Tomorrow will be the first council meeting with real business and a chance to see Dr. Penny Ballem in the city manager’s chair.

In the meantime, Vision councillors have a raft of motions on the new agenda to kick off their new era. Among them is Councillor Tim Stevenson’s motion to ask the provincial government to stiffen up the Residential Tenancy Act.

That has apartment owners and sellers in a tizzy, warning that council is “attempting to influence the provincial government.” Uh, boys, that’s what they do every day of the week. It’s their job.

Anyway, my guess is that most of the actions in Stevenson’s are unlikely to go anywhere with this government or even, in a parallel universe, an NDP government. A nice gesture, though.

There is a chance the provincial government might move to provide a few more protection for renters, given that their NPA friends probably told them that, in the recent civic election, the NPA couldn’t even get renters to talk to them. Maybe because they feel like they’ve been thrown out to the wolves the last few years, as they grappled with rising rents, economic evictions, demolitions, a zero vacancy rate, and everything else that strikes fear into the heart of renters. By the way, the latest CMHC report came out today and the vacancy rate is now at 0.3 per cent.

Anyway, this is what’s going around in the landlord-type circles.

From: Mark Goodman [mailto:mark@goodmanreport.com]
Sent: Friday, December 12, 2008 4:38 PM
To: [deleted]
Subject: The Goodman Report: Councillor’s plan to protect renters is a recipe for slums

Dear [deleted], While The Goodman Team was not planning to publish any further newsworthy items until the New Year, unfolding events dictate that we immediately address issues that we consider vital to our readership. There are growing concerns that Vancouver city council is attempting to influence the provincial government, as predicted by The Goodman Report a couple days ago, wherein we commented on “the spectre of increased government action concerning evictions and renovations.”

In today’s Vancouver Sun, in the front page article Councillor’s plan to protect renters is a recipe for slums, columnist Don Cayo writes, “Specifically, it calls on the province to amend the Residential Tenancy Act to require landlords to allow tenants evicted for the purpose of renovations to reoccupy their units once renovations are completed at the same rent as they were paying prior to the renovation.” David Goodman is on record in the forgoing article decrying the fact that Vancouver city council is advocating that landlords “subsidize tenants by making new investments that are guaranteed to show no return.”

Read: Councillor’s plan to protect renters is a recipe for slums >>

Further, Mary Francis Hill writes in The Vancouver Sun today on the same topic.

Read: Councillor Stevenson urges eviction protection for tenants >>

Included in Councillor Stevenson’s and Mayor Robertson’s motion to go towards Council next Tuesday, Dec 16th include:

• “First right of refusal” for rental tenants whereby landlords cannot raise rents even after substantial renovations
• Giving the City the authority to demand improvements on apartment buildings wherever and whenever they deem necessary
• Eviction notices to extend from 60 to 90 days
• Landlords to report to the Residential Tenancy Branch annually all turnovers, rent increases, and reasons for eviction.

To better appreciate the serious ramifications of Council’s initiative, please
download the MOTION ON NOTICE >>

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Be proactive and write your MLA, write the City of Vancouver, write the media and to the Mayor Gregor Robertson and Councillor Tim Stevenson.

Mayor and Council as a group: mayorandcouncil@vancouver.ca

Mayor Gregor Robertson
gregor.robertson@vancouver.ca
Phone: 604.873.7621
Fax: 604.873.7750

Councillor Tim Stevenson
clrstevenson@vancouver.ca
Phone: 604.873.7247
Fax: 604.873.7750

WRITE A LETTER TO THE EDITOR

British Columbia Newspapers

Vancouver Sun
sunletters@png.canwest.com

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Local Newspapers

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Westender
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---

CMHC Fall 2008 Greater Vancouver Rental Market Report To further assist our readership in setting their suite rentals at appropriate levels, we are delighted to share with you the just released CMHC Fall 2008 Greater Vancouver Rental Market Report. Vancouver Highlights: Strong Demand for Rental Housing Vancouver’s rental apartment vacancy rate moved lower in 2008, after two years of stable but already low vacancies Same sample rents increased at a slightly slower pace than last year The stock of purpose-built rental apartments declined in 2008, while the number of rental apartment condominium units increased The rental condominium vacancy rate rose slightly compared to 2007, but remained below one per cent Vacancy rates will stay below one per cent in 2009, while rents will continue to edge up in the 3-5 per cent range CMHC Fall 2008 Greater Vancouver Rental Market Report >>

Yours sincerely,

David & Mark Goodman

People have been hunting for decades for ways to make housing affordable to working-class and middle-income people in Vancouver. I have a story in BCBusiness here this month that takes a look at some of the solutions that are being tried locally and what might be in store for the city, if politicians and planners decide to get even more aggressive on this issue.

I also got this question from regular correspondent RossK: “Sure would be interested in reading your summing-up on the how and why it came to be that all those units are no longer being built for all those ‘desperate and very nice people’ just down the hill from you (and me) in SE False Creek.”

The simple answer that everyone in the apartment biz will tell you over and over is that the federal government got rid of certain tax provisions in 1975 that encouraged investors to put money into building apartments. Write-offs, tax breaks, whatever you want to call them. At any rate, those tax deals were what spurred a lot of the apartment-rental construction in the 1960s and 1970s. That’s what created all those three-storey wood-frame apartments you see all over this region.

No one griped about it too much at first, until the federal government also, 20 years later, decided not to put any more money into social housing. Ever since that, the stock of housing, either private or social, that rents at rates considered affordable to people who are not double-income professionals has been frozen. That would be okay if the population was also frozen, but of course, we keep adding more people every year to this country and, unfortunately, immigration officials don’t limit newcomers to those able to pay the rents in new condos. So you have more and more people of moderate incomes chasing the same number of available rentals. Result: Frenzy.

The city is getting some new rentals through investor condos — apparently about 40 per cent of all condos are rented out. But those tend to rent at prices on the high end of the scale. They’re also what’s considered unstable stock. An apartment-building owner isn’t gong to decide to take over all 30 suites in his building for his relatives or just leave them empty. But investors renting out condos may decide to take their units off the market as economic conditions or family situations change.

A lot of cities in B.C. are trying to figure out any possible way to get new rental stock onto the market. Vancouver is building its own apartments on top of the new community centre at 1Kingsway in Mount Pleasant. (City staff told me people started putting their names on the waiting lists for the building two years ago.) And housing-centre manager Cameron Gray said that the city is considering a new strategy in future megaprojects (Little Mountain, East Fraserlands and the like) of considering rental apartments to be part of the 20-per-cent affordable housing that developers are supposed to provide.

Which isn’t going to help those 99 people calling about my basement suite, who got to hear me telling them that it was already rented.

I posted my basement suite on craigslist Tuesday at about 2 p.m. It’s on okay suite, not the worst, but not the fanciest. I’m not one of those homeowners who’s raised the house to create higher ceilings. It’s about 540 square feet and the stove is at least 15years old. I charge $650, which I thought was reasonable and in the ballpark for the part of Mount Pleasant I live in.

The calls started coming in at about 2:01 p.m. After the first 10 calls in half an hour that effectively prevented me from getting any work done, I put a message on my machine telling people to send me emails instead. By 9 that night, I pulled the ad off craigslist because even the emails were overwhelming me. In all, I’d say I’ve had almost 100 calls (some from the newspaper ad that I couldn’t get pulled for a day). One young guy offered me $100 over whatever anyone else was willing to pay so that he and his girlfriend could get out of the 340-square-foot basement hole they were in on Fraser Street. One couple described themselves as professionals in their early 30s, who were dying to get out of their bachelor apartment on a busy intersection nearby. People who worked at galleries, in publishing, at talent agencies called. So did lots of graduate students. And then, slow off the mark, towards the tail end of the 100 calls, so did lots of men with the accents of various locales around the world. And this was all happening in the middle of the month, not at the beginning, when presumably most of the vacant apartments had already changed hands.

The whole experience was actually scary. I felt like the helicopter pilot in the evacuation of Saigon, someone whose whimsical choices about which of the supplicants I would call back would alter their lives. It made me feel like going out and buying an apartment building, just so I could rent it out to all the desperate and very nice people who called and emailed.

It was strange, too, because I had just finished doing research on affordable housing and noticed in all the statistics that I dredged up that, according to CMHC, about 25,000 apartments disappeared between 1996 and 2006 in the $500-$750 range. Most of them reappeared in the $750-$1,000 range, which would be okay if 25,000 households had also moved up in income in the same ten years but, of course, that didn’t happen. Instead, it felt like everyone in that group was all calling me to find a place to stay.

Here’s my latest reporting on this issue. I talked last month with the city’s longtime housing centre director, Cameron Gray, who has forgotten more about housing policy than most people in Vancouver will ever know. He’s been unable to verify the 18,000 number, but he does say, in spite of that, that there is a problem of empty housing units in the city. No one ones exactly how many there are. The last census in 2006 showed there were 20,641 empty houses, condos, duplexes and whatever in Vancouver proper. Approximately 4-5,000 of them are downtown. (NOT all 18,000.) No one knows whether those are second homes, investor properties kept empty or what. But, says Gray, they’re a worry.

“I still think we have to get a handle on this issue,” says Gray. “Four or five thousand units downtown is not insignificant. I think there is a city issue around vacant buildings.”

Gray didn’t talk about a speculator tax, as Vision Vancouver mayoral hopeful Gregor Robertson has. But he did suggest incentive programs, i.e. tax incentives to encourage investors to rent out properties they own, would be a good idea. Gray also supported the idea, currently being pushed by Victoria city council and others, that strata-owned buildings no longer be allowed to prohibit rentals. (Ontario already has a law like this.) People here often forget that the reason some of the new condos in the city are dark at night is not because evil investors are keeping them empty but because the rules of the building don’t allow rentals. I know that when I had to figure out what to do with my mother’s condo last year when she moved to a seniors’ home, I discovered the strata had bylaws that prohibited rentals for everyone in the building except the first set of owners who had moved in before the rental-ban rule was passed.

Some would argue that’s a good rule, since it encourages people to sell their units to others who will actually live in them. But it does mean that those condo units can never enter the rental pool, which EVERYONE these days is saying has a desperate shortage of stock.

By the way, Robertson has backed away in recent weeks from pushing the speculator tax. In one of my recent chats with him (as he, like his competitor Peter Ladner, logs employment-standards-violating hours meeting with the city’s Very Important People and every branch of every ethnic community), Robertson said he’s leaning more towards incentives than punitive measures as he looks for ways to promote better use of existing rental apartments and the creation of more.

“The speculator tax stirred up lots of debate,” he acknowledged. (Translation: He got pooped on heavily by the opposition and business community.) “It may not be right for Vancouver, even though it’s working in other cities. ” His focus now is on working on projects and collaborations that everyone supports. We’ll see how this unrolls.