A community too expensive for the mayor to live in? Could have happened to him, says Darrell Mussatto:
He pulls in nearly 90 grand a year, but says if his parents didn’t help him years ago, he wouldn’t be able to afford a home in the community he grew up and works in.
He’s the mayor of the City of North Vancouver.
“Twenty years ago I had help from my parents; times are different,” Darrell Mussatto says. “Imagine, the mayor can’t even own a house . . . I’d be able to afford an apartment with a pretty large mortgage.”
This article from the North Shore News explores the housing-affordability dilemma in interviews with the three North Shore mayors … and, for some reason, me.
Maybe North Van is a really popular spot and people like to live there? So there is competition for the existing stock of houses? No?
Rather than expensive housing being a problem maybe it’s a sign of success — people want to live in North Van. On the other hand there are lots of cheap houses in Detroit (forget about borders) and so maybe the solution is for people to move.
Why subsidize housing when there is plenty of housing but just in the wrong place? Just a thought.
Replying to David S: Well, one result is that you get the interesting, odd sorts of situations like the people who provide services for a community being unable to live there by being priced out. An extreme example exists in something a friend and I were just talking about the other day: in the morning, buses from downtown to West Vancouver are full of domestic workers (often Filipino ladies) going to their jobs to clean houses. If this kind of class-spatial segregation goes unchecked, en masse and over time, it can result in things like ghettos and whole districts chronically receiving less attention because they are deemed to be for “other” people. It becomes a question of social inclusion on a number of levels. (Also North Van does have homeless people, enough to warrant action: http://www.cnv.org/c//data/3/548/North%20Shore%20Homelessness%20Task%20Force%20Workplan.pdf)
I’d invite you to take a look at this recent blog post which unpacks the pieces of the intentions of mixed-income developments fairly well: http://blog.uwinnipeg.ca/ChristopherLeo/archives/2010/01/does_mixedincom.html.
Karen — excellent reply.
David Sucher’s equating of exhorbidant residential real estate prices with civic success is not an uncommon opinion in Greater Vancouver. In fact, it’s the predominant viewpoint, and most civic politics and much provincial politics related to the region revolves around that belief.