(To be updated) Late on Friday afternoon last week, a Special Council meeting agenda and report was posted on the City of Vancouver website, for Council at 3 pm on Tuesday, May 14, 2024.
On May 14, 2024, at 3pm, a staff report goes to a Special Council meeting. This appears to be the first major report under Vancouver’s new chief planner, Josh White (officially, the General Manager of Planning, Urban Design & Sustainability), who started on May 1.
Report: Provincial Housing Targets Order – 6 Month Interim Report: October 1, 2023 – March 31, 2024
Meeting link: https://council.vancouver.ca/20240514spec/spec20240514ag.htm
Report Link (PDF, 39 pages): https://council.vancouver.ca/20240514spec/documents/spec1.pdf
Several cities are scrambling to comply with provincial legislation imposed by the BC NDP, based on province-wide housing legislation that was prepared secretly, with selected municipalities included in “consultation” but forced to sign non-disclosure agreements, and under the veil of many months intensive lobbying by UDI/industry and associated activists. Even the supposed “empirical basis” for the naughty list was entirely redacted in an FOI response.
This report going to Council May 14 was foretold by then acting chief planner Doug Smith in his report to Council on April 23 in “Response to New Provincial Legislation: Bills 44, 46 and 47” (https://council.vancouver.ca/20240423/regu20240423ag.htm).
Some takeaways from the report
1) The volume of projects currently in the development pipeline (31,300 units) is more than enough to meet the Provincial 5 year housing targets (28,900).
2) Actual construction of housing has slowed due to the capacity of the construction industry – high financing costs, rising construction costs, and the availability of labour.
3) The City has woefully failed to meet provincial housing affordability targets (35% below market housing) for the first 6 months since October 2023 – achieving only 1% below market affordable housing.
4) The City will use a variety of financial enabling tools to “leverage affordable housing” with senior governments, private and non-profit housing providers to meet provincial affordable housing targets, claiming that only with significant funding by senior governments can affordability targets be met. The report does not mention the leveraging of the city’s “inclusionary housing” tool to achieve more affordability with the private sector. A Refresh Report on Affordability is coming before Council in June 2024.
5) The report claims that 426 units have been demolished in the first 6 months without any reference to demolitions of existing affordable rental stock.
The report also comments on the “Broadway Plan: Adopted in June 2022, the 30-year Plan enables more housing opportunities around future SkyTrain stations, and incentivizes delivery of market and non-profit rental housing. There are currently 39 rezoning applications under review, two already approved and one building currently under construction, with a total potential for over 8,400 units.” (CityHallWatch is actually tracking around 100 projects that appear to be in the works.)
Here are some more in-depth observations and comments about the report.
- The City is surpassing the provincial targets on housing approvals. There already is enough development in the pipeline to meet the general provincial targets. However, completions will depend on the economy in general.
- Currently there are almost no new large strata multifamily projects going ahead, because presales are dead, so developers cannot get financing for them. Even strata projects that were approved long ago and coming to completion are having a hard time with presales not closing. Most strata projects going ahead are smaller projects that don’t require presales.
- Most large housing projects now are rentals, but it is not clear if current subsidies for rental housing are deep enough even for them to make the numbers work anymore.
- Very few “affordable” below market units are being completed and this is directly related to the lack of provincial and federal subsidies.
- Another crucial and underlying factor, perhaps the most important one, is that land values have become so expensive after years of low interest rates, global financial flows, speculation, and money laundering. We recommend people refer to the work of David Ley (recent book Housing Booms in Gateway Cities (2023, 315 pages), and Patrick Condon, Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality, and Urban Crisis, https://www.ubcpress.ca/broken-city to be published this month). See also their statements in recent meetings. For example, “Does local democracy hinder socially sustainable cities? Who/what is to blame?” and “Rethinking the Housing Crisis: Beyond the Supply-Demand Dogma.”
- As a result of the above, the provincially-imposed “needs” assessments will not be met in Vancouver due to lack of affordability. The City will never be able to do this on its own.
- It is likely that the development industry is currently demolishing more affordable rental units than it is building.
Some further commentary….
We need to keep in context that the housing targets imposed top-down by the BC NDP/Provincial Government are being mostly development industry driven. See our post “How an industry-spawned Vancouver-centric ‘YIMBY’ narrative has severely twisted B.C. NDP housing ideology and massive legislation changes.”
This is also political, as the Province is trying to blame municipalities and download responsibility for producing affordable housing onto municipalities. Affordable housing is something the provincial and federal governments need to fund.
While the City of Vancouver under mayor Ken Sim and the ABC majority is entire complicit with the provincial housing bills and orders, it is clear that the City is concerned that the metrics for net new units are based on completions rather than approvals.
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