Nearly every Vancouver mayoral candidate has made fixing Vancouver’s housing affordability crisis part of their platform for the upcoming October 20 election.
But none of them seem to agree on how to tackle the problem or even where it’s coming from.
All agree that the majority of rental housing in the city is unaffordable for low-income workers and students. Their solutions to that range from building more “purpose-built” affordable housing to tackling rising rents through rent freezes and taxes and everything in between.
Priced out
Rent isn’t what it used to be.
Some factors contributing to the crisis cited by the candidates include soaring rent prices that leave many Vancouverites — especially students — unable to afford housing.
Many candidates cite an abundance of luxury condos and lack of “purpose-built rentals,” or housing geared towards low to middle income workers. An extremely low vacancy rate at less than one per cent is also contributing to high prices.
Proposed solutions include prioritizing purpose-built rentals over luxury condos. YES! Vancouver candidate and incumbent city councillor Hector Bremner has argued that purpose-built rentals are more stable than most rental spaces in Vancouver.
Due to the single-family detached home style of many neighbourhoods, most rentals are “secondary units” to a home like basement suites or laneway houses rented out by owners. He said that means tenants often get evicted during renovations or demolitions.
Independent candidate Kennedy Stewart and Jean Swanson of the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) include promoting social housing run by non-profits as part of their platforms. Kennedy's social housing platform would be geared towards households making less than $80,000 a year, which could factor in student renters.
Swanson plans to build self-regulating social housing for low-income and middle-income households, which would be run by the tenants themselves.
Swanson’s campaign also proposes a mansion tax as well as a rent freeze, which would mandate no rent increases for the next four years. The BC Government moved to decrease the allowable rent increase from 4.5 per cent in 2018 to 2.5 per cent in 2019 — but if elected, Swanson said she aims to bring it all the way down to zero, though she'll have 9 other city councillors to convince.
Swanson says that students often do not stay the full year lease and under the current system landlords can raise the rent substantially between tenants. Accordingly, COPE has also proposed tying rent control to the unit rather than the tenancy to avoid these high rent hikes.
“Housing is treated as a market commodity, rather than a human right,” Swanson said.
No vacancy
The vacancy rate in Vancouver right now is less than one per cent and all candidates have planned various projects to slowly densify the city.
Bremner and independent candidate Shauna Sylvester both highlighted plans to develop and “slowly densify” land near UBC in West Point Grey with more student-centric housing.
“We need to bring back students to West Point Grey,” said Sylvester.
“There used to be a lot of students there, but because so many units have gone to Airbnb, or Expedia or Booking.ca they’re not renting to students. So we need to bring [housing] back where it makes sense.”
Bremner also outlined his plan to develop a variety of new homes from social housing to townhomes and duplexes. YES! Vancouver’s market correction plan proposes building between 50,000 and 70,000 purpose-built rentals over the next three years, whereas Stewart’s plan calls for 85,000 rental homes to be built over the next ten years.
Promoting co-operative housing is also an idea raised by candidates Sylvester, Swanson, Stewart and Non-Partisan Association candidate Ken Sim. Currently, a large portion of Vancouver co-ops are leased on city land and many of those leases are up for renewal this year. Sylvester says one of her priorities is to ensure the city moves to renew the leases so these forms of housing can continue to operate.
Another grievance expressed by candidates is the slow-permit process which can stall social housing and purpose-built rental developments.
“[Vancouver has] the longest permit wait time in North America,” Bremner said, “and it takes us five to seven years to get a multi-residential building built.”
Sim also outlined this issue in a video posted on his campaign website, saying that he would “break the permitting logjam.” At the same time, both he and ProVancouver candidate David Chen also have plans to make sure the city works closely with developers to ensure new developments are meeting the needs of the city.
Others, however, have expressed concerns over plans to develop and densify the city more. Coalition Vancouver candidate Wai Young has a platform that advocates for the preservation of heritage homes and “the character” of Vancouver neighbourhoods, while still constructing more purpose-built rentals.
On this topic, Swanson noted that densifying can lead to gentrification and pushing out lower-income residents from neighbourhoods.
“[Renters] have to find someplace to go, which in Vancouver is more and more often the street,” she said.
According to Swanson, the most important thing in regards to housing is to “open up the conversation.”
“If you want to say that housing is a human right, we have to get it out of the market system too and that's what we're trying to do with our policies,” she said.
Bremner also noted, “We need to really look at this election from really choosing more of the same, or whether or not we're going to get outside the political conversation around housing and recognize that housing is not political.”