03) VANCOUVER'S HOUSING TASK FORCE DRAWS CRITICISM
By Kimball Cariou
Bike lanes, chicken coops and civil liberties may spark hot debates in Vancouver, but local controversies often revolve around housing. That's not surprising, since single detached home prices average about a million dollars here, and one‑bedroom condos cost over half a million. Over 50% of Vancouverites under 34 years old spend more than half their income on housing. Renters pay $1500 or more for a two‑bedroom suite. Despite some progress, homelessness remains a major problem. Many working people move to the suburbs, accepting the commute to get lower housing costs.
Against this background, Vancouver's task force on housing affordability was eagerly anticipated. Released in late September, the task force's recommendations met a skeptical reaction, not just from groups representing renters and low‑income people, but even among sectors which tended to back the governing Vision party in the past three civic elections.
Some pundits attribute this response to "communications" errors. Civic affairs blogger Frances Bula wrote, "the 15‑point priority action plan in Appendix A was just too big a wad of policy to swallow for many people... There were too many nuances and technical terms for reporters, even some hard‑working ones, to get everything that was in there."
There's an element of truth to this analysis. Looking for easy targets, the media jumped on the task force's so‑called "thin streets" proposal, essentially a plan to encourage new housing developments beside existing buildings along certain streets. This unpopular idea was quickly re‑branded an "option" for neighbourhoods to consider ‑ basically a way to drop the idea, without admitting that the concept was a fiasco.
But while the complexity and bulk of the report meant some misunderstandings, its general direction confirms the orientation of Mayor Robertson's Vision majority. On the one hand, they argue that building more housing will reduce prices for middle and low‑income people. But to make this happen, they rely on private developers who have a huge stake in driving up prices. Compounding the problem, investment in Vancouver real estate has become international in scope.
Having been elected in 2008 and 2011 largely on promises to make Vancouver more liveable and affordable, Robertson does hope to deliver.
But Vision may be trapped in a bind which he helped to create. The Mayor and his Vision councillors argue that they have a responsibility to ensure that more housing is built. This commitment, they say, sets them apart from neighbouring Burnaby, also governed by a centrist party linked to the NDP. The Burnaby council's view is that housing is a provincial and federal responsibility which should not be downloaded to municipalities.
Grassroots social housing advocates have tried for years to make the demand for a National Housing Strategy a priority issue. One campaign has been to earmark 1% of total federal spending for social and low‑income housing. Anti‑war groups point out that this could easily be achieved through a reduction in Canada's growing military spending.
But for tactical reasons, Vision has done relatively little to press Victoria and Ottawa for such commitments, even though the federal government boosted homelessness by eliminating funding for social housing during the 1980s and '90s.
Vancouver faces sky‑high prices for the relatively few spaces available to build on, and few political tools except incentives and zoning changes. So the Vision majority often gives quick approval for new high‑rises, despite significant neighbourhood criticism. Vision is increasingly regarded as a developer‑friendly party, especially since some of the same developers make big campaign donations.
Nothing in the Task Force changes this overall picture. One positive recommendation is to establish a Vancouver Housing Authority, a proposal first raised by the Coalition of Progressive Electors. It's also true that the Task Force calls for six‑story apartments on major streets, or stacked townhouses and rowhouses, not the high‑rises favoured by giant developers like Westbank, PCI, or Wall Developments.
But will these smaller‑scale projects lower housing costs? There are few teeth in the well‑intentioned hopes to encourage developers to make some percentage of new units available at vaguely‑defined affordable rates. Builders large and small want to make maximum profits; prices may fall only when the Vancouver bubble bursts, after twenty years of feverish speculation.
Unfortunately, the debate on the Task Force has so far been limited mainly to criticisms of Vision's pro‑market strategy.
One important response came from COPE, which lost its two city council members in a major electoral setback in 2011. COPE's Housing Affordability Committee has issued a 12‑page report, which warns that "the refusal of City Hall to build affordable housing capable of competing with and under‑cutting the private sector has left Vancouverites to rely on the private market alone. The City's dependence on private condominiums as the dominant form of housing tenure has fuelled unaffordability."
The COPE report criticizes the "incentivization of private construction" through tax exemptions and subsidies, the city's inadequate consultation process, a failure to acknowledge the impact of gentrification, and the lack of any meaningful definition of "affordability."
There is much to commend in the COPE report, which calls for an end to "renovictions", alternative forms of housing tenure, and other urgent reforms.
But the report also has some puzzling weaknesses. One is the implicit agreement with Vision that the housing crisis can mainly be resolved at the local level. In fact, there is only one reference to the responsibilities of provincial and federal governments, in the final sentence of the document.
Without major funding commitments from higher levels of government, how will social, low‑income, non‑market and co‑op housing be built? Here the report has little to say. For many years, COPE has urged that the city's Property Endowment Fund be tapped for urgent priorities such as low‑income housing. Yet the report does not mention this important potential revenue source. Nor does it include COPE's call for reversing the property tax shift which has benefited the city's business sector.
Instead, the report argues that building non‑market housing for the homeless will create additional funding for affordable housing "in a positive feed‑back loop, with money drawn away from currently‑strained City resources." In other words, money spent on emergency health and policing services for homeless persons could be saved simply by providing them with a place to live. This is quite true, but the funds to build such housing must be raised and then spent before the social savings start rolling in.
Similarly, the report addresses the problem of high land costs by proposing to "take a portion of land and housing out of the private marketplace." But how? It would take many billions of dollars for the city to buy enough private land, and municipal nationalization of such property would be immediately overturned by the capitalist state and courts.
Without presenting a coherent political approach to achieve these goals ‑ such as a wider struggle for a comprehensive national housing strategy ‑ the COPE report sounds more like a wish list than a serious plan to create affordable housing. Perhaps the authors could not resist the temptation to blame Vision and Mayor Robertson for the housing crisis. But by presenting this issue as mainly a municipal problem, the report lets the provincial and federal governments off the hook, and that's a strange shortcoming.
To read the COPE report, visit http://cope.bc.ca.
(The above article is from the November 1-15, 2012, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)