Why TEAM's Colleen Hardwick takes issue with the "housing supply" solution

Colleen Hardwick (TEAM For A Livable Vancouver)

Over the four years Colleen Hardwick has been a Vancouver city councillor — initially under the NPA, then briefly an independent, and then finally leading TEAM For A Livable Vancouver into the civic election — she has gained a reputation for being highly critical of housing and density.

While housing activists tend to paint a picture of her as someone who is uncaring of housing affordability, she wants voters to know that is anything but true.

“My objective is to make more things more affordable. I have two kids in their 30s and I now have two grandchildren that have been born during this term on council. And I don’t want to be the last generation of my family that can afford to live here. So that is my purpose on doing this, because I understand the complexity,” said Hardwick in an interview with Daily Hive Urbanized.

Unlike most of her counterparts in City Council and all of the other major mayoral candidates and their parties, Hardwick deviates in the discourse of pursuing a supply approach to reach housing affordability for a myriad of reasons.

She takes issue with the municipal government being addicted to generating more housing as its revenue source, especially for funding capital budgets for new facilities, infrastructure, and maintenance. She reckons the City of Vancouver’s entire approach with financing itself changed about 14 years ago, after Sam Sullivan’s NPA lost the election to Gregor Robertson’s Vision Vancouver.

You might also like:

“Prior to that, in the whole history of the City and most municipalities that I’m aware of, infrastructure was funded by capital debt. So we used to have standalone plebiscites,” said Hardwick, pointing to a 1984 plebiscite for the final approval of the Cambie Street Bridge.

She says after the Sullivan government, the City restructured its financial business model to fulfill the new political leadership’s vision of expanding the role of a municipal government.

“On the surface, it sounded like a great idea. We’re gonna let growth pay for growth. That was the narrative. And then at the same time, the definition of what constituted as capital expenditures changed from being infrastructure to what we now characterize as City Council priorities of climate change, social issues, economic development, and housing,” she said.

“So what we’ve seen happen over the decades since then is the budget has doubled… The City has bitten off more than cities have historically been responsible for and they needed to pay for it.”

All the while, there has been a tremendous increase in the number of City staff, and 65% of the budget is now attributable to salaries, according to Hardwick.

To begin to curb back on the City’s scope creep, during her term with the support of City Council, Hardwick successfully spearheaded the creation of an Auditor General. It now has a mandate to independently review the municipal government’s finances and operations, and determine efficiencies and cost savings.

In the process of encouraging more residential development to pay for growth, she believes the use of rezoning tools and density-catalyzing area plans by consecutive City Councils has greatly exacerbated Vancouver’s housing affordability crisis by pushing land values upwards.

“Well, on July 1 each year, BC Assessment comes in and says ‘oh, we’re going to assess the property based on the highest and best use.’ So when you do that many times over as we’ve seen over the last decade, it has ultimately exponentially increased land value… It all starts with the land if we want to talk about affordability. We have to stop inflating land lift,” she said.

“What I believe needs to happen is that we have to really restore balance to the pace of change, which means that we’re going to have to curtail this notion of promoting growth to fund the council priorities.”

She likens the City’s financial business model as a “Ponzi scheme” to extract as much revenue as possible.

She does not believe it is sustainable over the longer run for the City to have a real estate-driven economy. Rather, it needs to diversify and grow other sectors.

“We saw our economy go from being driven by natural resource extraction industries to being driven by real estate, construction and housing production. So in large part, what we’re seeing is using immigration to drive housing production, as opposed to looking at what we need to be doing in terms of economic diversification, innovation and entrepreneurship, which I again believe are absolutely mission critical to imagine the future that we want for ourselves,” she said.

Since 2017, the City has used the 10-year Housing Vancouver strategy as the basis for determining how many new additional units need to be approved each year through 2028. The target goal over this period is a total of 72,000 units of a range of housing tenures for a wide range of incomes. She says when she challenged City staff, they said these targets were “aspirational” and not based on any available data. By her calculations, she says, the 72,000 figure is grossly above and beyond what is needed, and that existing zoning capacity is sufficient to meet demand.

The other matter that she would like to fix is the 20% to 30% increase in the cost of homes as a result of the City’s permitting policies and regulations. She would like to cut the City’s topped up costs on new housing by half.

“Let’s knock it back. Let’s build within the existing zone capacity so we’re not inflating land, at least for a number of years to try and recover our balance. Let’s reduce our dependence on promoting development, because that’s really what we’re doing,” she continued.

“It’s like build, build, build at all costs. Well, maybe we better really look at what we’re doing.”

The civic election is tomorrow, Saturday, October 15.

You might also like: