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June 16, 2006
City is facing a housing crisis
Jewish community organizations sponsor a talk about solutions.
MONIKA ULLMANN
Home is where the heart is, a man's home is his castle, keep the
home fires burning – there is an endless supply of proverbs
about home in the English language. So when you have 2,000 homeless
in Vancouver and ordinary, middle-class people unable to find affordable
housing, you've got a serious community issue.
And if you needed proof, all you had to do was forgo a stroll on
the beach on a balmy spring evening for a spirited, highly informative
community housing conference, hosted by the Jewish Family Service
Agency (JFSA) and sponsored by the Canadian Jewish Congress, JFSA,
the Council on Poverty and the Lower Mainland Network for Affordable
Housing and NPHS, at the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture
on June 7.
Judging from the large turnout, it's an issue that cuts across age,
gender and income brackets. According to JFSA, the number of Jewish
individuals and families who lack affordable and safe housing hovers
at around 1,000, but beyond that, even teachers and firefighters
can't afford to buy or rent homes, if you apply the affordability
ratio that mandates we ought to spend no more than 30 per cent of
our income on housing. In 2006, a house in Vancouver costs an average
of $610,000, requiring an income of $135,000 plus a 10 per cent
down payment to qualify.
"We now have people who don't qualify for social housing but
can't afford market housing either," said keynote speaker Penny
Gurstein, professor of community and regional planning at the University
of British Columbia.
So just how bad is the situation here compared to the rest of the
globe? Howard Rotberg, president of the Rotberg Development Group
and the second keynote speaker, thought that, "Vancouver compares
unfavorably with every place in Canada and the U.S. – we're
cranking out rental units in Ontario at $650 per month and there's
money available in other provinces, but what's missing here is the
political will – people in Point Grey just don't want to see
pick up trucks in their neighborhood."
He had solutions: 10 of them that he rattled off at top speed. One
was to allocate a percentage of local parkland for housing projects;
another was to penalize speculators, "leeches," as he
called them, who drive up market prices. He suggested expediting
the processing of affordable housing development permits –
which he said even Florida is doing – or simply using the Community
Land Trusts as the basis for long-term affordable developments.
The latter has a precedent with Simon Fraser University's UniverCity
project.
Aside from UniverCity and the Woodward's project, there are other
examples of local developers working with civic governments on new
ways of building affordable and sustainable communities in Coquitlam
and in Surrey. But it clearly isn't enough.
Local politician and activist Jim Green, who was part of the discussion
panel, said that countries in the European Union were generally
miles ahead of us because, "they have a lot of left-leaning
governments there and it's OK to talk about and do something about
affordable housing."
Green suggested NIMBYism was a roadblock to useful change here.
His solution: co-operative housing that keeps prices in check and
also addresses social issues that keep people poor and homeless.
He called this "the architecture of opportunity" and cited
examples of local projects that have already overcome a number of
myths surrounding housing. One of them is that it has to be expensive.
According to Green, simply by removing the "normal" 1.8
parking spaces from the building equation, and allowing a second,
smaller unit to be rented out, cuts condo costs dramatically. He
pointed out that it costs $40,000 a year to keep someone "on
the street," so providing housing is actually far more cost-effective,
as well as humane, in the long term. The Woodward's project, he
said, is demonstrating how it can be done. There just needs to be
a commitment from all stakeholders to make such projects viable,
he said.
Unfortunately, provincial and federal programs aimed at helping
to build affordable housing were discontinued during the 1990s,
more or less at the same time that the housing market in Vancouver
increased. The result is that people are buying cheaper homes in
the suburbs, only to discover that their daily commute is taking
an increasingly large bite out of their overall budgets, not to
mention the ongoing problem with greenhouse gas emissions. In other
words, allowing the "market" to run the show isn't working,
said Rotberg.
What became clear during the evening was that there are a host of
potential solutions available. It's getting the ideas to people
that's difficult.
According to Mira Oreck, regional director of CJC Pacific Region,
the response to the forum has been outstanding.
"We have received a lot of e-mails from an extremely diverse
group of people, including architects, planners, developers and
people who need housing and they all thanked us and said it was
super interesting," said Oreck.
She also said that this event brought together Jewish and non-Jewish
organizers in a very important way and that non-Jewish organizations
were very interested to find that there were organizations in the
Jewish community interested in working with them.
Monika Ullmann is a freelance writer and editor living
in Vancouver.
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