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Challenge to creating low-cost housing: who benefits?

December 7th, 2011 · 99 Comments

One of the priorities that Mayor Gregor Robertson set out for this term is to explore new ways to create affordable housing in Vancouver.

That will be one of this administration’s toughest challenges. The other goals he has — promoting a Vancouver economy, pushing to become “the greenest city,” and more — are relatively easy in comparison.

But trying to create affordable housing in a city this size requires huge dollars or sweeping changes in land-use policy in order to do more than a few token units. And whenever cities try to do this, they also raise the question of who benefits. When developers get incentives to build lower-cost housing, do they benefit unduly? And who gets to live in the new lower-cost units? Does that small group get a benefit that others resent?

Those are the real questions that the mayor’s blue-ribbon task force on affordable housing has to answer. Last time, as the Vision council rushed in to creating its Short Term Incentives for Rental program, it didn’t.

The council pulled together a similar group of developers, housing advocates, architects, planners and more to come up with that plan. It swept aside the concerns of advocates like Brent Granby that the STIR program didn’t really provide low-cost rental, only market rental, and that would make people doubt it. As it turned out, he was very right, at least when it came to the West End.

Other smaller towns around North America have successfully created local worker housing — typically in small resort towns like Whistler or Aspen where there’s an easily understood problem of needing to provide affordable housing for the people who work in the resorts. The city’s two major universities have done something similar on their campuses in order to be able to attract and retain faculty.

But those small towns and universities operate in a simpler world.

Creating the kinds of affordable housing the Simon Fraser University or Whistler have is harder is a big, complex city: more dollars required, more possibilities for public misunderstanding, harder to draw the line around who the housing should be for.

So this time, besides just the mechanisms for creating low-cost housing, the panel has to address some much more basic questions if a new program is going to be accepted.

Among them:

1. How can you demonstrate to the public exactly what incentives developers get, in dollar terms, and what the public gets back for that? If there isn’t some extremely transparent format for doing this, there will be another WEN-style backlash where those who don’t understand the housing market will spread the word that developers are getting freebies.

As tedious as it is, the public needs to have the chance to go through the numbers and to have conversations with planners and politicians, in advance of any policy, to talk about the pros and cons.

As we saw in the past three years, most of the public doesn’t get how the rental market works, why it’s important to have buildings with permanent rentals in them (as opposed to a shifting stock of condo units that investors may or may not rent out), and why builders have not been building purpose-built rentals.

2. How can you demonstrate to the public that, if the city comes up with some way of producing lower-cost housing, it is allocated fairly?

Should “key workers” — police, firefighters, teachers, health workers — get first access, the way London does it? Should it be on an income basis? What happens when a family’s income changes? How do you keep speculators out?

And how does the city ensure that the stock of lower-cost housing it creates doesn’t just disappear after the first generation buys in? At SFU, buyers get to buy housing in the Verdant project at 20 per cent below market. But then they have to sell to the next buyer at 20 per cent below market, so that the university can keep those units in a special pool forever. Is it possible for the city to set up something similar?

All those questions, and more, are the real dilemma.

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