Vancouver rental completions down 30 per cent from last year: report
Credit to Author: Dan Fumano| Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2019 01:29:15 +0000
The number of rental homes built in the City of Vancouver has dropped by almost a third from last year, despite a decade of city hall efforts to encourage apartment construction, a new report says.
Vancouver is expecting 947 rental units, in 14 buildings, to be ready in 2019. That’s a 30 per cent drop from last year’s total of 1,364, said a report Friday by Goodman Commercial, a Vancouver company that buys and sells apartment buildings, publishes insights on the local market, and advocates for the industry.
The city has tried policies to encourage the private sector to build more apartments because of Vancouver’s persistently low rental vacancy rate. In July, a Vancouver report said city rental incentives have been “effective” at increasing apartment construction from the level of a decade ago, when developers mostly focused on condos and houses. However, the most recent numbers show the city lags far behind its own targets for adding rental homes.
Having 947 rental homes built in a year is “laughable,” said David Goodman, a principal of Goodman Commercial, who has been marketing and selling apartment buildings since 1983. “It won’t move the needle at all. It will have zero affect on vacancy rates.”
The Goodman report draws its information from municipal governments, developers, and site visits. Postmedia asked the City of Vancouver for comment Monday on the Goodman report’, but received no response before deadline.
While Vancouver still had the highest number of rental completions in Metro this year, the report highlighted some smaller municipalities like Coquitlam and the City of North Vancouver, crediting them for policies that have boosted the number of rentals “in the pipeline.”
B.C.’s Housing Minister Selina Robinson recently touted the province’s housing progress, saying “we are well on our way of achieving our goal” of adding 114,000 affordable housing units over 10 years. Robinson said Sunday that 22,460 homes have been completed or were underway, more than 80 per cent of which either under construction or in the early development process.
Of the 3,532 publicly funded homes completed around B.C. since September 2017, 157 units are “market rental homes and owner purchase homes for people with middle incomes,” the ministry said in a statement Monday, 633 are non-profit housing for low- and middle-income households, 650 are student housing and 2,092 are supportive housing.
Vancouver’s most recent stats, released earlier this month, show the city had approved 649 purpose-built rental units by the end of September, less than a third of its annual target of 2,000 approvals.
However, it often takes several years for projects to get from approval to construction, Goodman said, estimating as many as 20 per cent of approved units might never be built.
Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart, who campaigned last year on a platform of boosting rental construction, has publicly stated his support for a new city program that would allow developers to build larger rental buildings in exchange for guaranteeing a number of permanently “affordable” units. The first projects through that program — representing 300 rental homes in four buildings — could come to public hearings before the end of this year.