Dan Fumano: Housing crisis 'not just a big-city problem,' UBCM hears
Credit to Author: Dan Fumano| Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2019 02:18:27 +0000
It’s not exactly news that housing-affordability woes have spread far beyond Vancouver’s borders to communities of all sizes in disparate parts of B.C., but a crowd of elected officials gathered Thursday in Vancouver tried to learn from the examples set by the province’s larger municipalities.
“It’s not just a big-city problem, it’s a large problem across the province,” said Chad Eliason, a councillor from Salmon Arm who chaired the Thursday workshop dedicated to “tackling the housing crisis,” as part of the Union of B.C. Municipalities’ annual conference.
“Housing remains a challenge across British Columbia, with rising expectations and increased pressure on local governments to deliver,” Eliason said. “In this environment, moving too quickly can risk alienating stakeholders or intervening in the wrong places. While moving too slowly can result in further human displacement.”
The workshop heard from elected officials from three of B.C.’s larger municipalities: Burnaby, New Westminster and Nanaimo.
Those larger urban centres are on the “leading edge” of this issue, said Eliason, a five-term councillor from the city of about 13,000 people in B.C.’s Interior. “But we’ve found that this has filtered down to every part of B.C. It affects everyone. And historically, it didn’t.”
When workshop facilitator Shauna Sylvester, executive director of the Simon Fraser University Centre for Dialogue, asked the crowd who comes from a municipality with a “housing crisis,” most politicians in the crowd, representing B.C. municipalities of widely varying sizes, raised their hands.
In the question-and-answer period after Thursday’s panel presentation, elected officials from medium-sized and smaller municipalities raised their own issues. Bowen Island Coun. Maureen Nicholson shared her experience dealing with what she called “the housing crisis” facing her own 3,700-person municipality.
Three years ago, a Vancouver Sun editorial criticized then-Premier Christy Clark’s B.C. Liberals for “failing to pick up on the depth of the anxiety felt by many about housing affordability.”
Then-Finance Minister Mike de Jong had made comments that month suggesting housing-unaffordability problems were limited to “one or two neighbourhoods” around Vancouver’s west side, comments The Sun editorial called “insensitive.”
On the subject of housing affordability, the editorial noted, the Liberals were exhibiting a “politically perilous sensitivity gap.” Sure enough, when the following year’s election brought about the end of that B.C. Liberal government, many observers suggested their hesitation to recognize the scope of B.C.’s housing-affordability woes had hurt their electoral fortunes.
B.C.’s municipal leaders have also long criticized decades of successive federal governments, of different political stripes, for doing too little to support housing.
At Thursday’s workshop, Burnaby Mayor Mike Hurley commented on that subject, saying: “Absolutely, the federal government abandoned social housing — we all know that — in the 1980s. And that’s why we’ve probably got to the mess we’re in.”
With far less federal investment in social housing than some countries have, Canadian municipalities rely on private-sector developers for the vast majority of housing production. Hurley commented that while he sometimes hears public distrust of developers, “really, we can’t build housing without developers.”
So it’s up to local governments to make sure those private-sector developers build the right kinds of housing. In Vancouver, production of purpose-built market rental housing fell off dramatically after the 1970s, after the termination of federal programs to support rental construction and a boom in condo production. Vancouver’s statistics show the city saw the construction of more than twice as many rental apartments in the 10 years between 1960 and 1969 than in the 30 years between 1980 and 2009.
A healthy rental market is seen as a key piece of the housing puzzle in markets like Vancouver, where home ownership is out of reach for a large and growing proportion of the population. That may, increasingly, become the reality in smaller towns too.
And even though Vancouver’s high land costs mean new market-rental apartments are expensive, increasing the supply of secure rental units brings the market closer to “equilibrium,” according to a new report this week from RBC Economics. The report defines equilibrium as a rental vacancy rate of three per cent, but Vancouver’s rate has been below one per cent for years.
However, the report’s author, RBC senior economist Robert Hogue, said Thursday that Metro has seen an “encouraging” resurgence of purpose-built rental apartment projects in the past three years.
Vancouver has seen some success with programs to incentivize developers to build rentals instead of condos, said Hogue, adding: “but I don’t want to put the entire onus at the city level, I really think that across all levels of government, there has to be some concerted effort … to boost the rental side.”
Metro’s recent resurgence of apartment construction should, Hogue’s report says, “set off a wave of new supply now coming to market, which should eventually stabilize rent.”
But while those same rental-construction incentives have seen some success in Vancouver, they’ve also faced controversy. And Vancouver’s newest rental program, which would allow developers to build significantly larger buildings in exchange for deeper levels of affordability, will likely face a big pushback when projects start coming before council this fall, as neighbourhood groups complain about the pace and scale of change.
As B.C.’s smaller municipalities face their own housing crises, they too will likely face sometimes-painful debates over the solutions with their own longtime residents. Some already are.