The Tyee
Vancouver’s Up-zoning Push Lacks One Guarantee. Affordability
The bylaw is sold as a way to create new rentals. Council should insist what’s built reflects real incomes.
Patrick Condon,
2 Nov 2021
Excerpts:
Patrick Condon is the James Taylor chair in Landscape and Livable Environments at the University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and the founding chair of the UBC urban design program.
A proposal to replan the far reaches of the city for rental housing finally lands on council floor for public hearing today, Nov. 2. It has a seemingly benign title: A Bylaw to amend Zoning and Development Bylaw No. 3575 Regarding Residential Rental Tenure in C-2 Districts and New Residential Rental District Schedules.
Proponents of the planned change say it will ease the affordability crisis in the city, providing enhanced rental options across the city. The presumption is that by increasing rental stock all along [major streets] rents will drop to affordable rates. But will they?
The bylaw council is considering changing zoning rules to allow taller, denser, new rental developments. But there’s no requirement for the developments to be in line with the incomes of people who are being priced out of Vancouver.
Based on recent land sale activity there is reason to be skeptical. Two recent examples should give us pause. The first land offering was put forth as an opportunity for land assembly at Dunbar Street and West King Edward Avenue — the joining of adjacent parcels often is a requirement before larger projects can be built. The sale saw a doubling of land price over assessed value from around $2.5 million per plot to about $5 million per plot.
Key to providing affordable market housing rents is finding cheap land. We see that the city’s attempt to promote affordable market rental is somehow producing a counterproductive effect on land prices, doubling them in anticipation of medium density market rental. At these land prices rental rates will need to be set at nearly double the rate that is affordable to the median incomes of the city’s current renters.
The benefit of the zone change for purpose-built rental went not to future moderate-income city wage earners, but to land speculators, who built no building but rather secured a zone change on the promise of affordability that simple economics can’t support. As you can see, land cost is the real problem here.
As a result, I have, with some reluctance, concluded that we should not simply rezone for affordability but insist on it. If the goal is to house wage earners of average means, our young service workers and their families — people necessary to the civic and economic functions of the city — we must demand affordability as a condition of rezoning. In so doing we’ll be joining other municipalities doing just that. One is Cambridge, Massachusetts. Another is Berkeley, California.
Comment:
As we commented previously, up-zoning alone is not going to solve the housing crisis. There is a better solution. The most simple and effective way to drive down the cost of up-zoned land is to first introduce a general land value tax as an alternative to the ad valorem equal rate property tax. Over time, LVT exerts a downward pressure on the selling price of a land parcel, thereby lowering the effective cost of development. If housing is a right, then we have to retreat from the notion that home ownership is a major source of wealth-building.
