Mayor outlines seven "bold" strategies to grow Vancouver's housing supply

Mayor Ken Sim outlines seven "bold" strategies to grow Vancouver's housing supply

ABC Vancouver city councillors and Mayor Ken Sim at the housing press conference on October 11, 2023. (Kenneth Chan/Daily Hive)

Just ahead of the one-year anniversary of the ABC Vancouver party’s sweeping victory in the 2022 civic election, Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim has announced a multi-faceted strategy that he says defines his governing party’s approach to help make a meaningful change in the housing affordability and supply crisis.

Joined by all other ABC city councillors today in a press conference, Sim says he will be putting forward a member motion next week that summarizes seven key strategies, with a combination of new focuses and strategies already in play through City staff.

“It’s not just sending a signal to us internally, but it’s sending a signal to the entire City that this is what we’re focused on and making a stand on. This is how we want to be measured by. We want to do everything as quickly as possible,” said Sim, calling the move “bold.”

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“This work should have been done a long time ago. If it was done a long time ago, we wouldn’t be sitting here today and we’d be talking about other issues.”

Most of the strategies focus on catalyzing new housing supply and speeding up the review and approval processes. Here is a rundown:

1. Implementing 26 new Village Areas. As outlined in the Vancouver Plan, this will create new major clusters of townhouses, multiplex buildings, and mixed-use low-rise buildings, across the city. Sim says this will help create more interconnected communities where retail and residential uses blend together for more livable and walkable neighbourhoods, and complement the Missing Middle Policy. Last month, City Council also approved its gentle densification policy of enabling up to six strata homes or eight secured rental homes on a single-family lot.

The concept for 26 new Village Areas in the Vancouver Plan. (City of Vancouver)

2. Explore steps and measures to harmonize and align the Vancouver Building Code with the BC Building Code. The City of Vancouver’s separate building code from the provincial standards regulates how new construction, building alterations, repairs, and demolitions are completed. The changes will be done in a way that cuts unnecessary red tape but does not compromise the City’s leadership in sustainability and accessibility, according to Sim.

3. Review the City’s building height restrictions due to building shadowing impacts. Currently, the City has a unique practice of shaving off building height if it impacts the duration of sunlight on nearby parks, shopping streets, plazas, intersections, and other public spaces. This is in addition to City Council’s recent approval of a motion directing City staff to explore how protected mountain view cones impact potential added housing and job space, and identify obsolete view cones for possible removal.

4. Increasing the maximum floor plate size for residential towers. Larger floor plates will enable not only more homes on a lot through added density, but greater design flexibility.

5. Explore opportunities to expand and improve the City’s Certified Professional (CP) program. This measure of increasing the number of trained and certified professionals in the private sector will help accelerate more housing. The City of Burnaby also recently adopted a similar CP program.

6. Explore opportunities for more high-density, transit-oriented developments next to Vancouver’s underdeveloped SkyTrain stations. This will particularly focus on the rezoning of lands in close proximity to Nanaimo Station and 29th Avenue Station on the Expo Line, and Renfrew Station and Rupert Station on the Millennium Line. Similar to the Broadway Plan and Cambie Plan, the City is currently conducting an area planning process for the Renfrew and Rupert station area to identify more housing and employment opportunities.

Both Sim and ABC city councillor Mike Klassen commented on the need for greater density near SkyTrain stations, with Sim even commending the City of Burnaby’s tower-based, transit-oriented development.

7. Support the provincial government’s upcoming short-term rental enforcement policies. This will provide a signal to the provincial government that the City supports more measures to regulate short-term rentals like Airbnb. City Council recently approved a policy to hike the short-term rental license fee in Vancouver from the existing annual rate of $109 to $1,000 starting in 2024.

“Every single unit matters. One illegal short-term rental will eliminate one unit for the residents of Vancouver, so it’s a core priority,” said ABC city councillor Lenny Zhou.

Sim added, “This ABC majority council has already taken steps to address the need for tourists that will need accommodations. That being said, we need to strike a healthy balance between our tourism economy and our housing needs. This motion reaffirms our commitment to engage with the provincial government on enforcement and regulation of short-term rentals in the City of Vancouver.”

The mayor shared that beyond this motion outlining key strategies, there will be more announcements soon on social housing, supportive housing, and middle-income housing, along with measures to cut the municipal government’s red tape. He says City staff have performed a “substantial” review of its red tape, and they will be bringing up several hundred recommendations soon to cut these policies and regulations.

Late last month, the provincial government released its target housing orders for the City of Vancouver, requiring the municipal government to push nearly 29,000 new additional homes towards a state of completion and occupancy readiness — not merely approvals — over the next five years through 2028. This includes 8,015 ownership homes and 20,886 secured purpose-built rental homes, including 12,992 market rental units and 7,894 below-market rental units.

Moreover, the City is now approaching the halfway mark of its 10-year Housing Vancouver strategy, which measures approvals only. Housing Vancouver set a goal of approving 72,000 new homes between 2018 and 2017. As of 2022, the City has approved 48,114 units — condominiums, rental housing, social housing, townhouses, and laneway houses — equivalent to achieving a progress rate of 67% of the decade-long strategy.

“There’s an affordability crisis going on. There’s a lot of reasons why. We can talk about external macroeconomic factors and we have a supply and demand imbalance in the City of Vancouver. How we address that over the longer term is to build more housing,” said Sim.

“If we don’t build more housing, this will get worse. We are trying to build the future, we are trying to build as many units as possible so that people can actually live here, afford to live here, and build lives and raise their families here.”

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