Council approved series of moves aimed at encouraging construction of secure rental housing
Dan Fumano: ‘Watershed moment’: Vancouver’s council allows more rental housing
Dan Fumano
The Vancouver Sun
Analysis: Decision an “important litmus test” on whether council is serious about rental housing, former chief planner Gil Kelley says
City of Vancouver illustrations showing four-storey apartment buildings beside single detached houses. Photo by City of Vancouver /PNG
In its final meeting of 2021, Vancouver council made what could be one of the most significant decisions of the current four-year term: approving moves to boost rental housing construction, including on many side streets where no apartments have gone before.
Although the decision was a long time coming and the proposed changes drew controversy including a threat of a legal challenge, in the end, the council votes were not close, with only a single councillor in opposition.
Council approved a series of moves Tuesday night aimed at encouraging construction of secure rental housing, including making it easier to build mixed-use rental buildings of up to six storeys on busy commercial streets, and, more controversially, considering four-storey apartment buildings, subject to case-by-case decisions from council, on side streets a block off some arterials.
Early in Tuesday’s meeting, Edna Cho, a senior housing planner with the city, outlined the timeline for council of the public engagement on these policies over the last two-and-a-half years.
Thousands of residents participated in workshops and surveys on this report, both in-person and virtual, Cho said. The level of public participation on this matter was “the highest in recent years,” Cho said, with council hearing from more than 100 speakers over three nights of public hearings last month, and receiving 1,082 pieces of correspondence, with about 60 per cent in favour of the changes.
“The discourse has been divided,” Cho said. “It’s a case of ‘far too much,’ versus ‘not nearly far enough.’”
That description seems apt. Development industry figures predicted there was unlikely to be significant uptake on these kinds of projects, saying it would be difficult to make rental projects in these locations financially viable, even with the extra density allowed.
Tenants and their advocates called the changes far too timid.
But others, mostly longtime homeowners, have been up in arms. In October, Postmedia News reported a west side resident was threatening legal action against city hall to prevent the changes, arguing the city had not done enough consultation. That citizens’ group’s lawyer, Peter Gall, said Tuesday afternoon before the council meeting that the group was still considering legal challenges, depending on what happened in that evening’s meeting.
The decision has both practical and symbolic importance, said Gil Kelley, who headed Vancouver’s city’s planning department from 2016 until his departure in March of this year .
In his first public comments since his departure from the City of Vancouver in March of this year, Kelley told this reporter that the changes, which city staff created under his management, would not solve the city’s housing problems, but could help the city catch up after decades of meagre levels of rental construction, while condo development boomed.
There was also symbolic significance, he said, to making changes in some side streets off arterials, low-density areas that have seen comparatively little change in decades.
“It’s not a big bite at the apple, but symbolically, I think it’s important to say there are areas, off the corridors, where a slight upscaling of density is actually appropriate,” Kelley said. “It’s symbolically important to say Vancouver’s low-density neighbourhoods have to get a bit more interesting, a bit more dense, a bit more vital.”
After the vote Tuersday night, Kelley said it was “an important litmus test for council: are they going to commit to building more rental and affordable housing in concept only? Or are they going to actually do it when the going gets tough?”
Mayor Kennedy Stewart struck a similar note in his comments to council before the final vote, calling it “a watershed moment.”
“This marks a clear moment when those who are serious about addressing the affordable housing crisis will vote yes,” Stewart said, with a possible preview of some messaging he might use in his re-election campaign next year. “Those who are not serious, those who are pretending to care, will vote no.”
Coun. Colleen Hardwick, a vocal critic of the city’s housing strategy who has generally advocated for slowing the pace of development, was the only councillor to vote in opposition to the various changes, predicting they would hurt and not help the city’s housing woes.
Earlier in the meeting, Hardwick tried to postpone decision on the entire matter, introducing a motion to refer the report back to staff “for further consultation.”
Hardwick, who was elected in 2018 with the Non-Partisan Association but quit the party earlier this year and plans to run in next year’s election with the upstart TEAM for a Livable Vancouver party, proposed to refer the matter into Vancouver’s city-wide plan, a multi-year project currently underway.
Her proposal was unpopular with most of her colleagues, many of whom pointed out that this specific report had already been deferred for more consultation in August 2020, a delay criticized by voices both inside council and outside.
Coun. Sarah Kirby-Yung, elected in 2018 alongside Hardwick with the NPA and now an independent, opposed her former party colleague’s attempt to delay the decision.
“Council should have the courage of their convictions,,” Kirby-Yung said. Work on the proposed changes had taken most of the current council’s four-year term to reach a decision point, she said, “and we are — and I think fairly, now — being criticized on not making movement on housing policy. Not everybody agrees on policy, but at some point, we have to make a decision and stand for something.”
OneCity Coun. Christine Boyle said: “If there are councillors who don’t want us to do this, then they should just vote against it and stop suggesting that more consultation will get the answer that they’re looking for on this.”
Punting the whole thing into the future, Boyle said, does not show “any kind of leadership on the issues we were elected to address.”
Hardwick’s referral motion failed, with only NPA Coun. Melissa De Genova supporting the effort to delay the decision, and every other council member opposing it.
As the final council meeting of the year wrapped up late Tuesday night, councillors wished each other happy holidays, and thanked staff for all their hard work during a challenging year.
After the meeting, city manager Paul Mochrie, who took over the top job in January 2021, said it has been a difficult time, with the city grappling with multiple crises and “nothing is getting any easier.”
Next year will be busy. Council will resume in January, and July will mark their final meetings before the October 2022 election. And between those dates, Mochrie said, “there’s a lot of business to do.”
twitter.com/fumano
© 2021 Vancouver Sun