOMICS ignores and surpass all limits. But our ECOLOGIES are all about limits — each ecosystem is limited (by climate, geography, resources, etc.), and the ultimate limit is the earth itself, the entire biosphere. Our current economic system has run right past these ecological limits (the excess registering in global warming, the extinction of species, the loss of the world’s forests, huge Texas-sized patches of plastic floating in our oceans, etc. etc.). In Slavoj Zizek’s analogy, we are like Wile E. Coyote, running off the edge of the economical/ecological cliff. When we finally look down, we’ll fall.

Five basic things you need to know about the Vancouver civic election

Here are five basic things you’ll need to know to guide you through the fog of the 2011 Vancouver civic election campaign

1. Both the NPA and Vision Vancouver are bankrolled by developers

The most powerful thing the city does is make decisions about how land is developed. The city decides what kind of development is allowed on a given property, and how big. This is called “zoning,” which largely determines the value of the property. The city can also decide to change what’s allowed on a given property, thereby changing its value — “rezoning.” In short, big developers donate millions of dollars to municipal parties with the expectation that the parties will help increase the value of developers’ properties.

Both the Non-Partisan Association (NPA) and Vision Vancouver are bankrolled by big developers. As Vision’s Geoff Meggs said in an interview with The Mainlander this week, of the millions of campaign contributions to his party, “the lion’s share comes from developers.” Vision split from COPE in 2005 in part because of the Vision faction’s pro-developer strategy. In 2005, of Vision Vancouver’s $1.3M in campaign contributions, a full $984,000 was from corporations — largely developers. By comparison, of $525,740.81 raised by COPE during its 2005 campaign, only $25,763 was from corporations. In 2008, Vision raised $1,704,258.81 during, and another $433,560.83 after the election. About 60% of this was from corporations, including half a million from developers (for a breakdown see here). At Vision’s recent fundraising gala at the Westin Bayshore, Nov 3 2011, the list of attendees is dominated by developers.

The Non-Partisan Association has always been a developer party. During the 2008 campaign, the developer donations to the NPA equaled that of Vision: half a million dollars. The NPA’s current fundraising manager is Rob MacDonald, a right-wing developer and realtor. MacDonald’s fundraising pitch of September 2011, directed at developers, claimed that it is “unconstitutional” for the city to tax developers at all! The NPA expects to raise $2.4 million this campaign.

2. Despite the talk, neither the NPA or Vision will take action to alleviate the affordability crisis

No matter which way you slice it, Vancouver is one of the most unaffordable cities in the world. A recent RBC report showed that the average family would have to fork out over 90% of their income to buy an average bungalow, and over 50% of their income for an average condo. CMHC defines “affordable” as having to pay no more than 30% of household income on one’s housing.

The big developers need prices to stay high in order to ensure maximum profits. To protect these donors, the NPA and Vision will go to great lengths to maintain the unaffordable status quo. If you watched Wednesday’s CBC mayoral debate, you would have strained to tell the difference between Robertson and Anton’s approaches. It’s like trying to differentiate between Pepsi and Coke at a taste-test — the difference is that there is no difference!

INTERVIEW | Vision’s Geoff Meggs on the affordability crisis, Occupy Vancouver, and Operation Solidarity

Below, Tristan Markle of The Mainlander interviews Vision Vancouver’s Geoff Meggs, who is running for re-election to Vancouver City Council. We discuss Vancouver’s unaffordability malady: would Meggs make the correct diagnosis, or propose a sufficient intervention? We discuss other cities with similar disorders, but which have more robust public housing programs: would Meggs help implement those programs here, or take responsibility for the ongoing destruction of public housing? We discuss developer contributions to political parties: is Vision passing the buck on campaign finance reform? Finally, we compare 1983’s Operation Solidarity (in which Meggs was heavily involved) to the Occupy Together movement: is Vision misrepresenting, even vilifying, the new movement?

Markle: Why is housing so unaffordable in Vancouver, what’s the main reason?

Meggs: I would say there’s some short term key drivers, and some longer term ones. In the short term, the key reason’s been that the economy’s been quite buoyant here, and we’ve had a lot of people moving here, so it’s been driving up demand, and demand has been coupled with a lot of speculation. Because for about about 15 -20 years housing prices have tended to go up. So there’s a speculative element, there’s no doubt about it. But I think in the longer term I think the bigger picture is that land supply is quite constrained here and the ALR [the Agricultural Land Reserve] is part of that, it’s a positive part but it’s a contributor.

Markle: When you said that speculation plays a part, what exactly do you mean?

Meggs: Well I think many people had an expectation for a long time that if they purchased real estate that they would see gains in their equity that was faster than the rate of inflation. In other words, they could benefit economically by buying real estate more so than buying an RRSP or putting it in a bank account or buying Canadian savings bonds. And for a long time that was true. As a result, there was more pressure on the market than was justified by reality.

Markle: Last year prices went up over 20%, still. So how is that happening?

Meggs: Well I’m not an expert on all of these things, but I believe that because the BC economy and the Canadian economy have been relatively buffered from the global crisis, and because there are a number of underlying factors that make this a very attractive place to live – you know, say, no civil wars or armed conflicts going on, a pretty solid stable legal system, all of these things that are appealing – a lot of people have been coming here to purchase and to some degree to speculate. So we’ve continued to see higher prices than almost anywhere else in North America, certainly in stark contrast to the United States, for sure. That seems to be related to our place in the global economy.

Markle: We hear a lot about people from other countries buying property here on the one hand, but research doesn’t make it so clear that the majority of capital invested in new condos, for example, is necessarily coming from people from elsewhere, at all. You’ve covered some of the research that shows that it’s not so simple as that.

Meggs: I don’t think it’s useful to pursue that line of inquiry at all personally, and potentially dangerous, because it’s a classic deflection in BC politics to blame our problems on outsiders. The reality is that if there are purchases by offshore investors at the high end of the market, it’s not having and impact on anybody that I’m worried about at all. The real problem is at the mid-range.

Markle: Depending on what type of housing you’re looking at, whether it’s stand-alone homes or condos, the median price is way out of proportion to median income. High end properties won’t affect that median much at all. So when Bob Rennie did a study recently which said that all the talk about housing being unaffordable is skewed by the high end, he missed the point. The most simple measures of housing affordability – median income versus median price – are not affected by high end. So what is it then that’s driving up the prices, if it’s for the large part not money flowing in necessarily from elsewhere, not necessarily for high end luxury properties, so what is it?