Opinion: Is Vancouver City Council disconnected from housing realities? | Daily Hive

Example of a tower development site in the Broadway Plan area. (Google Maps)

Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by David Fine, who is an award-winning local filmmaker, an outspoken housing policy critic, and a moderator of the VanPoli Facebook group. He is currently making a documentary film about urban planning in Vancouver.

It’s very strange to watch Vancouver City Council treat housing like some kind of horse race, with the ABC Vancouver party constantly touting how many approvals have been passed and how serious they are about “addressing the housing crisis,” as if no other considerations matter other than the running total.

The opposition city councillors in the OneCity, Green, and even COPE parties are clearly along for the ride, voting, as they do, mostly lockstep with ABC.

Yes, we need more housing, and loads of new units are proudly being approved, but what does that really mean? Does it mean we are supplying the housing needed in this city, or does City Council even care so long as they can tout the score? Notably, by the way, only what has been approved, not built, but what if it actually isn’t the housing we need and what if a good deal of it won’t even get built?

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We heard the same calls to action about condominium development — that we needed them to address our housing crisis, and that building so much market housing, aggressively marketed to foreign investors, would supposedly free up affordable housing for the people who really need it (a dubious claim).

But now we have a glut of condominiums sitting unoccupied and developers shedding staff in big numbers and curtailing projects. What’s that saying about the definition of insanity?

ABC Vancouver

Still, YIMBY housing activists will insist that we are seeing rents come down precisely because of all this new rental housing. “Just build more and affordability will follow,” but hold on — most new rentals are still in the works, like Senakw and other big projects. Not a single Broadway Plan development has been completed. Few have even broken ground.

So far in 2025, there have been about 1,000 rental housing unit completions, while 2024 saw 2,478 rental apartment completions — a lot higher than the 1,208 in 2023. But completions were higher still in 2021 and 2018 without corresponding reductions in rent, so what’s new? The most significant change is that demand has been curtailed by the reduction in immigration and student visas. Something many of us had been calling for, for ages (while often being accused of racism for it!). Restricting short-term rentals has also had a positive impact on supply. All this without putting a shovel in the ground.

Still, City Council is dead set on what can only be described as a frenzy of development approvals, sometimes three or four rezoning applications in a week because, as is repeated ad nauseum, “we are in a housing crisis” and with that, it appears no other concerns or issues merit consideration because every single redevelopment application gets approved.

At this point, the public hearings essentially go through the motions with the odd concern about tenants being evicted, but not enough for any redevelopment not to pass. All city councillors vote mostly in lockstep on every single application.

CMHC

David Fine

It’s tantamount to heresy to suggest that perhaps, the housing crisis is not actually what it seems.

We are often reminded of the crazy low rental vacancy rate, but few consider that the data from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) only refers to secured purpose-built rentals and ignores the thousands of unsecured private rentals managed by homeowners and investors renting out the condominiums they bought, but do not intend to live in. This means that the vacancy rate, currently 1.6 per cent, is not really an accurate reflection.

Certainly, the casual observer can’t help but notice a lot more vacancy signs around, and logic tells us that if rents are going down, it must be because there are more vacancies, so how can that be if the vacancy rate has not improved?

Despite City Council’s insistence otherwise, the main issue is not a lack of housing; it’s a lack of affordable housing, and none of the thousands of units in development in the Broadway Plan area will address that.

Wait, what about the 20 per cent below-market rental housing component? They are real, but these will mostly account for replacing the existing below-market walk-ups, which are being demolished to build these towers. And so, we will end up with essentially no net new affordable housing, which will leave us with a whole lot of mostly smaller, unaffordable units.

We are already seeing examples demonstrating monthly rents of $2,400 for a tiny studio unit and over $4,000 for a modestly-sized, two-bedroom unit. These are not family-sized homes, and they are not affordable, so who are they meant to serve?

Daily Hive Urbanized published a story about how many renters are finding housing they can afford by crowding into shared apartments. Well, guess what? Not a single market unit being planned will provide an escape route for these tenants. If they are crowded into shared housing already, they sure won’t be looking to pay the market rents we are already seeing demonstrated. The few below-market units remaining after previously evicted tenants return will be quickly snapped up, leaving the vast majority of units rented at market rates.

City Council is clearly hellbent on the idea that the answer to all our housing needs is to build towers, and lots of them. So, why is City Council so disconnected from the realities so many of us can plainly see about the real housing crisis in Vancouver? It’s not like they don’t hear it often enough from the many who come to speak at public meetings and hearings.

And why do people line up to speak to each development application, knowing full well that nothing they say will change anything? Speakers I have contacted feel that they have to put their voices on the record. That to not speak up gives the impression that residents are fully on board with what is going on and that maybe, just maybe, hearing people speak to the issues often enough could trigger some reflection on City Council. If only. It seems the rubber stamp is poised to fall as soon as the drudgery of listening to residents has been completed.

A notable and significant recent rezoning was the massive Safeway redevelopment at SkyTrain’s Commercial-Broadway Station. It would see 40-storey towers, twice the height of most Broadway Plan towers and yet, extraordinarily, provide zero below-market housing. It passed with only COPE city councillor Sean Orr in opposition because of the total lack of below-market housing. Other developers will wonder why they have to take the below-market hit while this “Transit Oriented Development” gets a free pass and with double the density.

There was a community plan, the Grandview-Woodland Community Plan, initiated by the City, for residents to give input and share their priorities. Volunteers invested countless hours in order to come up with a plan for significant densification of the site, towers included, but with community amenities and features which reflected the qualities of the neighbourhood. That plan was as much as entirely ignored.

City of Vancouver | Perkins&Will/Crombie Reit/Westbank | David Fine

City of Vancouver (David Fine)

Well over 100 public speakers came to speak, most opposing the rezoning. Speakers 132 and 134 were young women desperate for housing that they could actually expect to live in. They articulated the issues with clarity and eloquence. In a movie with Jimmy Stewart, their emotional and pointed comments would have turned the tide, and City Council would see the light. Roll credits. No such luck here. There had been over 10 years of delays on the Safeway development, and City Council seemed minded not to be on the hook for another delay.

The Safeway site would not evict anyone, which is the one bright spot, but in the case of the redevelopment of 1270-1290 West 11th Ave., some 30 units worth of tenants were fighting to avoid having their community destroyed for developer profit. Speaker number one was Teresa Alfeld, an articulate and smart tenant threatened with eviction in that building (she is also featured in the documentary I am making, Is this the City we want to build?).

Alfeld’s comments were powerful and sharp. Listen to her full eight-minute speech online. City Council keeps insisting that all is well because “we have the strongest tenant protections in North America,” but Alfeld spoke of a dysfunctional and disrespectful process with misinformation, broken promises, confused messaging, and ever-changing City staff assigned to the project.

Her pointed comments obviously went over the heads of City Council, who would ultimately approve this project unanimously, but she was clear about what this vote means to tenants: emotional stress and housing insecurity. The City even included information about how to deal with potential homelessness.

Speaker after speaker spoke of the failures of the City’s Tenant Relocation Protection Policy (TRPP), which moved Green city councillor Pete Fry to table a motion to seek to confirm with these tenants that the developer was meeting their obligations under the TRPP.

ABC city councillors furrowed their brow and questioned whether such a motion would wreak havoc on the whole Broadway Plan by setting a precedent. ABC city councillor Lenny Zhou worried that such a provision would cause delays to the project. ABC city councillor Mike Klassen said that he felt this motion could produce chaos and so would not support it, while ABC city councillor Brian Montague opposed because he worried that this could mean that every application could be subject to such an amendment.

City of Vancouver/David Fine

Remember, this motion was only about making sure the developer was meeting the existing regulations and only for this one development. Nothing more. No new, onerous hoops to jump through, just that City Council would confirm that existing tenants’ rights under the TRPP were being upheld, and yet ABC city councillors looked for every reason they could muster to suggest it was a bad idea.

OneCity city councillor Lucy Maloney supported the motion, and Orr was conspicuous by his absence from the public hearing for a development which would evict scores of people.

Josh White, the City’s general manager of planning, urban design, and sustainability, and the director of planning, stepped to the podium and assured city councillors that it would not set a precedent and would not cause any kind of material delay to the project. With that assurance, all but one ABC city councillor could not manage any good reason to oppose Fry’s motion, and so it managed to pass with one ABC councillor still opposed.

This tiny concession, merely to make sure the developer was living up to their agreed terms, was seen by Alfeld as a win, but in the context of the application itself passing unanimously, it was, to say the least, bittersweet.

Having said that, there is a silver lining which is really material to this whole issue. One of the tenants happened to speak to the building owner, who seemed perturbed by the opposition and the criticism about their treatment. He grumbled that the development would never get built anyway because “it doesn’t pencil.”

Yes, a good deal of this whole densification exercise appears not to be about building housing at all, but increasing land value by getting the permit and then flipping. In the case of the Safeway redevelopment, Crombie REIT — the property’s owner — were not even that subtle. They openly indicated that one of their options is to monetize the site. That’s another way of saying, “let’s not bother building anything. Instead, let’s sell it to someone else and walk away with a tidy profit.”

Clearly, many property owners are doing no less than gaming the Broadway Plan for profit without any intention of building housing, and for some reason, our City Council appears to be blind to it. We have to ask how this obvious ruse seems to be of little interest to City Council. Perhaps it’s because they are more concerned with the optics of having approved housing, even if a good deal of it never actually gets built, and what does get built will be unaffordable to most of the very people who are so desperate for housing in Vancouver. It’s not like they don’t know because speaker after speaker tells them exactly this.

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