Allen Garr at the Courier caught condo marketer Bob Rennie in a talkative mood this week, where, from London, he slammed development consultant Michael Geller for his public comments about social housing at the Olympic village. In it, he calls Geller a “sniper” who is “taking out children” while aiming at social housing.
And he says Geller’s comments are damaging the ability to market the project — something that could eventually have a cost for everyone.
As most of you know, this is part of a rolling debate that has been going on for more than a week now, since Michael started commenting to various media, me included, that the social housing at the village was becoming a liability that could affect the prices for luxury condos.
He didn’t say social housing in general was a liability, but that the perception that the hardest to house (i.e. people from the Downtown Eastside with multiple issues) might move in, since the Portland Hotel Society was known to be one of the non-profits bidding to operate the buildings, might be a liability.
That generated scathing comments from Jim Green in the Vancouver Sun, a column from Globe writer Gary Mason slamming Green, and columns from Geller in the Sun and on his blog refuting Green’s criticisms. Not to mention, of course, bloggers weighing in. Plus more clarifications from Michael through the Vancouver Observer. I’m sure I’m missing some bits and pieces elsewhere.
This is a complicated fight because it mixes up so many different things: facts about who will actually live in the village’s social housing, people’s deeply held beliefs about what affects the value of real estate, people’s equally deeply held beliefs about whether segregated neighbourhoods are acceptable, idealism about how the city should work, business assessments about how to market housing.
What got Michael in trouble is not that he was expressing the secret wishes of the Non-Partisan Association, as Jim Green claimed. As anyone who knows Michael realizes, he expresses his views completely independently of any political group or ideology — to a fault, some might say.
(Full disclosure: He has been one of several people in the development field whose opinions I have regularly sought over the years to understand issues; I’ve been invited to many social events at his house, though have never managed to make it.)
He’s an honest and thoughtful guy, and almost constitutionally incapable of being mean — something he himself acknowledges can be a liability.
But what got Michael in trouble was that he was speaking as a development consultant who has been in charge of high-end projects, like the Bayshore development in the 1990s.
He expressed the view that is common among many who develop and market high-end projects, which is that, if you want to sell people a sense of exclusivity and luxury and charge them a very high price for it, you can’t have people around who obviously don’t fit the image.
That might mean people in social housing. At the Bayshore development, it did — Michael negotiated to have social housing for families moved offsite. He also designed a project that was not particularly suited to any kind of families, whether in social housing or not. That didn’t fit the kind of development the Bayshore owners were trying to create.
But that kind of marketing calculation is confined to social housing. The people seen as potential problems might also mean renters of any description. And it might also mean even buyers who are at the low end of the market.
That’s not being prejudiced. It might be inaccurate or based more on perception than reality — I haven’t found any study yet that corroborates that, even though it’s an accepted truism in the marketing industry — but it’s based on an economic/marketing calculation. As George Wong of Magnus, currently marketing River Green in Richmond, told me, developers of very high-end towers deliberately design their towers so that there are no small units anywhere. They’ll stick to a minimum of 2,000 square feet, to ensure that there are no low-end buyers in the building.
That doesn’t happen with every building. There are plenty of examples in Vancouver and elsewhere of the first-time buyers populating the lower floors of condos, while the people who cashed in their West Van houses are perched in the million-dollar penthouses at the top.
That kind of concern about property values and how the demographics of people living nearby will affect them is hardly restricted to developers, though. Every residents’ group that has protested against basement suites, townhouses, apartments and laneway houses — and heaven knows that there has been no shortgage of that throughout the region in the past 20 years — is at heart operating from that fear. I’ve heard it umpteen times at public hearings, the fear that having renters in the area will affect the value of the investment that is the largest one that many people have.
It’s also why many strata councils don’t allow people to rent out their units — precisely because of the concerns from the majority of owners that having renters in the building will affect property values.
In the Downtown Eastside, advocacy groups also worry that even one building of moderate-income renters or buyers will start to drive property values up and force out the very poor who live there. That’s why the Carnegie Community Action Project opposes every kind of development in the Downtown Eastside except for additional social housing. Even buildings that are aimed at affordable rental or affordable home-ownership geared to people making service-industry wages are on their no-go list.
The problem for many of us is that we don’t have the information to judge whether any of this is true, so fear ends up playing a part in our assessments.
Some academic could do a lot of good in this city by studying the impact of economic mixing to see what really happens. There is much more of it than we sometimes realize.
In spite of the heated battle over basement suites in the 1990s, the reality is that basement suites are now an accepted fact of life throughout Vancouver — west side and east side. So are laneway houses.That creates an economic social mix similar to having social housing formally designed in.
As well, there is social housing studded throughout the city — from the social housing across the street from the Bayshore Hotel in Coal Harbour and from Urban Fare in the Concord developments to older projects near the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club at Jericho Beach. Even at River Green in Richmond, there will be a chunk of the development designated as affordable housing, if I understand Richmond’s mandatory policy on inclusionary zoning correctly.
What is the real impact of that on property values? We don’t know. By and large I suspect it’s been non-existent, because most people don’t even realize social housing is in the neighbourhood. But that kind of obliviousness has taken a ding in the last two weeks.