TEAM Backs Plan Aimed at Delivering Affordable Middle-Income Housing
Cooperation Between Government and Private Sector Needed to Tackle Affordability Crisis
VANCOUVER, September 9 — TEAM for a Livable Vancouver is backing a bold new approach to tackling Vancouver’s housing-affordability crisis. The basic idea is that governments and the private sector should work together to deliver housing that middle-income households can actually afford — and ensure that affordability is secured over time.
It’s outlined in a paper developed by a group of respected Vancouver-based planners, architects and academics with decades of experience in housing and city-building. New Directions for Prioritizing Middle-Income Secure Affordable Housing proposes the creation of a defined sphere of secure middle-income affordable housing. That means housing mainly intended for people who live and work here, rather than housing whose affordability depends entirely on fluctuations in the private market
A TEAM majority Council will commit to pursuing and evaluating the 14 directions proposed in the paper.
“For years, Vancouver has pursued the theory that if we simply approve enough housing, affordability will follow,” says TEAM mayoral candidate Colleen Hardwick. “It hasn't. We don't have a general housing supply problem. We have an affordable housing supply problem. We need a better plan.”
The paper recognizes that we can’t expect the private development industry to solve the affordability problem on its own. Governments must use the tools available to them — including public land, financing, land-use regulation, partnerships and innovative tenure models — to achieve defined affordability outcomes.
But middle-income housing initiatives shouldn’t come at the expense of housing for those most in need. Governments must continue to prioritize low-income, supportive and secure rental housing, as well as housing for seniors and people with special needs.
Affordability – not simply supply
One key issue highlighted by New Directions is the cost of land.
Upzoning can increase the development value of land and fuel speculation. That bakes higher land costs into the housing ultimately produced. The paper calls for approaches that avoid unnecessary land-value escalation, capture increases in land value for public benefit, and explore ways of removing or reducing land costs from the affordability equation.
Instead of simply asking how many units were approved, we need to ask questions like who can afford the units in question? For how long? And who will actually live in them?
“Success isn't the number of units approved at City Hall,” Hardwick says. “Success is whether the people who work here can afford to live here, whether young people can see a future here, and whether families can remain part of their communities.”
TEAM also strongly supports the paper's call for meaningful citizen engagement and neighbourhood-based community planning. Housing solutions must reflect real population needs, household incomes, infrastructure capacity and neighbourhood conditions rather than being imposed through blanket city-wide policies. TEAM agrees with the paper’s concerns about the current approach being implemented through the Official Development Plan (ODP), that all of the other parties on council have unanimously approved, that TEAM will repeal and replace.
