Urban planner weighs in on how to fix Vancouver's housing crisis

"Investors can't get enough of Vancouver": Urban planner on fixing the housing crisis (VIDEO)

Urban planner and retired developer Andy Wise (Daily Hive) | Development in Vancouver (EB Adventure Photography/Shutterstock)

A Vancouver urban planner says building more supply alone won’t fix the city’s housing crisis, and instead, we need to work on solutions to the demand side of the equation.

Arny Wise, an urban planner and retired developer, sat down with Daily Hive Urbanized to share his ideas for what changes need to happen in Vancouver to remedy skyrocketing rental and home prices.

“Investors can’t get enough of Vancouver,” Wise said. “The demand is not coming from first-time homebuyers; it’s coming from investors.”

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Building more supply alone won’t fix the housing affordability problem, he added.

“The housing market is not a simple Economics 101 widget… What’s not looked at is the demand side. Where’s the demand for housing come from?”

Wise isn’t accusing foreign investors specifically. In fact, he says it’s a wide array of domestic and foreign investors that find Vancouver’s housing market attractive — from pension funds to real estate investment trusts (REITs), flippers, speculators, and mom-and-pop landlords. According to Wise, they’re buying up much of Vancouver’s housing supply and making units less affordable for renters and owners in the city.

Historically low interest rates and a lack of teeth on government restrictions made real estate investment in the city an attractive option for many years, according to Wise.

The problem with simply building more supply is that investors will snap it up — and city residents won’t see the more affordable options.

“The people who live here can’t afford to live here … Even people making $100,000 cannot live in this city. That’s a problem.”

Many people who can’t afford to live in Vancouver will move further out, either to the suburbs or smaller communities like Squamish — further inflating prices there and potentially leading to more greenhouse gas emissions as they commute, Wise said.

As for solutions, Wise thinks a greater proportion of units being built should be affordable — and that the classification for affordable needs to be updated. The City of Vancouver currently requires 30% of units in new builds to be affordable — 10% for social housing and 20% for moderate-income households. He thinks it should be closer to 50%.

Wise also floated the idea of a much higher speculation tax in Vancouver and suggested”zoning-up” land in the city to allow for greater density but putting conditions on developing it — such as having a high proportion of housing for moderate incomes.

“You can’t just have a rich enclave that only the rich can afford … That’s not the kind of city anybody wants.”

With files from Arash Randjbar

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