Another wave washes in from the tsunami of Vancouver profiles – this one in The Walrus by Gary Stephen Ross. It’s a take-off of a take-off, playing with parody, with some great ideas (and great photos by Grant Harder).
Here’s one:
Indeed, if the measure of an idea is how widely it’s disseminated and how passionately it’s embraced, this city is anything but the kayaking, navel-gazing, pot-smoking Lotus Land of
popular imagination. It’s a hotbed of entrepreneurship and creativity. “Doesn’t anybody here work?” a visitor joked one October afternoon as we walked past a surprisingly active Kits Beach.
Yes, people do work, all the time — just not in head offices, since we have very few. They launch start-ups, they freelance, they find Wi-Fi spots, they unfurl blueprints at Starbucks. They invent, imagine, concoct.
Sure, we have Jean and Alastair Carruthers to thank for Botox, as apt a metaphor for superficiality as you can imagine. But we also have Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon to thank for the 100-Mile Diet, which began as a blog on thetyee.ca and has become shorthand for the global locavore movement (in much the same way that, about twenty years ago, Douglas Coupland’s first novel coalesced the skeptical, cockeyed anomie of the day into Generation X).
Laugh at the clichés, but understand that leading-edge thinking elsewhere is often the norm here.
So: we work in our heads, not in our head offices.
Yes, people work in Vancouver. Unfrotunately they just can’t afford to live in Vancouver. Vancouver is not friendly to middle income families. It is a playground for the rich. Families must live in the burbs. A two bedroom condo of 800 square feet for half a million just doesn’t work for the average family. Yes, Vancouver does have more affordable housing in places like the Fraserlands. Transit and amenities within walking distance are so bad there that you may as well live in the burbs. There are cities in the world that do combine a sustainable transit oriented walkable core and do make it affordable for a middle class family with a fair amount of room. Vancouver is not one of those cities and can’t call itself sustainable until it is one. Keep in mind, four people sharing 1600 sq feet leave less of a foot print than a single person with 600 square feet. This is something the CoV and developers in the region need to wrap their heads around. Just try and find places for 1600 sq feet under a half million that are located in a walkable community with decent transit that is not plagued with drug issues. That does not exist in Metro Vancouver.
Absolutely right, John. Pirces matter.
However, your condemnation of the “burbs” is a bit of a letdown. It’s time people stopped the parochialism and realized the Metro Vancouver is a single, integrated region, and that the real estate and political interests who wish to keep it divided into fueding bailiwicks have their own greedy interests at heart.
I’d love to hear John’s solution to creating affordable 1600 sqft homes in Vancouver. I’m sure everyone would be supportive of it if he has a way to do it.
I’m not sure what John’s solutions are but here are three ideas. That said, they all involve slowing the run away property values that are driving Vancouver in an un-affordable direction. Hence, I doubt they’ll get a lot of support from home owners who’ve benefited handsomely in the last 20 years from the explosion in property values.
1) Introduce a speculator’s tax (didn’t Vision Vancouver say they were going to do this?!?). Any residence that isn’t someone’s primary one gets taxed at a higher rate to encourage owner occupation and promote Vancouverites using the space. The money from that tax could go into an affordable housing fund specifically dedicated to creating affordable units. Re: anyone worried about a lack of rental housing could be mollified by having an exception for those who rent their units out. So if investors want to rent then they can be exempted, but they won’t be able to just hold the units nor will we continue to place the needs of foreigners who like to visit Vancouver once or twice a year for a week or two above those who actually contribute to our city.
2) For the previous thing to work, I think it would need to be combined with outlawing the practice of allowing pre-construction purchasing. Often many Condo units are snapped up in bulk during this phase of development by investors who have no intention of actually living, or even renting the units. Their one and only intention is to drive the prices of the remaining units up and they’ll hold what they’ve boughten until their investment begins to pay off. Once the overall value has been driven up by this restriction on demand, only then will they sell their investment units.
3) Stop expecting developers to build amenities like parks and schools. Many Vancouverites, ie. those who already own property, think this is a boon because the taxpayer isn’t paying for it. That said, economic reality still exists. If the taxpayer isn’t paying for a public amenity anymore, newbies in the property market are the ones who replace them since it isn’t as if the cost suddenly dissipates into thin air. These extra costs are moved from the public as a whole, onto the developer, who then passes them onto new buyers, since the value of the property and the cost of construction has increased. For example, all Vancouverites get to use the amenities built by the developers of the Yaletown south area, like the neighbourhood parks, the Elsie Roy Elementary school and the seawall. Many thought this was a great idea, some sort of stroke of genius to force the developers to pay for it. But surprise, surprise, the neighbourhood, despite being extremely dense is not at all affordable.
A lot of these ideas are discussed in more detail in Howard Rotberg’s “Exploring Vancouverism: Chapter 9 Eco Density and the Fraud on the Young.” It’s quite a fascinating read.
I will admit solutions are tough. There is still too much land in Vancouver that is single family residential. That must change although it is difficult if not impossible to force. Perhaps the more attainable solution is to encourage more transit friendly sustainable development that is also family friendly region wide. If you have a family, make a decent middle class income and want to live somewhere that you don’t have to rely on a car(s) and don’t want to spend more than half a million (a more than reasonable amount as to what a family should be expected to spend), there are really no options in Metro Vancouver.
What is worse is the tendency of too many Vancouverites to judge those who live in the suburbs as part of the sustainability problem. I would wager the average family is not the problem….but municipalities and developers just don’t have the courage to build family friendly communities that are walkable and you can get by without a car. As a region how advanced and sustainable can we consider ourselves if we cannot accomplish this? To think that Vancouver or Metro Vancouver is any better than any other motordom city in terms of sustainbility is hogwash until progress is made on this issue.
#1 idea for affordable housing: Eliminate minimum parking spot requirements in new residential developments. Sure, that’s not the only solution, nor a magic bullet, but it shaves tens of thousands off of the price of a unit.
My bet, though, is that a lot of the price comes in finishings that developers use because it can increases profit margins and they feel the ability to sell jumps, too. I haven’t seen new condos with basic finishings anywhere, though admittedly I haven’t looked that hard. Anyone else notice this?
I tend to think that the current high end finishes are more to lull the buyers into thinking they are getting something actually worth the $350,000 for the 600 sq ft one bedroom.
The difference in the bottom line for the condo probably isn’t enough to make a unit “affordable”.
Some of the earlier Concord buildings (the ones away from the water like Waterworks) have laminate countertops and laminate-faced cabinets.
Let’s do some ballpark math for new built family housing. My numbers are a bit old so someone please update: Assume $250/square foot construction costs X 1600 square feet = $400,000 just to build the three bedroom family unit. Add in a conservative 15% developer profit and we are up to $460,000 without taking land costs into account. What is zoned multi-family land in Vancouver running at now, $500 per square foot? You can see where this is going. The land cost is the killer in this so finding ways to radically increase the supply (goodbye single detached exclusive zoning?), increase the unit yield per hectare (basically what is being done already), or reduce the cost (who wants to take the loss – or provide the subsidy – here?) strike me as the most productive avenues to explore.