BC Housing Minister warns of red-tape delays in Vancouver's new housing plan

Jan 27 2022, 5:32 pm

BC’s Housing Minister is throwing his support behind Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart’s proposal to allow up to six homes to be built on a single-family lot.

David Eby told Daily Hive Urbanized he agrees with the intention of Stewart’s “Making Home” plan, which the mayor resurrected after a 2020 defeat at council and passed successfully through council Wednesday night.

“It’s brave in an election year to tell single family neighbourhoods you are going to allow additional density,” said Eby. “And it’s also necessary.”

“I think it’s great,” he added.

“Any time a local council or mayor is willing to take a risk and try something new to increase the availability and affordable housing I’m fully supportive of that. We need more of this conversation taking place. But more than the conversation, we need action.”

Stewart’s plan would allow owners of 2,000 single family properties to convert or redevelop them into up to six ground-oriented strata units. 

vancouver housing plan

Vancouver’s “Making Home” plan. (MakingHome.ca)

The increased value of the land once the density is increased would be captured by the city to fund affordable housing, or redirected to make two units permanently affordable in a development.

“The most useful part of it that I see is we have a large number of single family homeowners who are quite house rich and income poor,” said Eby.

“And the only way that they can realise the income from their property is to sell it and move somewhere else. For many seniors, moving on to a community where they have all of their friends and all their social connections and all of their local stores that they go to where they know everybody is is a huge and disruptive thing to do and so most people choose not to do it. 

ICBC

David Eby (Facebook)

“The possibility that this proposal raises is that a homeowner could potentially enter into an agreement with a developer to create a number of units and then live in one of those units that’s more appropriately sized for what their needs and also have money to live on, and not have to do reverse mortgage or sell their home.”

BC is willing to help partner on redevelopments under Kennedy’s plan, using $2 billion set aside in BC Housing’s Housing HUB fund, said Eby.

“Proposals like this are what that funding was designed for,” he said.

Permit approval red-tape could delay progress

Still, the proposal will not solve all of Vancouver’s housing woes by a long shot.

The city, like the rest of the province, is facing skyrocketing real estate price increases due to low interest rates, limited supply, investor speculation and other factors.

Another problem is the notoriously long time it takes for Vancouver city hall to issue development permits, which ties up thousands of units in bureaucratic red tape.

“That’s going to be the big challenge with this plan,” said Eby.

“You now have the right to build this number of units on your property, but you can’t actually get the permit to build them, is the situation a number of people, not just in Vancouver but other municipalities, run into.”

The tortured development process within municipalities is something Eby said he will tackle with new legislation this fall. But he’s going to wait until after the October 15 municipal election to table the reforms in the legislature to avoid making it a municipal campaign issue.

kennedy stewart

Vancouver City Hall. (Oleg Mayorov/Shutterstock)

He said the changes, which build off the 2019 Development Approvals Process Review report and a 2021 expert report on housing supply, will focus on “expediting and supporting municipalities in faster approvals processes, and more predictable land use plans, and facilitating more affordable housing.”

The legislation will streamline how municipalities hold public hearings on redevelopments, set official community plans and issue development permits, with the goal of letting people who want to increase density in a way already allowed by a community’s official community plan to get busy actually building that housing, said Eby. 

“The pieces that that I’m particularly interested in is making sure that there’s sufficient density around transit stations, for reasons of affordability and climate that people are able to live close to transit,” he said. 

“And the other is around this problem that we have of it taking years for someone who proposes housing to actually begin construction and dramatically shortening that, especially around affordable housing projects.”

Eby is looking squarely at Vancouver on that issue, criticising it for not moving forward with a plan to dramatically increase density around the under-construction Broadway Subway line corridor, saying “thousands of rental units along that corridor are just wanting to be built.”

It’s not clear how much of the fall legislation will be incentives to municipalities to move faster on higher density, and how much will be punitive in reducing access to things like dollars for provincial transit projects for cities that refuse to densify along new corridors.

Vancouver could fall into both categories.

In the meantime, anyone looking to run municipality this fall can expect to be handed a whole new set of rules on housing development shortly after they are sworn into office in October.

Rob ShawRob Shaw

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