Don Davies' opposition to rental housing
Why I'm volunteering with Amy K. Gill
[Update: Amy K. Gill lost very narrowly to Don Davies - the difference was about 300 votes, or less than 1%. It was the sixth-closest race in the country. Considering that Don Davies won by more than 25% in 2021, a narrow loss was a good result for Amy, although of course a narrow victory would have been even better! We’ll see what happens next time.]
Someone asked on Reddit:
So who exactly is Amy Gill? Can't find any substantive information on her web page and it feels like she was just paradropped into this riding to win a seat for the Liberals. Why should we vote for her over Don Davies?
Amy K. Gill is a mid-career professional - her background is in accounting and finance, she's been a CPA for 15 years and has served as a chief financial officer in both private-sector and non-profit organizations. She's also on the boards of RainCity Housing and DIVERSEcity. She's accustomed to making things work in a large and complex organization. If you'd like to see more details on her work experience, she's got a LinkedIn page. On a personal level, she's one of five sisters and has a fair number of nieces and nephews.
For me the big challenge in Vancouver (at the root of so many other problems) is that housing is unbearably scarce and expensive, resulting in younger people and renters being crushed and driven out by high housing costs. When younger people can't afford to live here, how is the healthcare system supposed to work? How are hospitals supposed to find nurses and even doctors?
Amy has direct experience with the maddening process of trying to get approval to build desperately needed housing. She was involved with a project that took six years to get approval. ("It's easier to elect a pope than to approve a small apartment building in the city of Vancouver.") She was recruited to her current role (CFO for the Vancouver Chinatown Foundation), from a private-sector position, because the foundation (which runs non-profit housing projects for seniors) wanted someone with experience in building housing.
Why not Don Davies?
In short, Don Davies is literally a NIMBY, someone opposed to new housing.
I know people like Don Davies a lot, but I think if you actually want to solve a problem like housing being scarce and expensive, you need to understand the problem. If you don't understand what's going on, you can easily end up pushing for supposed remedies that are ineffective or counterproductive. As Mario Polese says in The Wealth and Poverty of Regions: "As in medicine, the essential first step to a cure is an accurate diagnosis."
My assessment is that Don is much better at describing a problem than he is at identifying the correct diagnosis and coming up with practical solutions. In the running battle over new housing, between people who say "this is too much, too soon" (the Jean Swanson / Colleen Hardwick position) and "this is too little, too late" (younger people and renters who are being crushed and driven out because housing is so scarce and expensive), somehow he ended up on the wrong side. He organized a neighbourhood group (the Fraser Street Neighbourhood Coalition) to oppose a series of six-storey rental buildings in his neighbourhood.
As Alex Hemingway of the CCPA put it on Twitter, as a renter living in precarious and substandard housing, it was a surreal experience to hear his own NDP MP argue against rental housing. Video from the public hearing for the six-storey rezoning at Fraser and 23rd, where both Alex and Don spoke, with direct links to each speaker.
To me, party politics is a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Housing is an issue that cuts across party lines. At the very same public hearing where Don Davies argued against rental housing, I was really impressed by Kennedy Stewart's clear explanation of how it would be far more expensive for someone to try to buy a $1.5 million half-duplex (which was all that could be built under the existing zoning); I ended up running on Kennedy’s slate in the 2022 municipal election. I strongly support the BC NDP's push for more housing, and I volunteered on Christine Boyle's campaign in Vancouver - Little Mountain. But somehow Don Davies has ended up buying into the Patrick Condon / Colleen Hardwick argument that more supply isn't going to make any difference.
Centrist politicians sometimes talk about "growing the pie" instead of just slicing it differently. (Carney: "You can't redistribute what you don't have.") The progressive counterargument is that growth is a good thing, but inequality (how you slice the pie) is even more important. Don Davies' position on housing seems to me like an extreme example: focusing so much on housing inequality and taking growth so much for granted that he ends up opposing more badly-needed secure rental housing.
For anyone reading this who's concerned about housing, I'd highly recommend reading the MacPhail Report, from a joint federal-provincial expert panel led by Joy MacPhail. Demand for housing in Metro Vancouver is high - we have lots of jobs and a temperate climate, so lots of people want to live and work here. The question is, why is supply so limited? The answer is, at the municipal level we make it really difficult to get permission, and we also place extremely heavy taxes on new housing.
What happens next?
I don't want to downplay Don's 17 years of service to Vancouver Kingsway. He’s had a good run. But it's an intense job, and my sense is that it's pretty difficult to take on new ideas while you're serving in this role. (Numerous NDP people have repeatedly tried and failed to change Don's mind on the need for more housing.) So you end up relying on whatever ideas and beliefs you had going in. And things have changed a lot since 2008, when Don was first elected.
With Trump's trade war, we're basically having Brexit forced on us, which is going to result in less investment (who can make long-term investment decisions in the middle of the chaos in the White House?) and less economic growth. Figuring out how to strengthen long-term investment and economic growth is an urgent problem. In Metro Vancouver, one extremely obvious way to strengthen long-term investment is to simply make it easier to build new housing (a form of investment that lasts for 60 years or so).
One concrete idea. The Vancouver Kingsway riding has three SkyTrain stations: Nanaimo, 29th Avenue, and Joyce. Joyce has a lot of high-rises, but Nanaimo and 29th Avenue still look like they did in the 1980s. Why? Apparently the city hasn't upgraded the sewer capacity near the stations. But as Deny Sullivan has observed, because building housing is so expensive in relation to water and sewer upgrades, this is a small tail wagging a very big dog. Federal funding to upgrade the sewer capacity near these stations more rapidly, combined with municipal upzoning of the land, would unlock a tremendous amount of new housing investment.
I had a direct-message conversation recently with a Don Davies supporter, who wrote that I seemed to be focusing entirely on housing, which isn’t going to convince voters when Don Davies has done so many other great things.
I wrote:
To me, politics is a means rather than an end in itself. For younger people and renters who are being crushed and driven out by the housing shortage, what's more important than housing? For that matter, how's the healthcare system supposed to work when younger people can't afford to live here? As I see it, the goal of elected officials isn't to be re-elected, it's to actually fix problems.
If Don Davies has been elected five times in seventeen years, but he hasn't helped to fix the housing shortage and doesn't even understand what's going on, is he a great success, or is he a failure?
How to help
Election Day is on Monday April 28. If you’d like to help Amy unseat Don:
Please pass the word on to people you know in Vancouver Kingsway.
You can make a donation to the Vancouver Kingsway Liberals. There’s a 75% refundable tax credit on federal donations up to $400, so if you haven’t made any other federal donations this year, you get $300 back and the cost to you is only $100. Donation link.
If you have time, you can also volunteer to go out as part of a team and remind people to vote. We especially need volunteers on Election Day itself. Sign up for a volunteer shift.
By the way, if anyone close to Don is reading this: please ask him to read the MacPhail Report.
I voted for Don already, mainly because you didn't get the nom. As a renter, I'm probably shooting myself in the foot, but I just didn't know enough about Amy's stance on housing to be comfortable with that choice.