Colleen Hardwick's TEAM proposes building 2,000 affordable homes for $500M

Colleen Hardwick's TEAM party proposes building 2,000 affordable co-op homes in Vancouver for $500 million

Workers repairing severe rot damage on a False Creek South residential building in April 2018. (Shutterstock)

If elected, the TEAM For A Livable Vancouver party led by current city councillor and mayoral candidate Colleen Hardwick would direct the City of Vancouver to spend $500 million on building 2,000 new units of affordable co-operative homes for over 4,000 people.

This major housing platform promise announced today entails building the developments on City-owned land across Vancouver.

But it would be up to the city’s residents to support the idea — first to vote for TEAM in the October 2022 civic election, and then for the specific idea in a separate public vote conducted through a mail-in ballot referendum held within 18 months after November 2022’s swearing-in.

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Hardwick asserts her party’s co-op housing proposal would be the single largest increase in 100% affordable housing the city has ever seen at one time. The half-billion-dollar cost would be amortized over 30 years, and the co-op rents would recover costs to the City, with the municipal government retaining ownership of the lands under the municipal Property Endowment Fund through long-term leases to the co-ops.

In addition to the City of Vancouver’s contribution, TEAM would ask the provincial and federal governments to each contribute $500 million to grow the affordable co-op housing project to $15 billion with 6,000 units for over 12,000 people.

Hardwick notes that this affordable co-op proposal is inspired by the work of her father Walter Hardwick when he led the first iteration of the first TEAM party in the early 1970s.

Her father’s work with TEAM is associated with the creation of the 1970s/1980s-built False Creek South neighbourhood of low- and mid-rise buildings, with co-op housing and rentals on City-owned endowment lands. After Vancouver City Council’s 2021 decision to reject a City proposal to redevelop the False Creek South neighbourhood, the municipal government has been working to extend the leases to the existing False Creek South co-ops by up to an additional 20 years through the 2050s and 2060s.

Hardwick has been highly critical of the provincial and municipal strategies of improving housing affordability through introducing additional housing supply, the generation of market rental and ownership homes, and the introduction of density through tower-based developments. She believes community plans — such as the Broadway Plan, Cambie Corridor Plan, and West End Plan — and the resulting rezoning leads to higher housing costs through the land value lift.

As well, she has been against the City of Vancouver’s growing dependency on using development-driven revenues generated by market residential developments to pay for municipal costs in building and improving community amenities, facilities, parks, and infrastructure.

“Our affordable housing plan is about giving people real hope about the future of living in our beautiful city – not the hype we hear from major corporate developers and other political parties that have simply failed over the past four years of skyrocketing rents and housing prices and yet while prescribing more of the same but expect different results,” she said in a statement.

“We need 100% affordable housing built as soon as possible and this plan will, with the support of Vancouver residents, create thousands of new homes for people who desperately need them.”

Other components of TEAM’s housing platform include improving neighbourhood-based planning and assembling accurate population growth data to determine housing needs, providing a mix of non-market and market housing “planned in partnership with local residents at the scale of each neighbourhood,” and ending spot rezonings that do not comply with area plans.

The Broadway Plan and Vancouver Plan, both recently approved by City Council for outlining how new density is to be introduced, would also be revoked by TEAM.

Other than Hardwick for mayor, TEAM is running six candidates for City Council, six candidates for the Vancouver Park Board, and one candidate for Vancouver School Board.

The 2022 civic election is scheduled for Saturday, October 15.

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