Now that the election season is over and politicians are doing what they promised (that’s way more common than you think), the vagueness of well-intentioned promise is being replaced by the unintentioned exposure of decision. Kickback is filling up my inbox, as illustrated by some selected items from just this morning.
UDI comes out shooting on vacancy controls:
BUILDERS WARN MORE RENT CONTROLS COULD PUT THOUSANDS OF NEW RENTAL HOMES AT RISK
A new Urban Development Institute survey of 30 rental builders finds that 12,631 rental homes which are currently planned for communities across B.C., will be at significant risk if restrictive policies are imposed. This number represents nearly two-thirds of the 19,972 rental homes that respondents reported are currently in development. …
Vacancy control would tie rent controls to a unit rather than the tenant. Currently, rental owners have the flexibility to adjust rents between tenants to account for building and unit upgrades and other increased costs like property taxes, insurance and utilities. Vacancy control would remove this ability. If rent is tied to the unit, the incentive for a rental owner to ensure necessary upgrades, including seismic and energy efficiency standards are completed to aging buildings, is severely compromised. …
In recent years, Seattle has built a surplus of rental homes which drove up overall vacancy rates from 6 percent a year ago to 7.5 percent now and decreased monthly rents, with many tenant incentives.
Click here to download a high resolution version of the infographic.
Speaking of Seattle, Sightline just credited their home city with a big urbanism win in their Daily:
3. Seattle is proving, again, that urbanization works
Even more than Vancouver has within its region, Seattle has embraced urbanization like no other city in its metro area and no other big city in the country.
(Seattle) opened its riches to 114,000 more residents since 2010 by adding 53,000 more homes. More than almost anywhere in the modern North American West, it’s built those homes in the center of the city, not in sprawling exurbs. Thanks in part to falling parking requirements, those homes have been disproportionately built along transit lines. …
Seattle’s construction boom is paying off in ways tenants and homebuyers can actually feel. Not only have home prices stopped rising despite continuing job and income growth, they’ve now dipped $80,000 from their peak as vacancy rates and unsold inventory finally rise. Average rents are flat to down as landlords of older buildings try to prevent tenants from grabbing bargains in new, higher-end buildings.
All the more irony, then, when you see what Sightline credited as their second huge urbanism win:
2. Vancouver, BC, just re-legalized duplexes citywide
In September, Vancouver … ended the failed experiment of banning duplexes from most of the city. Almost every residential lot in Vancouver can now have two full-size homes. It’s the first city in the US or Canada to make the change … Watch our site over the next year for more coverage of Vancouver’s work to end exclusionary zoning.
Oh, we’ll be watching. Given that the one of the first motions put forward by an NPA Councillor was to re-ban the ban.
That’s not quite as ironic (I’m being polite) as the action taken in the District of North Vancouver to deep-six an affordable housing project, currently lighting up some Slack and Twitter streams, with this connection to the North Shore News:
District of North Vancouver Couns. Lisa Muri, Betty Forbes, Megan Curren and Jim Hanson and Mayor Mike Little all believe we need affordable housing. Throughout the campaign they told us, repeatedly, that North Van has too much market housing and not enough affordable housing.
But when it came to their very first vote on an all-below-market housing project in Delbrook, Monday, they all said, “No.”
The reasons given for preventing 80 working people, families and seniors from having safe, secure, affordable homes to live in, was that it was too tall, too dense, that the unit mix was wrong, that it had too little parking and wasn’t designed to the highest environmental standards. Mostly though, it was to mollify the very comfortably housed neighbours in Delbrook.
I’m anticipating that those councillors and mayors who have sent a signal opposed to ‘density’ will run for cover by supporting an extended planning process, with the (futile) hope that conflicts will be resolved by everyone sitting down together to reach consensus.
So a survey of corporations that have benefited enormously from raising rents beyond inflation have said that bad things will happen if they can’t continue to raise rents beyond inflation. And you believe this is worth repeating, why exactly? PriceTags has shown time and time again that the loudest voices defending the status quo and forecasting some horrible, awful disaster if things change aren’t always right. (See any number of bike lane controversies.)
Not saying that they’re definitely wrong, but they aren’t citing evidence just issuing threats. Not exactly inspiring confidence.
Like many things in this world, the fears stoked by the UDI’s 30 survey respondents are vastly overblown, but not completely baseless. Building ain’t charity. The less profitable a building is, the fewer new buildings there will be. That said, they’ll still make bank on rentals. Just not as much and not as often.
All the more reason to build non-profit public rental buildings. Lots of them, especially around transit.
Abundant non profit housing @$ 300 sq ft on crown land using 3% Govt bonds would be self financing.— There would be no need for any rent controls– Landlords with to many empty suites don’t need rent controls to curb their greed