Opinion: BC cities should be grateful for transit-oriented development law

Opinion: BC cities should be grateful for the new transit-oriented development law

Construction progress on Oakridge Park (Oakridge Centre mall redevelopment) next to SkyTrain Oakridge-41st Avenue Station, as of November 15, 2023. (Kenneth Chan/Daily Hive)

Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by Owen Brady, a director of Abundant Housing Vancouver, a housing advocacy group.

Why are there still so few apartments next to multibillion-dollar public transit investments?

January 2023 will mark 38 years since SkyTrain’s Expo Line opened. Looking at the seas of single-family detached houses surrounding many stations or listening to some politicians complain that their cities haven’t had enough time to plan, you might think that the whole SkyTrain system was announced last month.

Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon has announced the broad outline of Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) regulations with which cities with SkyTrain stations and bus exchanges must comply by mid-2024.

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Kahlon has also indicated that cities will have wide latitude to impose development fees, restrict tenure to rental, and impose other requirements, as long as they still allow for the minimum required density.

bc transit oriented development legislation

British Columbia’s transit-oriented development legislation. (Government of BC)

Several local politicians, such as Mayor Ken Sim of Vancouver, Mayor Meghan Lahti of Port Moody, and Mayor Tom Dyas of Kelowna, are supportive of the TOD law. They likely see that having their hands “tied” on minimum density will actually free city councils to focus on planning for what’s actually needed around existing and future multibillion-dollar transit infrastructure without the pressure to conform to what local NIMBY opposition will accept.

Instead of cutting daycare space and other amenities from proposed apartment buildings to make them smaller, local councils and the public can have a conversation about what spaces are needed in a 20-storey building beside busy transit stations.

Some commentators have raised legitimate concerns about potential displacement of tenants from older apartment buildings near transit stations. But this again misses the point of the legislation, which is saving municipal governments from themselves.

Cities have systematically targeted apartment and commercial areas for redevelopment over previous decades while mostly preserving single-family areas. The fact that building new apartments is still mostly only allowed where they replace existing apartments is inefficient, completely unnecessary, and cruel. You can stand in several Canada Line stations and see detached houses, mandated by zoning, directly behind an apartment across the street.

Apartment areas near SkyTrain stations largely already have plans that allow for higher density than required or have sufficient density that redevelopment for somewhat higher density is much less attractive than replacing single-family houses for the same purpose.

Existing zoning around SkyTrain stations in Vancouver. (Mountain Math)

In a similar vein, Vancouver, in the Broadway Plan area, Burnaby, and New Westminster more broadly, have already enacted comprehensive tenant relocation policies that allow tenants in a building being redeveloped to return to the new buildings at below-market rents, often the same rent. Vancouver City Council can easily extend this protection to other TOD areas when updating development plans as required.

Having the option to redevelop single-family houses or apartments, with the cost of compensating tenants in both cases, creates a large disincentive to redevelop buildings with many tenants. On the whole, since this TOD legislation applies to any area zoned for residential or mixed-use, regardless of density, it will take pressure away from denser housing.

A major driving factor behind evictions is unsecured rental, where landlords can easily evict tenants for their own purposes or even through neglect.

Another factor is our chronically low rental vacancy rate, which means that evicted tenants have essentially nowhere else to move to, and thousands of others are not able to access the opportunities offered by Vancouver in the first place.

A cynic might suspect that those who only worry about displacement when it is visible on the skyline are more concerned about the skyline than the displacement.

Top reasons for evictions, 2021. (Statistics Canada)

The TOD legislation, along with recent complementary measures like the federal GST rebate for rental construction and provincial land acquisition for affordable housing development, will tackle these drivers of displacement head-on by incentivizing the construction of new secured purpose-built rental homes at various levels of affordability and in locations with many fewer tenants.

New market-rate homes will no doubt be more expensive than existing homes, but every high-income household that moves into one is one less household competing for those existing apartments, of which there are far too few to meet demand.

Tenant protections were always needed, but our cities were slow to enact them as the interests of homeowners were put first, and mostly still are. Notably, Vancouver’s tenant relocation policy only applies to single-family houses if they are being assembled for a larger building.

Likewise, municipal governments should be grateful that the provincial government is forcing them to do something meaningful with the land near rapid transit stations, including and especially single-family-zoned land, after decades ignoring the potential of these large investments while the housing crisis spiralled out of control. Cities are still free to plan areas near transit stations as they see fit, now they are also free from the parochial politics that let the areas with the most potential go to waste.

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