Opinion: Vancouver's governing party needs to do much more for housing

Opinion: Vancouver's governing party needs to do much more on the housing front

BC Premier David Eby (left) and Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim (right) during the December 2022 modular housing announcement. (Peter Meiszner/Twitter)

Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by Peter Waldkirch, who is a director with Abundant Housing Vancouver.

Ken Sim and his ABC Vancouver party were swept to power almost one year ago. Vancouver’s previous City Council was divided, but today ABC has the votes to pass anything it wants.

What have they done with all that power?

When it comes to housing, the answer is not much. Vancouver’s housing crisis is worse than ever, and City Council is asleep at the wheel.

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It is now widely recognized that Vancouver has a severe housing shortage. This is bad for affordability and bad for the environment. Cities are centres of jobs and opportunity, but when people compete for an insufficient stock of housing, only the wealthiest get to stay. Everyone else gets pushed out farther and farther away from the core of the city. That means long car commutes and environmentally destructive sprawl.

ABC knows this. The party’s main housing promise during the 2022 election campaign was to triple housing construction. But housing starts in 2023 will be lower than in 2022 when it was elected.

ABC invited us to measure its success by how much housing gets built, and so far it is failing.

How is ABC responding to this crisis? The only significant step it’s taken is passing a bylaw that allows multiplexes (buildings with three to six strata homes in them, depending on the size of the lot) in some areas of the city.

But the multiplexes are small – only 14% bigger than existing houses. City staff themselves estimate there will only be around 150 multiplex applications per year. This isn’t even a drop in the bucket compared to the tens of thousands of homes Vancouver urgently needs. And it does nothing for renters.

Even worse, multiplexes aren’t even an ABC policy. It’s a legacy from the last mayor, Kennedy Stewart. If Stewart’s hand-me-downs are the best ABC has to offer, the housing crisis will only continue to deepen under their watch.

Endless dithering has taken hold at City Hall. The last major planning initiative, the Vancouver Plan, was launched almost five years ago. After all that time, the multiplex policy is the only thing to come from it. The Broadway Plan, another planning initiative, also took over four years.

ABC has hinted it’ll have some new housing policy to announce soon. But the municipal government’s glacial pace means that, because ABC has squandered its first year in power, even if it asks City staff to act now, it’s unlikely it’ll have anything to show for it before the next election.

A better future for Vancouver is possible, but we won’t get there without leadership. The thriving cities of today and tomorrow embrace complete communities and abundant housing. People who want to live close to their jobs, friends, and shops should be able to. Seniors should be able to age in place in their communities, and that requires options for downsizing.

We don’t need endless reports or committees to know what we need: legalizing apartments across Vancouver. That means real land use reform. Our zoning is stuck in the thinking of a hundred years ago. Apartments are banned on about 80% of Vancouver’s residential land — until we fix that, housing will never be affordable.

Band-aids like multiplexes might have made a difference 30 years ago, but we need to look forward, not backward. That means six floors and corner stores. New neighbours in every neighbourhood will help Vancouver thrive and continue to be one of the best cities on the planet. Not just yesterday, but tomorrow.

There is a deep malaise with Vancouver’s political and planning leadership. After a lacklustre first year, ABC still has a rare opportunity to move beyond slogans and show real leadership. That means bold action on land use reform by legalizing housing across the city.

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