Colour me confused, but things didn't appear to be exactly as advertised when Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson made an announcement this week that the City would build 400 new "affordable" housing units on four City-owned sites.
It was characterized as a good-news announcement; units would rent in the range of $375 per month for single-room units to $2,000 for family-oriented apartments. The definition of affordable is clearly malleable.
"At City Hall we'll keep doing everything we can to tackle our housing affordability crisis head on," the mayor said in a news release.
But hold off on your rejoicing and declarations that this could be the beginning of the end to the city's rental-housing woes.
First, consider the wording of the announcement.
The details, contained in the release, and as related by the mayor and others, are murky at best. The headline states plainly, "Vancouver's Affordable Housing Agency building 400 new affordable rental homes." But further down it reads, "The City of Vancouver's Affordable Housing Agency is taking steps to build 400 new affordable homes on four City-owned sites worth $50-million. These sites are the first four of the 20 City-owned sites offered to senior levels of government to build affordable homes in partnership with VAHA [Vancouver Affordable Housing Agency]."
"Taking steps" is different from actually building; and offering sites to senior levels of government "to build affordable homes" makes it sound like it's the provincial and federal governments doing the building.
Then there's a quote from Mukhtar Latif, the City's chief housing officer and CEO of the VAHA, who says the city has committed resources to planning the projects, but will be "seeking to work with funding partners to develop these sites."
When I asked Mr. Latif to clarify who would pay for what, he told me: "City council has allocated substantial resources to enable these sites to be brought forward in the hope that we will be able to capture any federal and provincial funding that will be announced in the coming months as they put together their budgets.
" We are getting ourselves ready to put ourselves in a position to secure funding going forward."
Huh?
When I asked him outright whether the completion of the 400 units was contingent on federal and provincial funding, Mr. Latif said the plan was to work with developers who could maximize land use, reduce building costs and arrange a mortgage to cover construction costs. I think that means no, it is not contingent on funding.
Mr. Latif says funding from senior levels of government will help "deepen affordability."
All of this leads to the question: What is happening with the $2.3-billion the federal government says it will spend on affordable housing over the next two years? Roughly one-third of it has been earmarked for First Nations and northern communities with the remainder going to provinces and territories to decide how and where the money will be spent.
What's clear is that the federal commitment and the City's pledge to build (sort of) 400 new units of housing will offer no immediate relief for renters in Vancouver who are facing a vacancy rate of 0.6 per cent, increasing rents, so-called "renovictions" and landlords who have recognized the profits that can be had with short-term rentals.
I've talked to a lot of people about rental housing this week, and without fail they all go back to the same thing: The federal government stopped funding affordable housing in 1993 and now we live with the consequences.
Gordon Price, the former city councillor who is now the director of Simon Fraser University's City Program, said exactly that. He told me that while 400 units may be a good start, unless we get back to a long-term strategy led by the federal government nothing else will make a difference. "Remember, it's their responsibility; there's no doubt about that."
Economist Tom Davidoff of the University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Business thinks now would be a good time for Ottawa to get back into building affordable housing. "The federal government can borrow money for so cheap these days," he said. Prof. Davidoff says Ottawa should be seeing investments in rental housing as infrastructure spending that actually pays a return.
Local politicians, academics, anti-poverty activists, tenants' rights groups – all of them point to the federal government abdicating its responsibility to build housing as the reason we're where we are now.
A commitment to build 400 new units – regardless of who is building them – is laudable, but let's call it what it is: a drop in the bucket.
Stephen Quinn is the host of On the Coast on CBC Radio One, 88.1 FM and 690 AM in Vancouver.