Dan Fumano: Feds lend support for previously announced affordable housing in Vancouver
Credit to Author: Dan Fumano| Date: Thu, 08 Aug 2019 01:23:52 +0000
They were all smiles Wednesday, the cabinet ministers standing in the sunshine in the bright new River District neighbourhood in Vancouver’s southeastern-most corner.
One wag suggested the presence of so many of them in front of cameras could only mean one thing: An election is coming soon.
On Wednesday, after months of lobbying by Metro politicians and affordable housing officials for Ottawa to do more to tackle tackling B.C.’s affordability woes, representatives of the governments of Canada, B.C. and Vancouver assembled for a press conference, two months before the looming federal election.
Some of the local figures who recently criticized Ottawa were on hand Wednesday in a celebratory mood, including Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart, who two months ago said the city’s dire homelessness situation depended on whether “the Prime Minister going to put his money where his mouth is.” Also, B.C. Co-operative Housing Federation executive director Thom Armstrong, who just last month co-wrote a sharply critical op-ed in The Province saying Ottawa’s housing strategy “has so far failed to launch in B.C.”
Stewart and Armstrong appeared with federal Housing Minister Jean-Yves Duclos and thanked him for a new commitment for affordable housing in Vancouver.
The headline numbers in Wednesday’s announcement were eye-catching: a quarter-billion dollar investment to build 1,100 homes in Vancouver.
But the 1,100 homes had all been announced before, and were already in various stages of development, government staff later confirmed following the event.
Of the nine projects mentioned Wednesday, seven were announced in 2018 by then-mayor Gregor Robertson, as a partnership between the city and the Community Land Trust, a non-profit developer created by the Co-operative Housing Federation of B.C.
Financing of those seven projects — totalling 1,000 homes — is still being worked out, Armstrong said after the news conference. But he said the federal money will help move the projects forward and make them more affordable.
The one furthest along the development process is Pierview Homes with an expected occupancy in early 2020. Its construction site was the backdrop for Wednesday’s announcement, noisy but symbolic.
The two other sites mentioned Wednesday were a 172-unit affordable housing development in the Downtown Eastside in development since 2016, and a proposed temporary modular housing project near the Nanaimo SkyTrain station.
To help fund those already announced 1,100 homes, the feds said it would pony up $184 million. But CMHC staff later said it consists of about $114 million in low-interest loans and $69 million in direct funding. The “quarter-of-a-billion-dollar” figure cited by Stewart includes the city’s contribution, valued at $96 million and consisting of land, grants, and waivers from development charges.
Duclos said his government intended to make life more affordable.
“Today’s announcement is just one more step,” Duclos said. “We know there is a lot more to do.”
But “the good news,” Duclos said later, is that after “many, many years of absence from the federal government — and that includes different political parties — the federal government is back,” Duclos said, apparently acknowledging that lack of federal funding for housing, which stretches back to the 1990s, includes both Conservative and Liberal governments.
Armstrong, in his comments at Wednesday’s press conference, also alluded to his recent op-ed criticizing Ottawa, which was followed a week later by an op-ed in response from Duclos.
“Minister Duclos and I have been chirping at each other recently in the media,” Armstrong told the crowd. “But that is never going to stop us from working together on our common mission. I get how challenging it is to deliver a national housing program in a market like British Columbia. And I know the minister understands it’s my job never to be satisfied until the very last person who needs an affordable place to call home is properly housed.”
Armstrong’s op-ed last month said B.C. needs “tens of thousands of new homes, particularly homes that are affordable for low- and middle-income households, to make up for decades of neglect by all levels of government.”
After Wednesday’s media event, Armstrong said he still believes that’s true, adding: “I don’t think anybody who was up at that podium today would disagree. Nobody thinks we’re going to build 1,100 and call it a job done.”
The hope, then, is that Vancouver and B.C. won’t need to wait until another federal election for the next big housing announcement.
For the average taxpayer following these kinds of press conferences at home and catching the headlines, “it makes it seem like there are thousands and thousands and thousands of non-market homes getting created every year,” said Andy Yan, director of Simon Fraser University’s city program.
But when drilling into city data tracking the actual completions of homes, Yan found an annual average of 258 non-market homes created annually over the last 10 years. That does include, though, a significant uptick for 2018, when the alignment of senior governments was the same as it is now, and 527 units of social and supportive housing were created in Vancouver, plus another 404 temporary modular homes.
If we actually get a few years of dramatically increased non-market housing production, it would help dig us out of the deficit we’re in after decades of underinvestment from senior governments, Yan said.
“But I’ll believe it when I see the completions, and not only the announcements.”