ABC rejects Social Housing Initiative
Well, that’s frustrating.
Three years ago, in December 2022, Vancouver city council voted unanimously to prepare recommendations making 12-storey social housing projects (including co-ops) legal by right in certain zones, without requiring a rezoning.
After three years of work by city staff, yesterday the recommendations were voted on by city council. The ABC majority voted to reject the recommendations.
That means social housing projects will still have to go through the slow and expensive ($500K to $1M) spot rezoning process.
People often say, “We don’t need more housing, we need more affordable housing.” So we should make it legal to build affordable housing? “No, that’s too much.”
The next opportunity to have a mayor and council that are willing to use the levers under their control to tackle the housing shortage is the upcoming 2026 election.
My simple test for city housing policy:
1) Do you support turning a parking lot and grocery store next to SkyTrain into lots of homes, and
2) do you support making it easier to build more non-market housing throughout the city?
Votes are in and only the OneCity party supports both 1 & 2.
Ken Sim and ABC Vancouver just killed the Social Housing Initiative. A program that could have actually gotten people off the streets and into homes? Dead.
If you’re a Vancouverite, I don’t need to tell you how hard it is to survive in this housing crisis. Whether you’re on the street, sleeping rough, working but living in your car, or raising kids while scraping by, everyone is getting crushed. You know it. I know it. Ken Sim knows it.
As a non-profit housing CEO, here’s why the Social Housing Initiative mattered. It offered a real pathway to build homes for our neighbours in need, without half a million dollars in paperwork. Without 8-12 months of unnecessary delays for projects Council never rejects anyway.
Ken Sim was elected on cutting red tape and bureaucratic waste. Today, he had his councillors vote against a program that would have done exactly that.
Solid breakdown of the disconnect betwen rhetoric and action. The irony of rejecting streamlining when red tape reduction was literally part of the campaign platform is pretty glaring. The point about non-profit projects already getting approved anyway makes the delay-plus-cost barrier seem more performative than substantive. If the stated goal is affordability but the mechanism to deliver it gets blocked, that's basically saying the goal doesn't actually matter.
While I don't always agree with ABC councillors decisions, this time they did the right thing. As someone who spent almost 10 years at CMHC approving social housing projects and has spent the last 40+ years building market and non market housing in both wood frame and concrete buildings the staff proposal was illl-conceived. Why?
This proposal was essentially rezoning over 33,500 properties for towers up to 20 storeys when many of these properties are nowhere near transit corridors. They are in the middle of low-scale residential areas.
Moreover, there wasn't a need to do this. First of all, given who is in greatest housing need, highrise buildings are the wrong building form. What's needed are low rise buildings that are not only more suitable in terms of design, but also overall cost per unit.
Furthermore, the key issue was how best to fast track worthy social housing projects. There are better ways to do this. As I said, this was using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
Council made the right decision and I'm happy to further discuss if anyone is interested!