Everyone simply assumes that housing costs too much because there is not enough "supply". But Vancouver is the living proof thats not true. And yet, UDI speaks, the NDP listens.
cityhallwatch.wordpress.com/2025/02/24/c...
Extracting 10 percent more each year out of renters who on average increase their income by only 3 percent is not an avenue that gets you to affordability - sadly.
That too
www.vanmag.com/city/real-es...
Condon supports the taxing of landowners for the “land lift,” or increased value of land due to rezoning, and using the money for social benefit. In his book, Broken City, the message is not to wish for enough affordability after an upzone, but instead to insist on it
www.velj.org/uploads/1/2/...
Detailed study that shows zoning is not the reason why housing costs too much. Other things are at fault.
M comments on the Vancouver Broadway plan last night to council.
“you sadly increase the market cost of the ‘land price residual.’ That puts money that would have gone to public benefit into the pocket of the land speculator.”
vancouversun.com/opinion/colu...
"When the city and province reduce expectations that highrise developers have to contribute to the public good through such things as attractive design and green spaces, Condon said,
Book review of Broken City. Thank you Francis.
"Broken City, though it leans towards realistic city-wide zoning approaches to combat the immediate crisis in housing and to restrain the seemingly inexorable rise in urban land prices"
www.commonwealth.ca/blog/broken-...
1 pm community open air discussion tomorrow - city hall park - about the Broadway Plan. I have comments to make. Hope to see you there. Bring an umbrella!
This is an illusion, one that leads us away from the thoughtful urban planning traditions that have shaped our city for the better.
Friends and neighbors,
We find ourselves with a plan motivated by a falsehood—an unsupported belief that removing planning and development controls for new market rental towers along the Broadway corridor will lower rents.
Some deep thoughts from Erick Villagomez on the perils of "urban renewal" thinking
spacing.ca/vancouver/20...
Revisit this plan and continue building the best modern city in North America.
Revisit this plan.
This is the opposite of planning and exhibits a maddeningly ignorant view of the way this urban land market works, and how we might capitalize on the strength of this vibrant urban land market to meet our social ends.
Revisit this plan. No one here is opposed to adding new residential density in the numbers anticipated. What is objected to is the narrow mindedness of this brutal non planning approach.
It wont, it will just make land speculators richer.
And yet this city and province are doing the opposite: they are removing zoning controls, removing land lift taxes, removing betterment fees, adhering blindly to the false premise that this will make housing more affordable.
Other cities are using these tools to secure 50% or more permanently affordable housing as a required feature of their plans.
- benefits such as parks, municipal infrastructure, and the social benefit we most need, affordable housing.
Tragically, the city is now intent on eliminating all planning controls - controls which if used intelligently as they have been used in the past, could shift a major portion of the increased real estate values spawned by the plan to be directed into social benefits
But the housing market can be leveraged to 'do the right thing" if the city uses the tools that it already has at its disposal: intelligent pro affordability zoning bylaws and development controls.
What then is to be done. First the market assumptions informing the plan must be challenged by the on the ground reality of how this housing market works. This housing market will never build affordable housing. The unfettered market only builds housing in areas where housing prices are going up.
Heartbreaking
The Broadway plan is thus critically flawed by its expressed faith in the ability of an unfettered housing market to meet our common desire for affordable housing - housing for our sons and daughters and the service workers who make this city run. We did more than anyone else. It didn't work.
The facts on the ground loudly proclaim that North America's most careful and multi generational project to add density - not just to the downtown but in every corner of the city - has made the city much better except in one crucial area: sadly adding density did not lower prices. Not one bit.
