Secret plan by Vancouver city council to increase requirements for social housing?
Question: I have heard that city council plans to amend the Oppenheimer sub district zoning to require 60% social housing in any new development, up from 20% in the current official plan, meaning that it will be uneconomic for private developers to build anything, resulting in taxpayers paying the whole shot for any development in the area. Is this true, and is it true that this announcement is being held back until after the next civic election?
This is the kind of question that is breaking my heart these days. There’s a stream of conspiracy theorizing that’s always run through this city, but it’s swelled to a raging river lately. (Is that a block that metaphor sentence? Perhaps.)
Yes, council does plan to amend the Oppenheimer sub-district zoning to require 60 per cent housing in any new development. But the rest of this question just makes me sad, for various reasons, which I will explain.
1. The announcement is not being held back until the next civic election for I assume you think nefarious political reasons.
It’s been out there and is being debated endlessly. Development consultant Michael Geller has been railing about it here and there and everywhere, while various people have defended it. It was discussed at some length at a recent community meeting in Strathcona. Just because you don’t keep up with the news doesn’t mean something is being hidden and/or is a conspiracy. (BTW, for those who still don’t realize it, I don’t have any idea who sends in questions. My blog form somehow eliminates the email addresses that questions come from, so you are all completely anonymous to me. I have no idea whether you are a developer or an activist in the area or what.)
2. As I’ve been given to understand recently by Ray Spaxman, the former city planning director who has been labouring hard in the trenches of the Downtown Eastside to help people there prepare a proper response to the city’s proposed plan for the area, saying “60 per cent social housing” is not quite accurate. Nor is Michael Geller’s assertion that the new proposal blocks any market-condo development in the area at all. Ray said that the proposal calls for any new building that is LARGER THAN the current building size allowed in the area has to make any of the additional space all rental, with some of that being rented out at below-market rates.
A developer can still build 1 FSR of for-sale condos in the new project. (For those just joining the urban-planning world, 1 FSR means you can build a building to the equivalent of the square footage of the lot. So if a lot is 33 x 100, the building can be 3300 square feet, in whatever form you want. One floor of 3,300, two floors of 1,650, three floors of 1,100, etc.) The remainder has to be rental. Sixty per cent of that rental has to be “social housing,” which means, in essence, that it’s below-market in some way. The city’s formula is that a third of that should be deep subsidy (so essentially rented out at welfare rates), a third at shallow subsidy (so rent at 30 per cent of the person’s income, for those who are low-income but not on welfare), and a third at prevailing market rates in the area for all apartments (so you can’t charge the normal rent that you’d get for a new unit.) That’s a super-shallow subsidy, but does encourage people of a different income group to mix in.
3. It will be uneconomic for private developers to build anything, resulting in taxpayers paying the whole shot for any development in the area.
My dear friend, what are you talking about? If it is uneconomic for developers to build anything, they won’t build. The city doesn’t own any of those buildings. The city has not committed one dime to helping out with subsidies that I know of to this point. You’re right, in that questions have been raised about whether any developer will see this as workable and whether the formula should be adjusted. But city tax money? Where do you get that from?
BTW, I should point out that the goal of something like this is to stop buyers from paying inflated prices for the land, which also helps with all properties in the area to prevent speculation. If a developer is considering buying a piece of Downtown Eastside land and knows that the city requirement will only allow him or her to build a limited number of for-sale condos and a limited number of market-rate-rental apartments, that will prompt him/her to offer a much lower price for the land in order to make the pro forma work.
For all you other listeners, if I have mucked up any details of this somewhat complex topic, please weigh in. Wouldn’t want any MORE crazy misinformation circulating, because I think the circuits are loaded already on that.