Dunbar Neighbourhood Cafe organizer Carmen Smith introduces speaker Brian Palmquist at a Nov. 13 session on the new kinds of housing being built in Dunbar.
By Carol Volkart
The ballooning of houses and shrinking of gardens that’s now transforming Dunbar is based on the faulty premise that increased supply means increased affordability, says local architect and urban designer Brian Palmquist.
“The reason this is happening is simply money, it’s nothing to do with affordability,” Palmquist told a meeting about the new kinds of housing going up in once-single-family residential areas like Dunbar under new rules to encourage density.
About 50 people from Dunbar, Southlands, Mackenzie Heights, Kerrisdale, Point Grey, Kitsilano and Marpole attended the Neighbourhood Café session held at the Dunbar Community Centre on Nov. 13.
Palmquist said the supply-means-affordability narrative has been adopted by all three levels of government – municipal, provincial and federal – and is repeated unquestioningly by a media heavily dependent on the real-estate industry.
But that theory has never been proven in any scientific study in the Anglosphere, including Canada, the U.S., Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand, he said.
“There has not been one peer-reviewed scientific or economic study in any of those countries that demonstrates that building more housing makes it affordable. All that we’re doing is building more unaffordable housing.”
Nor does the “trickle-down” theory, beloved of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, actually work. The idea that the wealthiest will step up to the most luxurious housing when it’s built, leaving their former homes to trickle down to the next most-wealthy, and eventually ease the cost of housing at the lowest level simply “doesn’t happen,” Palmquist said.
Asked by an audience member why the laws of supply and demand don’t apply to housing, Palmquist said: “Because homes are not televisions.
“Homes are dirt-based products. There’s a limited supply of dirt. So if you say to everyone who owns dirt that you can now build three times as much as you could last week, then the value of the dirt goes up.
“If it’s a television, if there’s a glut of TVs on the market, you might get a price reduction. Or on any consumer good. But as soon as you tie that consumer good to the ground, it’s a completely different thing.”
While the city and provincial governments have justified the major changes to housing rules on the grounds that it will lead to affordability, what it’s really doing is generating profits, said Palmquist. And that applies whether they’re multiplexes in Dunbar or high-rises in the Broadway area.
Now that four to six units (eight if they’re rental) are allowed on every lot in what once were single-family zones, there’s money to be made.
Buy a ramshackle old house on a 33-foot lot for $2 million and build a duplex, with each side selling for $2 million. Or pay $3.5 million for a 50-foot lot on the west side and build six units that sell for $2 million or more apiece, “and it’s a pretty good profit.”
Palmquist said this is why the new buildings “are being built to the absolute maximum in every direction” and look so different from what existed before. Front yards have been cut by at least 10 feet, rear yards have been halved, and the required separation between front-yard and rear-yard duplexes has been reduced.
These Collingwood Street homes are a good illustration of the difference between the old and new zoning, which allows much bigger buildings and smaller front-yard setbacks.
Also on Collingwood Street, an example of maximum use of a lot where once only a single-family home could have been built.
Builders have also “blown air” into storeys, up from the old standard of nine feet to 10 or 11 or even higher. Which is why a 20-storey apartment building these days can look like 26. And why the giant new house just built next to Palmquist’s is a full storey higher than his, even though both are nominally two and a half storeys.
“So what we’re seeing increasingly is the neighbour has filled up the back yard with building which may be all of four storeys. So huge overlook, huge shadowing. And not much you can do about it at the moment.”
Huge profits are also being made in the massive Broadway Plan area, where 150 high-rises have been proposed so far. A common scenario is that developers might pay $6 million for several building lots, spend another $1 million for rezoning – with no design required or any intention of building – and flip it. If they can get $12 million, they’ve made $5 million for very little effort. “That’s what’s going on all over the city,” Palmquist said, noting that less than one-fifth of the rezonings in the Broadway Plan have gone to the development permit stage, and only a handful have proceeded. “It’s a shell game.”
Palmquist said if people don’t like the type of buildings going up in Dunbar, they should blame the city, not developers, “because they do what they’re permitted to do.”
No developers will forgo the chance to build to the maximum, “and out of the goodness of their hearts, say ‘Okay, we’re just going to do this [smaller] because it’s nicer for the neighbourhood.’ They’re going to build the maximum that the planning and building departments will let them build. And I don’t blame them for that. I blame the city for permitting that to be done.”
At the same time, the city is not stepping up to ensure that developers are abiding by the rules, Palmquist said, drawing on his own experience and remarks from the audience. When the new house next door was being built an inch too close to his own, he complained to the building inspector, who ignored him. So he went to the chief building official, who said, “Well, the drawings show that it’s okay.” Palmquist responded that the actual building wasn’t following the drawings. He was ignored, and nobody ever came out to check.
“So if you get approval to build something, it’s well known, or it appears to be well known amongst the building community that you can ignore many aspects of the permitted construction with impunity. The city doesn’t check.”
Palmquist noted the new owners were required to save a tree in the front yard, which after four years of neglect is a dead stick. “None of the landscaping that was approved got planted, and the area of hard surfaces has expanded. And nobody from the city is checking. So that’s a fundamental issue.”
He finds it ironic that in 1986, he had a fundamentally different experience with the city. In those days, it took citizens’ complaints seriously, and when a number of people were complaining about monster houses, Palmquist was hired to look into the problem. “We did something that hasn’t happened in the city for at least a decade,” he said. “We actually went out and talked to people.” The result: “We made some tweakings in the zoning that were approved by the city and made the whole monster house thing go away.”
It’s not just developers who are profiting from the new building boom, Palmquist said – the city is as well. On top of the $400-$500-per-square-foot cost of wood-frame construction in Vancouver is a city development fee of more than $100,000 per unit. “So the tradeoff for letting you push everything to the max is you’re giving the city more money.”
Those fees are passed straight along to the eventual buyers or renters, Palmquist said, adding that when the city talks affordability, it’s somehow assuming that developers will build cheaper or sell cheaper than the market will bear. “So it’s a bit of a fool’s game.”
Development fees haven’t always been a profit centre for the city, Palmquist said. Before Vision Vancouver took over in 2009, the building and planning department charged only enough fees to cover staff costs and break even, “which worked okay.”
But the new administration made them part of the city’s operational budget, increased fees dramatically, built up a huge bureaucracy to manage them, “and that’s what we’re paying for now.”
With all the money sloshing into its coffers, the city should be planning plenty of amenities to provide for the needs of a higher population, right?
But when one resident asked where the kids would go to school if a 20-storey tower was built on Dunbar, Palmquist told her there are no plans for new schools. In fact, he said, the school board seems totally out of step with the city’s densification moves and is actually planning to sell off school properties.
Nor do the massive new Broadway Plan, Cambie Corridor and Heather Lands developments include the parks, schools, community centres and other amenities the thousands of new residents will need, he said. “All of those human infrastructure bits are not being included.”
“If Dunbar doubles in size in the next 15 to 20 years, if this place [the Community Centre] hasn’t fallen down for lack of maintenance, it will be no bigger.”
There are ways of building affordable housing, said Palmquist, who spent much of his career doing just that. An early example was Vancouver’s False Creek South, where the city leased land to co-ops and rental and strata groups to build mixed-income level housing. “You don’t have to charge the earth for the earth, if you choose to do that.”
Palmquist said that today, the city, province, and Canadian governments all own land in Vancouver that could be leased to co-ops and low-cost housing groups to produce affordable housing. “But no level of government wants to give up that revenue.”
At Courtenay and 15th Avenue, another example of how lots are being filled by housing. Residents at the Neighbourhood Cafe session expressed concern about how little land is left for plants and trees.
This back view of the Courtenay and 15th property shows how the new buildings overlook the house and yard next door.