Link to comment on the Times Colonist website
Broader housing affordability is essential because we also need attainable homes for teachers, nurses, doctors and a whole lot of other people.
A commentary by a member of Victoria city council.
The recent commentary, “Victoria council needs to get serious about affordable housing” raises a crucial issue—affordable housing—but the public needs important information in order to understand the problem and the solutions.
First, Victoria city council is serious about affordable housing and housing affordability.
Second, the North-America-wide housing crisis was mainly the result of two colossal policy failures by governments:
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A conservative ideology of “small government” (spending cuts for the poor and tax cuts for the rich) in the 1980s and 1990s that slashed spending on new social housing.
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Cities obstructing new housing, creating a massive shortage that drove up rents and purchase costs across the continent.
This crisis has been decades in the making, and it will take years to undo. However, because governments did it, we can undo it. We must and we will, but we need to be realistic about how.
Cities in Canada are one level of government, along with federal, provincial and regional governments, and cities can’t create affordable housing on their own.
We work with our partner governments and with non-profit housing developers and operators. The main role of cities is approving land use applications (housing proposals), and we use that power to incentivize affordable housing, as well as housing affordability more broadly.
Victoria councils have directed staff to fast-track approval of affordable housing, giving it preferential treatment over other proposals; staff literally drop other files when an affordable housing proposal comes in the door.
Council has also advanced affordable housing proposals mixed in with larger market housing projects.
The Caledonia-Douglas project includes is a 16-storey building with 131 below-market homes as part of a larger project that include purpose-built rental and condo buildings.
The Greater Victoria Housing Society plans to build an 18- to 23-storey tower with 160 to 220 affordable units as part of the Bayview Roundhouse project.
So called “Inclusionary zoning” (IZ) is different.
The idea sounds good—require a few affordable suites inside market condo buildings—but the reality is that it’s more challenging for non-profit housing operators to manage suites sprinkled around in various condos.
Moreover, builders are not keen; Victoria’s IZ policy resulted in builders simply avoiding condos and moving into building rentals, which we also need, but these buildings don’t have IZ requirements.
New, purpose-built affordable housing isn’t the whole picture. We also need to talk about broader housing affordability, and future affordable housing.
Broader housing affordability is essential because we also need attainable homes for teachers, nurses, doctors and a whole lot of other people. Broader affordability comes from addressing the overall housing shortage.
Victoria is already short (we have a “latent demand”) of more than 8,000 homes, and we need to add more than a thousand a year to address annual population increase.
That means new market housing is also desperately needed. New housing is always expensive. New affordable housing requires massive subsidies to make it affordable, including free land and cash grants to help pay for construction.
The majority of today’s affordable housing was once new market housing, and it has just aged into affordability. New market housing is the affordable housing of the future.
If we don’t allow it to be built, we eliminate a lot of future affordable housing. That’s what happened over the past few decades, as municipalities blocked much new housing—especially multi-family—through restrictive zoning rules.
Another factor is movement of people across the housing spectrum. When new market homes are added, some people with rising incomes or growing families move into them, freeing relatively affordable homes for others with more average incomes.
In turn, the homes those folks vacate are then freed up for people with modest incomes, and so on. These moving chains, also known as vacancy chains, are well-documented in cities around the world and contribute to greater affordability throughout the housing cost spectrum.
This is why it’s important that council has approved about 7,000 new homes since the beginning of our term. New housing reduces competition for more affordable homes — a competition that lower-income people always lose. And these new homes will also provide for more affordable housing in the future.
The bottom line is that cities need to work with partners to get new affordable housing built, and we need to allow new market housing to be built for broader affordability, and for future affordable housing.
Victoria city council is working flat out in both areas. And we will continue to do so.