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Is it possible for Vancouver to do an affordable home-ownership plan, given our insane land prices?

June 5th, 2016 · 4 Comments

Vancouver has said it’s going to start a small “affordable home-ownership” program, with an initial 300 units over three years.

It’s hardly the first city to do this. There are programs all over the continent that have started up as resort towns, universities, mid-sized cities, and large cities have all tried to find a way to ensure that one group of potential residents — people making decent but not fabulous incomes — can find a place to live in their communities.

In a recent story for the Globe, I talked to the people who run some of the programs elsewhere: Toronto, Whistler, UBC. One woman who’s been doing this for a while, Heather Tremain, had serious reservations about how Vancouver is going to be able to do this, given land prices.

In a recent speech to the UDI, Bob Rennie (marketing guru, Svengali, adviser and fundraiser for a wide variety of politicians) suggested that Vancouver should stay out of this game because, even with a 20-per-cent reduction in price that it’s proposing, that isn’t any better than what the same buyer could get by moving to Burnaby or Coquitlam.

My very certain guess is that Vancouver will pay no attention to Rennie on this one. Yes, it’s true, all housing problems can theoretically be solved by telling people to drive until they find something they can afford. But many civic leaders, housing advocates, regular folks are uncomfortable with that.

One: That then risks producing a city populated by only two kinds of people, the extremely wealthy and a service class, willing to cram into tiny, shared spaces in the cheaper parts of town. That’s not a healthy mix.

Two: It takes away a choice that many feel should be on offer. That is: if you really, really want to be in the heart of your community and you’re willing to accept less space and less of a profit on your home, we will find an option for you.

After all, affordable home-ownership plans, the ones that survive, aren’t really offering a discount. They are offering to let someone buy at below-market rate, in return for selling at below-market rate. Many people won’t like that deal. Either they aren’t that wedded to the city and they’ll move to Burnaby or Coquitlam, where they can buy outright and perhaps get something bigger. Or they’ll find a way to stretch to buy at market price in Vancouver, so they can get the full profit.

I should say that I continue to hear from people about one of the niggling problems with these programs, which is enforcing the rules. One affordable home-ownership effort that BC Housing took part in turned out to be somewhat disappointing. People got a deal to be able to buy — and then their units started showing up as rentals on Craigslist, in completion violation of the spirit and the letter of their agreements.

 

 

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  • Pete Fry

    Not often I will agree with Rennie, but he’s right on this one..
    (or at least this particular home-ownership scheme)

    VAHA’s decision to not establish their new affordable ownership scheme under the limited appreciation model (as done in New York, San Francisco and Whistler and pretty much everywhere) effectively dooms this particular project to the same kind of failure achieved by the Westbank project at 60 Cordova you cite above. The scheme works fine for the first buyer who will be building equity but the expense of the next buyers. In effect, it’s subsidized speculation.

  • A Taxpayer

    Calling it an “affordable home ownership plan” is a bit misleading as most government support plans can be accessed by all those that qualify. Clearly, it is not affordable to government to provide affordable housing for all those who want it so how is the City going to allocate spaces to those lucky few? A lottery? And the unlucky many not only still have to provide for their own housing but are effectively subsidizing the lucky few through their taxes. How are the gains in value going to be shared? What will be the cost of administering the program? The regulations will have to be incredibly complex to try to stop “cheating” and even then, those that find the loopholes tend to be cleverer than those who are designing the system.

    It is easy to dismiss the comments of Bob Rennie as he does have a vested interest in the real estate market but it doesn’t mean he isn’t right. If the City insists on wading into the housing market with an ill conceived scheme it will only end badly for the taxpayers.

  • peakie

    I wonder if we can do something as the rush for post-war housing in the 1940s.
    Though back then Vancouver was 30 percent empty and rural, Burnaby was 60 percent empty and rural awaiting the 1950s-1960s Burnaboom, many people were arriving in Vancouver, demobbed soldiers, immigrants, Displaced Persons, etc.
    All creating new families and trying to find places to stay.
    There were some ex-barracks still up, and war-time restrictions had kept house bulding done, rents frozen and building materials in short supply

    Some people revolted that they could not get afforadable family housing then.

    “A Palace for the Public”: Housing Reform and the 1946 Occupation of the Old Hotel Vancouver by Jill Wade.
    http://www.canlitsubmit.ca/index.php/bcstudies/article/viewFile/1235/1279 BC Studies, Spring-Summer 1986, pages 288+

    [ See also
    The” sting” of Vancouver’s Better Housing” spree”, 1919-1949, J Wade – Urban History Review/Revue d’histoire urbaine, 1993
    erudit.org/revue/uhr/1993/v21/n2/1016793ar.pdf ]

    “80 percent of Vancouver’s population lived in single houses. By 1941, 75.2 percent of all housing types still consisted of detached dwellings.
    The city’s problem in the forties resulted mainly from a huge population increase amounting to 44,000 people between 1939 and 1944.12 This growth may be attributed to a heavy inward movement of workers and their families attracted by the expansion of wartime shipbuilding and aircraft industries, to an influx of armed forces dependents, and to an uninterrupted migration from the prairie provinces. Later, in 1945-46, demobilization greatly affected the housing situation. As federal officials expected, significantly more discharged personnel than the city’s 30,000 enlistments settled in the area.”

    Should the public Occupy the Trump Tower, the City Hall, the Mayor’s apartment tower, or Alexandra Park across the way on English Bay to emphasize the scale of the problem.

  • Desmond Bliek

    “It takes away a choice that many feel should be on offer. That is: if you really, really want to be in the heart of your community and you’re willing to accept less space and less of a profit on your home, we will find an option for you.”

    Actually, local government systematically restricts people’s ability to make that choice, at least as it applies to row/townhouses, and low-key, trick-or-treatable missing middle type housing. So the trade-off ends up being accepting an apartment with a lot less space (and limited/no ground level outdoor space). Which is great for some (many!), but clearly not the preferred option for many others (think of the folks in your last feature on millenials with kids heading for the burbs, in search of a townhouse).

    Older incumbent homeowners, at the very least, successfully demand that government heavily restrict that choice through zoning (yes, you can have suites), and all kinds of councils seem to agree that easy on street parking is indeed more valuable than offering more housing options. If many folks think that choice should be on offer, let’s hear it…