Robyn Chan: Governments need to pay close attention to which types and tenures of housing are actually in demand and acknowledge the housing market has changed.
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It’s all hands on the housing deck. Ottawa, the province and the City of Vancouver are propping up market-rate housing, even though what’s desperately needed is affordable, non-market housing.
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Ottawa just partnered with the province to scoop up 2,200 new, unsold condos, billed by Housing Minister Gregor Robertson as a “creative pathway” to home ownership through a rent-to-own program that is weak on details.
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For its part, the city quietly eliminated the requirement for new six-storey rental buildings in some areas to include any percentage of affordable housing, citing rising construction and financing costs. These initiatives, however, are incredibly narrow. All are market housing options that can’t guarantee any level of affordability beyond the initial buyer or renter, because they lack restrictions on future selling prices and don’t mandate housing be non-profit.
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These options leave truly affordable housing behind. They fail to address the root causes of unaffordability. We can’t build our way out of a housing crisis without ensuring viable options for lower-income households.
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Seventy per cent of renters can’t afford the average rent for purpose-built rentals in Metro Vancouver, nor can they afford a down payment or a mortgage. For the lowest-income quartile of households, housing prospects are dire. These households face vacancy rates of 0.5 per cent because higher vacancy rates — that 3.7 per cent frequently championed by the province — are concentrated in the most expensive rentals.
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And while the province assures us that asking prices for market-rate rent have fallen by more than $330 a month over three years, it also cancelled its affordable community housing fund earlier this year, along with $775 million in funding, leaving community-oriented housing developers out millions of dollars in pre-development costs. The biggest difference between market and affordable — or non-market — housing is that the latter, such as co-ops, become even more affordable over time.
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As expected, competition for limited, reasonably priced housing, particularly when it’s non-market, is fierce. Earlier this year, 750 applications were received over four days from people hoping to live in a 50-year-old, wood frame housing co-operative in Vancouver’s False Creek South. There, households pay up to $1,500 per month for a two-bedroom home, roughly half the rate of newly built co-ops, and a third the price of the average Vancouver rental of the same size.
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All of this underscores the urgency of retaining existing housing for as long as possible. The cheapest housing is that which is already built, and clearly there’s demand for it. The province knows it — or it did — when it was buying older apartment complexes through the rental protection fund to keep them available. Albeit total investment in this one-time provincial program was six times less than the $3 billion in loans earmarked for the condo conversion program.
