New Citywide Plan Won’t Bring Cheaper Housing, Café Told

About 50 people attended a March 13 Dunbar Neighbourhood Cafe on the Official Development Plan at the Dunbar Community Centre.

By Carol Volkart

Will Vancouver’s new citywide plan lead to more affordable housing? That was the key question that emerged at a Dunbar Neighbourhood Café meeting on the Official Development Plan two days after it got unanimous approval from City Council.

Café speakers Elizabeth Murphy, a private sector project manager, and Patrick Condon, UBC professor emeritus in the school of landscape and architecture, said that while the plan paves the way for massive increases in density, affordability is an unlikely outcome.

That’s because it relies on the simple but mistaken premise that more supply leads to affordability, said Condon, who has studied and written about the issue extensively.

He demonstrated his point by starting his talk with a request that audience members raise their hands “if you think the reason housing in this city is unaffordable because we’re not building enough.” No hands went up. When he asked, “Hold up your hand if you disagree with that,” the audience was a sea of waving hands.

“Well, you’re right,” he said. “But everybody at City Hall feels very differently.”

He said that at the March 10-11 public hearing on the plan, when General Manager of Planning Josh White and other city officials were asked why housing is so expensive, “their answer was that we’re not building enough. And this plan allows us to build enough. . . .Unfortunately everybody I listened to that came out of the planning department and every city councillor was sitting there saying, ‘Well, you’ve got to put more supply in this city because if you don’t, the prices will continue to go up.”

That’s contrary to what his studies have shown.

In fact, he said, putting up startling graphs to illustrate his point, Vancouver has built more housing since the 1960s than any other centre city in North America. But instead of that leading to affordability, Vancouver is the least affordable in North America when housing is measured against average household income.

Graph showing amount of housing that’s been built in Vancouver compared to other cities since 1960.

And now, he said, the “hair-on-fire panic” about affordable housing is sweeping away the neighbourhoods, the consultation, and the excellence in urban design that drew him to Vancouver from the U.S. many years ago. “I came here because I wanted to be part of it and I was part of it, but unfortunately over the last 15 years I have become extremely disappointed,” said Condon, who had been head city planner in Westfield, Massachusetts.

“It’s ironic and tragic that in these circumstances, where we have demonstrated decisively that we can  grow our city and grow it well and make it better over time, to be sort of blamed for not putting up enough housing and that our public officials and our elected and appointed officials are going along with this fantasy.”

Which led an audience member to ask why, when Condon can explain the problem so clearly to the Café, “is it impossible to get the message through to city councillors?”

Condon, who sometimes affects a good ole boy persona, responded: “I don’t know, I wake up every day saying, ‘How can I be so stupid?’” Then, more seriously, he said an “overwhelming” global narrative has emerged that blames municipal zoning restrictions for the lack of affordable housing.

“There is a narrative and it’s very strong and it’s not just here in Vancouver, it’s global. Today the Senate of the United States passed a bill that says exactly what we’re talking about here today. It’s a nationwide bill that encourages states and municipalities to get rid of all zoning ordinances. Why? Because they blame community control over what a city looks like for the housing cost.

‘It’s a short answer to your question, but it’s a very overwhelming narrative and there’s lot of money on the table. There’s a lot of people with a lot of money on the table that are interested in pursuing that narrative.”

When an audience member said there’s plenty of housing for the wealthy, but the lack is for people with limited incomes, Condon said: “Extremely good point. Their argument is that if you just build enough, prices will drop to the point where it will be affordable.”

So how can we get more affordable housing? When the question came up, Condon pointed to his latest book, Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality and Urban Crisis, adding that the answer is a large inventory of non-market housing. “If we’re going to build housing at all, it has to be a very, very significant proportion of that.”

He said that back in 2018, when his plans to run for mayor were interrupted by a stroke, “I was saying 50 percent of all new housing should be non-market housing that is permanently affordable to people making average wages. We can do that. False Creek South did that, Champlain Heights did that. It ended up getting paid for by the people who rented those units so it didn’t cost the taxpayer any money.”

Another audience member wanted a definition of affordability, noting that “everybody has heard the term affordable housing a million times,” but mostly don’t know what that means. Condon said the benchmark for affordability is 30 percent of the median household income for the region. The median income in Vancouver is about $80,000, “so you do the math from that.”

As for the future, both Condon and audience members looked to the past.

Condon said the fact that Vancouver has done so well in supplying housing and imaginatively growing the city in the past and been rewarded with such dismal results may actually have intriguing consequences. Vancouver could potentially “be a paragon of something that changes this narrative,” he said.

“So that’s why I’m personally interested in identifying this information which I think is quite dramatic as potentially a lever that we collectively could use to argue against this locally, but would have national and perhaps international implications.”

When an audience member mentioned that TEAM for a Livable Vancouver is the only civic party opposing the Official Development Plan, Condon recalled how the first version of TEAM, The Electors’ Action Movement (T.E.A.M.) of the 1970s, also went against the prevailing narrative of the time.

“One of the interesting things about the history of Vancouver is T.E.A.M.,” which successfully battled a plan to build a freeway through downtown, he said.  Vancouver ended up being the only centre city of any significant size that didn’t have such a freeway, he said, which at the time was “extraordinary.”

“So there was a political upwelling during the ‘70s that was very, very important. Perhaps we’re on the cusp of a similar political upwelling.”

To which an audience member said that with planners supporting the Official Development Plan and councillors from all the parties on City Council voting in favour of it, there is an opportunity now to break that consensus and change the channel.

That wasn’t the only reference to the potential for change in the near future. “There’s an election this fall, right?” an audience member asked during Murphy’s earlier presentation on key points of the plan.

“If we elect a mayor and council who oppose it, could it be scrapped?” the audience member asked.

“It could be repealed,” said Murphy, formerly with the city of Vancouver’s housing and properties department, BC Housing and BC Buildings Corp.

“If you had a council that had a backbone, they could oppose a lot of what is coming from the province,” she said, referring to provincial housing bills requiring Vancouver to adopt an Official Development Plan and some of its components. “You could do a fraction of what they propose in this ODP and it would still be compliant with the B.C. zoning bills.”

She said Vancouver can’t blame the province for the Official Development Plan because it’s based on the Vancouver Plan, which was approved in 2022 before the provincial bills were passed. “Most of this was already in the works; the zoning bills just made it worse.”

Murphy and Condon were among 30 urban designers, architects, and academics who wrote a letter to City Council urging the “flawed” Official Development Plan be withdrawn. The letter said the plan will inflate land values and displace thousands of residents  “without addressing the fundamental lack of affordable housing. This is doing more harm than good for the public interest.”