AT the Downtown Vancouver Association dialogue series this morning at BCIT.
The focus was on the City’s expectations for amenities (from playgrounds to public art, from childcare to community centres) and how those expectations impact the quality of life in Downtown Vancouver. In other words (as I interpreted it), would reducing the cost or quality of amenities, as required by the City from new development, assist affordability?
The panel included Councillor Geoff Meggs, Jennifer Podmore Russell, Senior Manager in Financial Advisory at Deloitte Touche – and me. My thoughts …
The dilemma: we have raised expectations so high with respect to the requirement for amenity as a condition of development that we would have to rewrite the contract we have with citizens. In particular, if we were to forego the benefits a community has come to expect in order to achieve more affordable housing, then three conditions would have to be agreed on:
(1) ‘Affordable housing’ would be accepted as an amenity – or at least a substitute for same.
City council more or less established that principle with the STIR program. Additional density was provided to projects that did not have to pay the usual community amenity charge for the bonus, on the assumption that we all benefited from rental housing that would be more affordable than otherwise. Inherit in that action was the assumption that a neighbourhood like the West End already had sufficient amenities in order to accommodate growth. Which takes us to the larger condition:
(2) Growth would not be required to help pay for growth
That was the trade-off that Councils of the 1990s established with the development of the megaprojects like Concord Pacific Place and Coal Harbour. As these large brownfield sites were redeveloped with thousands of more units, people could see that they arrived with new parks, seawalls, community centres, infrastructure, public art, etc – all provided at no additional cost to the property-taxpayer. It would have been hard to argue, after all, that existing taxpayers should be billed for the amenities provided to newcomers or, if not included in the projects, compete with them for use of existing facilities.
(3) The foregone value of amenities would be seen to directly reduce the cost of housing
This is the critical one. Just because the developer saves the cost of foregone amenities does not necessarily mean the cost of the housing will be reduced commensurately. The market sets the price, after all – and just because x amount of savings are achieved, the unit may still sell for y, without the difference being passed on to the buyer or the renter or the City. Unless that is explicitly required in some demonstrable way.
So how likely is it that this contract can be rewritten? Why would citizens accept growth without benefit? What’s there to negotiate? And is an appeal to homeowners in high-amenity neighbourhoods, watching their assets accumulate in value, to provide for the needs of those who aren’t here, including the next generation, likely to be heard when the debates turn to the arguments over density, height and greed?
That is the unresolved debate, being played out in the blogs, the public hearings and the DVA dialogues.
Next up:
Part 2 of the series will identity priorities for action in each of the following categories: Live; Work; Play; Learn. This event is set for April 24, 2012.
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Part 3 of the series will focus on action planning. Based on the priorities identified from Part 2, speakers suggest tangible actions that will help improve the lives of the average income earners in Downtown Vancouver. This event is set for May 29, 2012.
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Speaking of affordable housing – an update in Fraseropolis on a report by Margaret Eberle, submitted to the Metro Vancouver Housing Corporation, that measures the performance of 15 Metro Vancouver municipalities – the 15 largest – in implementing the 2007 regional housing strategy.
The regional strategy listed 35 ways that local governments can promote housing affordability for renters and owners. The Eberle report finds that, as of last summer, Vancouver City had adopted 80 per cent of the recommended actions, Delta had adopted 23 per cent, and other municipalities sat in between. (Incidentally, the appropriate municipal policies were often in place long before the 2007 strategy appeared.)
Only 7 of 15 communities had created local affordable housing action plans more than three years after the adoption of the regional strategy. Other recommendations had stronger uptake: for example, 87 per cent of communities had moved to allow secondary suites in single-family residential areas; 80 per cent had placed restrictions on the conversion of rental units into condominiums.
