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Vancouver's city-building over the past year has been dominated by two intertwined issues: housing the homeless, and affordability for the rest of us. These are dual manifestations of the same problem: the inability, to date, of our political, bureaucratic and development leaders to deliver more housing at lower prices to the Lower Mainland.

While house, and especially condo, prices are expected to recede here somewhat next year, Vancouver is stuck with a problem that could be its undoing as a metropolis: we pay Canada's highest housing prices on significantly less than Canada's highest salaries.

Paying our nation's highest ratio of incomes for housing is no more a minor bother — some inevitable West Coast eccentricity — than is this city's worsening drug problem. Last July saw Statistics Canada's publication of Head Office Employment in Canada, 1999-2005, a deeply sobering analysis of this city's track record in creating good jobs compared with our urban competitors.

Vancouver was the only major city to have a net loss of head office jobs — down a staggering one third so far this decade, while Calgary's increased by 64 per cent. Anyone who thinks this unfortunate trend is not due — at least in part — to our astronomical housing costs is dreaming in technicolour.

In the face of this, we are not getting imaginative thinking from our government and development industry leaders, but an unfortunate falling back on the policies which have utterly failed us in the past: packing more social housing into the Downtown Eastside, while ignoring the impediments to affordable shelter everywhere else.

This Christmas season thus sees a re-mounting of a pantomime Vancouver has seen many times before: an annual joint production by our political left and political right that repeats the same sad plotline year after year: “Let's park the poorest in a drugs slum.”

Stage right, the mavens of Point Grey and South Vancouver love it, as they do not have to provide social housing sites along their leafy lanes, even for their own senior citizens. Stage left, supposedly progressive community organizations can consolidate their power and funding streams by concentrating poverty into one area.

Let's stand back from this depressingly predictable spectacle and look for innovative solutions, a seasonal gift that will truly go on giving.

Social psychologists suggest a simple schema for how human societies make difficult decisions. There are what they call the “guilt cultures” where individual accountability drives action. Then there are the “shame cultures” where collective social processes and pressures are applied to assure the best joint outcome.

All of the social housing solutions offered this year are “guilt culture” solutions — Mayor Sullivan's playing for time by proposing a 2007 civic ballot vote on increased taxes to house the homeless, and Premier Campbell's announcement of 450 units of housing for the poorest only (but nothing for affordability generally), of which only one fifth will be in Vancouver.

Why not try a “shame culture” solution to housing the homeless and affordability for the rest of us?

There is a myth that Vancouver is too poor to take on our housing crisis, that only senior governments have the means. Untrue, as Vancouver has two civic aces up its sleeve that are now ripe for playing: its city-owned property endowment worth $1.2-billion, and its ability to set land uses and densities throughout the city.

Even in the wildest imaginings of our civic engineers and parks planners, no more than one half of this astonishing legacy is needed for current or future city needs.

With the property market now at its peak, why not do what our private developers are doing, and cash out of a portfolio that may soon lose value, and re-invest in an urgent public need — affordable housing?

Marketer Bob Rennie and developer Ian Gillespie sold out their mixed-use Woodward's development in a few hours with their slogan Go Bold or Move to the Suburbs, and only the same strategy will allow us to get past our hyper-concentration of social housing in the Downtown Eastside. City of Vancouver housing head Cameron Gray informs me that his office has worked with city planners to identify 19 social and affordable housing sites all over the city available to roll out right now, a dozen of them owned by the city itself, the rest offered gratis by developers.

The secret here is shame: commit the city to providing this land plus the political wherewithal for re-zoning 19 affordable housing sites in every neighbourhood in the city.

Which Vancouver district will be the first one to squawk about doing its share of solving this urgent issue: Collingwood, Dunbar, Kitsilano? Shame works, and in achieving a more truly “Vancouverist” balance of income groups and housing types here, only a city-wide blitz like this will work.

And for you, Premier Campbell? As a developer at Marathon Realty you learned the power of a deal.

If Vancouver's developers plus its mayor and council come to you with a huge portfolio of available land — plus a political commitment to rezoning and hanging on through NIMBY-ist whining — can we now shame you into bringing something into the deal?

With land and approvals on the table, and tax revenues never higher, the province should provide funding to build the blitz of new housing. This is the best public-private partnership going. With the 19 sites built, all of us can then shame the feds into a renewed national housing policy.

Shame on you, Vancouver — in this season of generosity — if you don't get down to solutions like these in the next few weeks.

tboddy@globeandmail.com