Condos in the Gilmore area of Burnaby are seen behind houses in east Vancouver, B.C., on Sept. 20, 2015.DARRYL DYCK/The Globe and Mail
Since he was first elected in 2002, former Burnaby mayor Derek Corrigan sat by as vast tracts of affordable walk-up apartments in his city were bulldozed to make way for shiny new condo towers. Burnaby amassed a healthy cash reserve – $1.3-billion – but like Ebenezer Scrooge, spent very little to help poor residents by providing social or affordable housing. As a result, many of Burnaby’s low-income residents were forced to relocate to New Westminster, Surrey and even Vancouver, neighbouring municipalities struggling with their own low vacancy rates and rising property values.
Mr. Corrigan defended his stand on principle. Housing, he argued, is the responsibility of higher levels of government and community amenity contributions paid to cities by developers should be used only for community benefits like parks, ice rinks and recreation centres.
Historically, that was a workable approach, but when faced with an affordable-housing crisis of epic proportions, mayors in the neighbouring municipalities of Vancouver and New Westminster switched gears and began to craft policy designed to invest in social housing and preserve rental stock.
If there was one thing mayoral candidates learned during this election, it was that you ignore affordability problems at your peril. Mr. Corrigan’s housing epiphany came right before the election, only when it grew increasingly obvious his electorate was prepared to dump him. It was too late; he lost.
In Vancouver, housing led to the downfall of an entire party – Vision Vancouver – even though the city had built 2,849 units of social, supportive and co-op housing since 2009. Not all of that was a net gain to the city’s affordable housing stock (some private-sector affordable housing was lost during that time as well). Despite the city’s efforts, it was too little, too late for former Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson who, seeing his party’s fortunes tank over the housing crisis, opted not to run again. One of the few surviving mayors north of the Fraser was Jonathan Coté who, as mayor of New Westminster since 2014, has consistently worked to preserve existing affordable rental stock and add more by building social housing.
Mr. Coté and his two newly-elected mayoral counterparts, Kennedy Stewart in Vancouver and Mike Hurley in Burnaby, have already started a conversation about the affordable housing file with a view to developing regional best practices. Those might include Vancouver’s recent push, with the help of the provincial government, to erect 600 units of temporary modular housing for homeless people.
It could also include New Westminster’s moratorium on the conversion of rental buildings to condominiums, except in cases of heritage revitalization. New Westminster also refuses to rezone for higher density developments if it means the demolition of existing rental stock. Mr. Hurley says that’s what led to Burnaby’s “demovictions” and he intends to be very cautious going forward.
Mr. Stewart says his first order of business is to pry money from the federal government for affordable housing. So, after congratulating Mr. Coté on his re-election, he talked to him about New Westminster’s techniques for securing senior-government investment in housing. “He told me that when everybody was saying no, he was saying yes,” Mr. Stewart says.
Both New Westminster and Vancouver have mechanisms in place to leverage city land for non-market housing. The previous Vancouver council, in one of its final motions, created an affordable housing endowment fund to amass funding and land for more projects.
Mr. Coté says there is no end of good ideas floating around, but because municipalities operate in silos, there is no cross-boundary coordination. He believes there is much to be gained by neighbouring cities adopting similar policies. He says he’d love to share his city’s strategy for protecting rental stock with neighbouring Burnaby, which has struggled with affordable housing demolitions. Mr. Hurley says he’s keen to learn from his neighbours and will meet with them soon.
If Burnaby develops strong policies to protect rentals and develop non-market and social housing, and shoulders its responsibility for housing low-income residents, it will help ease the stress on Vancouver and New Westminster. As Mr. Stewart notes, Boundary Road, which divides Burnaby and Vancouver, is only a political line. “There isn’t a wall there.” In the end, all problems are regional, he says. The solutions likely are as well.