Column: 12th&Cambie
So Mayor Kennedy Stewart wants to give owners of single-family homes the authority to build more homes on their property.
The mayor rolled out his plan this week.
He’s calling it Making Home, or Making Housing Options for Middle-Income Earners.
Under the plan, owners could convert or redevelop a single detached house into multiple homes, keep one for themselves or other family members, and sell the remaining homes to middle-income earners.
The number of homes would depend on what an owner wants and what the city will allow.
But Stewart is adamant at least two homes in a six-homes-on-one-property scenario would be set aside permanently for middle-income households; at least one home would be required to be affordable in a smaller redevelopment.
Who qualifies as a middle-income earner?
We heard in a technical briefing Monday that a person or a household that brings in between $80,000 to $120,000 a year in salary would qualify; each person would be income-tested before a sale could proceed.
Stewart’s announcement and subsequent media play triggered the Twitter crowd, who can always be relied on for informed and thoughtful comment.
A sampling: “Great plan. Make every buyer compete with developers.”
Another one: “Planners: densification on major arteries and transit hubs. Politicians: condo sales drying up. Let’s carve up SFHs into micro suites to sell ‘em.”
And this one: “Let me guess, this would only be allowed to happen east of Main Street, since the rest of the city wouldn’t stand for their property values to fall or be cut up.”
We heard a completely different take from the builders, small home advocates and an architect the mayor lined up for his technical briefing. Their conclusions: the plan was innovative and doable.
Before I get to some more of what they said, it’s important to note the mayor’s plan is still just that — a plan — and hasn’t gone before council for discussion, or approval.
It’s also important to know that Stewart’s move piggybacks on a motion that Coun. Lisa Dominato introduced in the summer and was deferred to this week, only to have it punted again to another meeting scheduled for Sept. 29; council being council got too busy with other issues this week.
That Sept. 29 meeting is when Stewart plans to amend Dominato’s motion to add details of his plan.
Dominato’s motion is titled, “Enabling Creative and Easily Replicated ‘Missing Middle’ Housing Pilots.” Her motion isn’t prescriptive, but calls for creative and experimental ground-oriented housing types in RS and RT zones suitable and affordable for a wider spectrum of Vancouver families across the city.
She points out, as the mayor did in his announcement, that almost 60 per cent of Vancouver is zoned for single-family detached homes that only five per cent of households in Metro Vancouver can afford.
We’re talking roughly 68,000 lots.
How expensive are Vancouver single-family homes in 2020?
Currently, the average price of a detached home on the East Side is $1.4 million.
The calculation provided by the mayor’s office says a buyer would need to earn $200,000 or more per year and come up with a $300,000 down payment to buy an East Side home.
If that home has a basement suite, the renter would need to earn $60,000 or more per year to pay for what would be expensive rent. Rent would be even higher for a renter living in a laneway house on the same property, according to the mayor’s office.
Under the mayor’s plan, down payments for buyers would be cheaper because there would be more owners and at least one of the homes — via a covenant — would have to be affordable to a household earning between $80,000 and $120,000.
We also heard that lock-off suites for renters, at conceivably cheaper rents, could also be part of the scenario, although the focus is on buyers who can’t get in to today’s market in Vancouver.
The mayor said such a program would create an inventory of housing and dampen speculation, which were talking points also used by some of the people he lined up to speak to media before his announcement, including Darrell Mussatto, the executive director at Small Housing BC.
In promoting the plan, Mussatto said there were examples of co-housing in North Vancouver where “little miniature” apartment buildings have been built with 18 to 30 suites, with a percentage permanently affordable.
A strata council ensures the suites remain affordable, he said.
“The way you really make sure this is done is you have a negative covenant put on title at the land titles office to say that that unit has to sell at a certain percentage below market value,” said Mussatto, who is a former mayor of the City of North Vancouver.
Added Mussatto: “We are supportive of what we’ve seen so far, and we’re anxious to get moving on this. It’s something the City of Vancouver could lead on, and it could quickly spread to other municipalities in the Lower Mainland, and throughout B.C.”
Marianne Amodio of Marianne Amodio and Harley Grusko Architects Inc. said minor zoning changes under the mayor’s plan can create more innovative housing, while still keeping the character of the neighbourhood.
“There still can be a front yard, there can still be a house, there’s still a backyard, there’s still a laneway house,” Amodio said. “And it’s remarkably similar to what as a city we used to do regularly in the past. In a lot of ways, I always say this is a kind of story to return to the way things used to be.”
She was referring to various housing types built over the years in Kitsilano, Strathcona and the area around city hall, near 12th Avenue and Cambie Street.
Michael Mortensen, a director of Liveable City Planning Ltd. and adjunct professor at the University of B.C., said the mayor’s plan was about breaking the single-family home into “more bite-sized pieces” and townhouse-style units.
“The economics behind it are pretty simple — let’s break bulk, let’s add more units using strata title legislation,” he said. “It’s old news, really, the strata title piece. We know we can do this, and we know we can do this in a physical form that fits into the scale and pattern of existing neighbourhoods.”
Absent from the technical briefing were skeptics such as Larry Benge, co-chair of the Coalition of Vancouver Neighbourhoods, who is concerned the mayor’s plan would be more of a gain for developers than for people who truly need affordable housing, particularly those on low incomes.
“I’m sitting here in my 1,800 square feet bungalow [in Kitsilano] and I could be surrounded by six-unit conglomerates on either side,” Benge said of the mayor’s proposal. “That’s one of the images that comes out of this.”
He said the coalition has long been adamant for neighbourhood-based planning processes and to hear the voices of citizens, many of whom want to preserve the character and uniqueness of where they live.
“That’s the strength of Vancouver — the different, and variety of neighbourhoods that we have,” he continued. “When you start pronouncing policies and programs that take a broad-brush approach to, in effect, rezoning large swaths of the city, that’s a problem.”
Benge wouldn’t predict how the mayor’s plan would be received by neighbourhoods because Stewart has not said which areas of the city would participate in a pilot program, except that he wants up to 100 homes tested in the experiment across Vancouver.
Benge is on the list of residents to speak to Dominato’s motion Sept. 29 and was glad to hear the mayor announce that his plan would come in the form of an amendment to the councillor’s motion.
This gives residents more time to research the proposal before it goes before council.
Often, Benge said, he will speak to council about a motion and then watch councillors or the mayor introduce an amendment or series of amendments after council has heard from residents, making residents’ speeches sometimes irrelevant to the initial motion.
All that said, Benge wondered who has the money to actually take the mayor up on his plan and redevelop their property during a pandemic, all in the name of helping middle-income earners out.
“Most homeowners, I would guess, don’t have the money to build something like this,” he said. “It’s not that these ideas aren’t attractive, that aren’t possible in certain circumstances, but the devil is in the details.”
@Howellings
