Another data storm…

Another data storm passed over Vancouver last week, causing flooded minds but doing no other damage. There was little illumination in its wake.
The vacant-houses report by Ecotagious, presented to council on March 8th, was an anticlimactic thud, concluding that the percentage of vacant homes had barely budged since 2002. Last Friday, a detailed article in the Globe by Kerry Gold picked holes in the conclusions and was informative about the methodology and its shortcomings. To me, the salient information was the contrasting political reactions of Councillor Kerry Jang and Point Grey MLA David Eby.

Councillor Kerry Jang says the chief concern was to find out if houses were empty for a year at a time. He says the report is proof that foreign buyers are not hiding their money in houses and leaving them to fall into disrepair. He has no issues with a homeowner who only uses a house for a week or two out of the year, or a couple of months.

“It goes back to the fact that they assume an Asian investor is parking his money in Vancouver, leaving their house empty. That’s what I’m taking issue with here. It’s your property. If you want to live in it half the year, that’s your business. Are you to tell me I have to live in my house for eight months of the year? What happens if I don’t? Are you going to take it away from me? That’s the argument.”

Point Grey MLA David Eby, who’s raised the issue of empty houses in the media, says he was shocked at both the survey results, and also the media reaction, which tied the results to proof that foreign investment was a “myth.” He calls the methodology “conservative.”

“We have a shocking number of empty condos and a huge number of underused homes. The people who are trying to sell this [myth] line should spend a little time in Point Grey, in Kerrisdale, and they will see the reality for themselves, in the stores and on the streets. I understand the reasons for underselling this report and saying, ‘Oh, look, the real estate alarmists have been disproven,’ because a lot of people are benefiting from this system, but our community knows the issues. We see them every day.”

This could be one of the old NPA-COPE battles of values from 20 years ago. Eby’s town-hall style meeting, as noted in a previous post, takes place tonight.

Evidently, the question of how many vacant homes – or is it underused homes? – is not going to be solved by data. It will take leadership to craft public policy that will have to be based on community values, not the factoids of one study versus another.

I was really on the side of the Dunbar-West Point Grey-Kerrisdale residents who believed their neighbourhoods were hollowed out, that many houses were vacant and blocks were spooky, and maybe I still am. But a couple of gatherings – what might be called “west side cocktail parties” – around Christmas and thereafter nudged me away from a firm position.

For the first hour, I talked to people who wanted only to speak about the vacancy issue, often with overtones of race and crazy wealth thrown in; having tired of it, people then began to speak about their holidays, the houses they were renting in Palm Springs for the winter, the time-share in Scottsdale, the cabin at the lake, the trips to Europe they’d planned.

How many months of the year were they away, a few weeks here, a few weeks there? Were they engaged in their community when they returned? Is the issue underused homes, one made worse by the affluence of most people in some parts of town? And if it is, what can or should be done about it?