Speaking notes for 888 Cambie

A lot of opposition to a 29-storey rental/hotel building downtown

Office buildings at 888 Cambie and 896 Cambie, July 2024

[The results of the OneCity nomination race will be announced later this morning. I’ll send out a post once they’re public.]

I spoke at Thursday’s public hearing to rezone a downtown site for a 29-storey mixed-use building with 160 rental apartments, 250 hotel rooms, and commercial space on the ground floor. There were a lot of opposition speakers.

Video from the public hearing.

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Hi, my name is Russil Wvong. I live in Vancouver. I don’t work in real estate or development. I’m calling in support of this rezoning.

Many of the speakers have talked about getting pushed out of the city, or having to commute for hours to get to work, because of high prices and rents, which I totally understand. A young friend worked at a restaurant on Main Street in Vancouver. They had a co-worker who was taking transit in from Surrey, at least one and a half hours each way.

What’s driving people out is the overall shortage of housing. Because we don’t have enough housing, prices and rents have to rise to unbearable levels to push people out.

When Vancouver is reluctant to build market housing, the people who would have lived in that market housing don’t vanish into thin air. They’ll end up finding somewhere else to live, bidding up prices and rents for existing housing, and we’ll get more trickle-down evictions. Which is exactly what’s happening right now.

When there’s an overall shortage of housing, the people who suffer the most are those with lower incomes, like the workers we’ve heard from today.

The basic situation is that the city of Vancouver is the geographic centre of the region, with easy access to lots of jobs. So demand is highest here. But at the same time, political resistance is also highest here. Vancouver is struggling to approve a building that’s less than 30 storeys tall, right downtown. Meanwhile, Burnaby is approving 80-storey towers out at Lougheed. It’s like pushing down on a balloon. Lack of housing in Vancouver results in higher prices and rents in Burnaby and Surrey. There’s even high-rises out in Langley.

In the last two or three years, a combination of more supply and weaker demand has resulted in higher vacancy rates, and declining asking rents. Affordability is improving … a little bit.

I understand people looking at this project and saying, this doesn’t provide any affordable housing. But what’s there now also doesn’t provide any housing, affordable or not.

Someone mentioned that there isn’t much of a community amenity contribution, only $1.5 million. Part of what city staff do when negotiating community amenity contributions is look at how much money the city can take. Their job is to maximize the city revenue. Market rents are coming down, which is a good thing, but that does also mean that there’s less money for the city to take.

The scale of the housing shortage in the city of Vancouver is immense. The city’s own estimate is that we’re short about 100,000 homes.

Of course building social housing, co-ops, and other forms of non-market housing will help directly. And I strongly support policies that make it easier to build them. But I would argue that in order to address the scale of the housing shortage, we also need market housing. Trying to block market housing projects is counterproductive. You end up with even more intense competition for existing housing, as people end up fighting over an unnecessarily small housing stock, and workers lose out.

Thank you.