Vancouver housing targets and plan

The plan is to take 20 years to approve the housing we need

The ten-year target is only half of the estimated need

Housing Vancouver 10 Year Housing Targets (2024 – 2033) and 3 Year Housing Action Plan (2024 – 2026). On today’s agenda for city council.

The most surprising discrepancy is that the city’s estimate of the ten-year housing need is 167,000 additional homes, but the city is planning to approve only 83,000 homes over the next ten years.

I didn’t see it in this report, but my understanding is that city staff are basically saying that the plan is to take 20 years (close to a generation) to build enough housing to meet people’s needs. In earlier discussion, the Vancouver Area Neighbours Association had suggested that staff also put forward a 10-year timeline as an option.

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An earlier email to city staff, with a summary up front and then more details below:

Thanks again to you and your team for taking the time to meet with us, and of course for the work that you're doing to plan for more desperately needed housing!

VANA members are very active and engaged because housing in Metro Vancouver is so scarce and expensive: younger people and renters are being crushed and driven out by high housing costs. Within the region, the city of Vancouver is especially important because it's geographically central, with easy access to lots of jobs, and so there's lots of people who want to live here.

To try to boil down some of our comments and requests:

1. Consider a 10-year timeline as well as the 20-year timeline. We're glad to see that the 10-year housing needs assessment (about 160,000 households) is pretty close to the estimate from Jens von Bergmann and Nathan Lauster. We'd ask that you consider a 10-year timeline as well as a 20-year timeline. Even if council isn't willing to support a target that's more like 16,000 net new homes per year instead of 8,500, it'd be good if they had that option.

2. Include asking rents, prices, and vacancy rates in status reports, not just progress against targets. If we look at asking rents, price per square foot, and vacancy rates, everything is flashing red and all the alarms are going off. If we look at approvals versus past targets, everything is green.

3. To meet a more ambitious target more rapidly, consider making it faster and more attractive to build low- and mid-rise housing (like small apartment buildings) across the city, and to bring down costs as much as possible, especially for rental housing. The big advantage of low- and mid-rise buildings, compared to high-rises, is that they should be much easier and faster to plan and build, and construction costs are lower than for high-rises.

Good luck with your consultation work!

Best regards,
Russil

Some further discussion and links:

Because we don't have enough housing, prices and asking rents have to rise to unbearable levels to keep people out, which also forces younger people to give up and leave. In 2015, it was already close to impossible to find a place to live in Metro Vancouver with a household income of less than $100,000. (Graph by Jens.)

Latest vacancy rates from CMHC: http://tinyurl.com/mw58xtvc

Ideally, small apartment buildings would be legal by right. Waterloo just moved forward on making it legal to build four storeys and four units on a single lot in residential neighbourhoods. [Burnaby has also done this.] According to public opinion polls, 70% of people in the city of Vancouver would support this as well. morehousing.ca/public-opinion

Coriolis's analysis of Vancouver's multiplex program (which restricts floor space to 1.0 FSR, for an average unit size of 1000 square feet on a 33x122 lot) found that it's not economically viable on a 33-foot lot, and that making the eight-unit rental option viable would require 2.0 FSR. morehousing.ca/multiplex-report

Adopting the province's SSMU guidelines would make many more projects economically viable: within 400 metres of frequent transit, the guidelines allow six units with 1.8 FSR (three storeys with 60% site coverage, average unit size of 1200 square feet on a 33-foot lot). morehousing.ca/bc-summary

Perhaps consider allowing four storeys (2.4 FSR) for a purpose-built rental project, similar to the small, simple apartment buildings built in the 1960s.

An illustration of the impact of Auckland's 2016 land use reform on land cost per square metre of floor space: morehousing.ca/land-cost

An illustration of the cost bottleneck, based on a 2022 analysis by Coriolis. If something is legal to build, but costs are too high, it won't get built. Cost increases are first absorbed by land lift, but once that's gone, projects have to wait for higher prices and rents - in other words, the additional costs are paid by homebuyers and renters. And this affects prices and asking rents for existing housing, not just new housing, since they compete with each other. morehousing.ca/cost-bottleneck

The city has direct control over some of these costs, such as density bonus fees and fixed amenity fees. Of course reducing approval times for low- and mid-rise housing would also be helpful, since delays and uncertainty are costly.