Housing Happy Hour

Tuesday May 21, 7 to 9 pm, at Portland Craft (not Hero's Welcome)

If you’d like to meet pro-housing people in Vancouver, our next Housing Happy Hour will be Tuesday May 21, at Portland Craft. (The original plan was Hero’s Welcome, but it turns out that they have trivia that night!)

When: Tuesday May 21, 7 to 9 pm
Where: Hero’s Welcome, 3917 Main Street Portland Craft, 3835 Main Street (Main at 23rd)

No real agenda, it’s just an opportunity to get together and talk about housing. Why is housing in Metro Vancouver so scarce and expensive, and what should we do about it?

If you’re interested (even if you’re not sure you’ll be able to make it), please email me (russilwvong@gmail.com), so that we can give the pub a rough idea of how many people are coming.

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Some thoughts:

People want to live and work here (there’s lots of jobs here), and other people want to build housing for them. But neighbourhood opposition makes it slow and difficult to get permission (“it’s easier to elect a pope”), and municipal governments also tax new housing like a gold mine. The result is that housing is incredibly scarce, with vacancy rates near zero. Prices and rents have to rise to unbearable levels to push people out.

This isn’t sustainable: when younger people can’t afford to live here, the healthcare system will collapse. And since Covid and the sudden surge in people working from home, Metro Vancouver’s housing shortage has spilled over to the rest of BC and to Alberta.

So what can we do about it?

• The city of Vancouver’s approval process has a tremendous amount of micromanagement, amounting to co-design rather than regulation. The approval process should be much simpler, less labour-intensive, and much faster.

• We should allow small apartment buildings everywhere. People aren’t building apartment buildings out of some perverse desire to ruin neighbourhoods - it’s because we have limited land.

• We should also allow tall apartment buildings to be taller.

• Municipal governments should rely less on up-front development charges (like paying high fees for membership in an increasingly fancy country club) and more on annual revenue.