Pete Fry unveils Green Party of Vancouver's housing plan
With the Vancouver election just over one month away, mayoral candidate Pete Fry just released his housing plan.
Fry, who is a current city councillor and is running for mayor with the Green Party of Vancouver, promised to approve homes faster, provide more housing choices, and prioritize Canadian-built construction.
“Housing is too expensive, and part of the reason is that we still make it too difficult, too slow, and too costly to build the homes people need,” said Fry in a release.
“We can protect safety and quality while making the system work better. City Hall should be helping good housing get built, not putting unnecessary barriers in the way.”
The Green Party promises to launch pre-approved housing designs (including prefabricated) and partner with Build Canada Homes to attract investment and fast-track qualifying projects.
The Green Party said they would “champion Canadian procurement and employment requirements for major developments,” as well as utilize mass timber and wood-frame construction, which they said is faster and more cost-effective to build.
They added that they would streamline permitting for low-rise apartments, row homes, townhomes, infill, and wood-frame construction across Vancouver.
The party also said they’d support the Vancouver Building By-law and allow “innovative climate, mechanical, and built-form solutions, including mass timber and decarbonization.”
Further, the plan includes preserving existing affordable homes by partnering with the federal Deep Retrofit Accelerator Initiative and the BC Retrofit Accelerator in order to fund climate-smart retrofits.
“Vancouver doesn’t need one kind of housing everywhere. We need more ways for people to find a home that fits their life and their budget,” Fry said. “We can build apartments, row homes, townhomes, and rentals faster, using B.C. wood and Canadian workers, and make sure that when City Hall creates more value, some of that value comes back as secured rental and non-market homes.”
What have other parties promised?
Rebecca Bligh, a current city councillor who is running for mayor under the Vote Vancouver banner, shared the main pillars of her party’s platform last week, which included building permanently affordable homes for middle-income earners on public land, with not-for-profit childcare included in all new developments.
TEAM for a Livable Vancouver, with mayoral candidate Colleen Hardwick, also released their housing plan last week. They said that governments and the private sector would work together to deliver housing that middle-income households can afford, while also prioritizing low-income, supportive, and secure rental housing.
They argue that upzoning land increases the development value on it, and thus causes speculation and makes it more costly, resulting in the actual housing being more expensive once it’s built. TEAM said they would ask questions beyond how many units are approved, such as who can actually afford to live in those units.
ABC Vancouver and incumbent mayor Ken Sim have yet to release their housing platform for this year’s election.
Kareem Allam, mayoral candidate for the Vancouver Liberals, is also yet to release a housing platform. However, he did write in Sitka Media that part of the problem causing long housing approval times is that Vancouver’s building by-law adds extra steps, and that it should be replaced with the B.C. Building Code.
Voting day is on October 17.