EcoDensity: making Vancouver sustainable, livable, affordable

[GenWhy?]

"The listing describes the one-bedroom laneway house and the three-bedroom basement suite as “mortgage helpers,” and when visitors tour the property, the agent quietly touts the two as bringing over $19,000 a month in revenue as short-term rentals...."

Correct me if I'm wrong but the person who is advertising this is advertising an illegal operation? If I recall you're only allowed to short-term rent out your primary residence that you live in and not the secondary suites on your property. And if they're doing that, they're doing that without the required business license. I can't imagine the nightmare to enforce this from the City's POV.

At least it appears we know (if I read the article right) that Draco Pacific Reality is promoting at least one illegal activity, that we know of for housing.

[whatnext]

Originally Posted by GenWhy?

"The listing describes the one-bedroom laneway house and the three-bedroom basement suite as “mortgage helpers,” and when visitors tour the property, the agent quietly touts the two as bringing over $19,000 a month in revenue as short-term rentals...."

Correct me if I'm wrong but the person who is advertising this is advertising an illegal operation? If I recall you're only allowed to short-term rent out your primary residence that you live in and not the secondary suites on your property. And if they're doing that, they're doing that without the required business license. I can't imagine the nightmare to enforce this from the City's POV.

At least it appears we know (if I read the article right) that Draco Pacific Reality is promoting at least one illegal activity, that we know of for housing.

What, Layla Yang involved in something so untoward and unseemly? Perish the thought.

B.C. realtor denies making threatening call

This gargantuan US$16 million Canadian ‘farmhouse’ is last hurrah for a wild real estate bonanza, fuelled by Chinese money

Alleged Canada property tax dodge for foreign buyers is described in Vancouver legal action

[GenWhy?]

Exactly, so crack down on these people and let us continue with the multiplex program. Enhance it. Away we go

[Sheba]

I think this is the right thread - Ottawa to provide nearly $500 million in loans for new rental housing in Vancouver

Ottawa says it will provide $500 million in low-interest loans to help build more than 1,100 rental units at eight locations in Vancouver, plus at the University of B.C.

Federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser made the announcement Wednesday at UBC, where he pledged the federal government would help finance more housing projects that working Vancouverites can afford.

...

Fraser did not say where the projects, other than the one at UBC with 152 units, would be built but said they will all be within walking distance of rapid transit.

He said announcements about the location of the rental units will be made by the City of Vancouver in the weeks ahead.

He promised that each rental building will offer units at below market value in alignment with average salaries, and that they would be offered at 30 per cent of the median household income.

“So to the extent that if the prices are at risk of going up, it will only do so if wages in the city are going up as well,” said Fraser.

Fraser said the plan is to create more rental homes for working people who cannot find vacancies at a price that their job allows.

...

Earlier this week in Burnaby, Fraser said the federal government should have never got out of the housing business, as even high-income professionals are struggling to find affordable housing.

He said past federal governments were mostly preoccupied with providing subsidized housing to low-income people, but there’s been a fundamental shift as working professionals struggle to afford a home.

...

[Kisai]

Originally Posted by GenWhy?

"The listing describes the one-bedroom laneway house and the three-bedroom basement suite as “mortgage helpers,” and when visitors tour the property, the agent quietly touts the two as bringing over $19,000 a month in revenue as short-term rentals...."

Correct me if I'm wrong but the person who is advertising this is advertising an illegal operation? If I recall you're only allowed to short-term rent out your primary residence that you live in and not the secondary suites on your property. And if they're doing that, they're doing that without the required business license. I can't imagine the nightmare to enforce this from the City's POV.

At least it appears we know (if I read the article right) that Draco Pacific Reality is promoting at least one illegal activity, that we know of for housing.

"Illegal suites" are ALL basement suites without a separate address.

They are "illegal" as in the tenant has zero recourse, and if the owner of the property rents out the other half of the building to another tenant, they certainly aren't going to intervene.

Now back in the late 70's, early 80's, every single home built in Metro Vancouver and elsewhere in the province, was built with a "inlaw suite"/"mortgage helper"

These are always illegal suites. They only became "kind of legal to rent", since 2004, but that resulted in people building not just "one" illegal suite, but two.,

And that's a problem, and you see this in comments on places like CBC and Vancouver Reddit, where people want to turn SFH into duplex/triplex/quadplexes, without making them safe to actually sleep in.

A "legal" suite has to minimally have two means of egress (which basement suites never have, let alone two), and separate addresses for electricity, gas, water, sewage, internet, etc to be billed to. Most importantly, parking spaces ON the property for all suites, which is another thing that illegal suites rarely have.

If any SFH housing should be turned into proper MDU, it should be turned into a proper MDU apartment building with the HVAC, water, sewage included in rent like a real MDU property. Condo's are stratafied, and you end up paying nearly as much in strata fees as you do in rent, and you STILL end up paying for HVAC through your electricity.

Go look at the strata fees in Vancouver and then look at the fees in Calgary and Edmonton. Strata fees in Edmonton are as much as rent is in Vancouver, with sometimes seeing $900 to $1200/mo for places that are $400 in Vancouver. So "the grass isn't greener" when people get told to move somewhere cheaper.

Time and time again, you'll see some suggestion to bring down the cost of housing in Vancouver, and they're always the worst ideas that a 12 year old could see the holes in.

- Build housing out of wood instead of concrete. So now it costs 3 times as much to heat in the winter and becomes an oven in the summer. If you want to build housing out of wood, you need to make that a property cooled by a heatpump, otherwise you're just burdening the person living in it with extortionate electricity costs to operate the crappiest heating and cooling solution. It would be better to build everything out of concrete for thermal and acoustic reasons. Not to mention after the leaky condo saga, I don't see why you'd build any MDU out of wood. Developers just do not give a crap about building good housing unless a gun is to their head.
- Make every basement suite legal, absolutely stupid, creating death traps.
- Convert patios into bedrooms, absolutely stupid, death trap, even worse than the basement suite, because there's no heat.
- Allow microsuites, Ugh, NO housing unit should ever be smaller than 500sq ft unless it's student/senior housing in a building that supplies those missing services. No full-size kitchen? Then that building better have a restaurant or cafeteria that is free to the residents. But no, developers would rather everyone sleep in capsule hotels and not have any personal space if they weren't required to make them at least 398sq ft.

Realistically, we need to stop the housing shrink-ray. A minimum of 250sq ft per bedroom on top of 250sq ft to cover the kitchen and bathroom. No more of these fake bedrooms with no closets that can't fit a queen size bed in.

All that's happened by allowing illegal basement suites, is that it's driven up the cost of housing, because now everyone is REQUIRED to have an illegal suite in order to pay their mortgage. It went from "extra money" to "requirement", and there is no way out of this.

I'd love nothing more than to see interest rates continue to climb and force banks into losing money as everyone starts declaring bankruptcy, because I don't believe for a second that housing should cost this much, and the reason for these 100% YOY price increases is because of foreigners trading properties like stocks.

Yes, there is a shortage of rental supply, but there is a shortage of ALL supply, caused by people with no connections to the province, buying the property and deciding to leave it empty, or operate illegal hotels via AirBnB.

[Changing City]

Originally Posted by Kisai

"Illegal suites" are ALL basement suites without a separate address...

Some of what you state is inaccurate. I'm pretty certain suites can still be legal that don't have electricity, gas, or water on a seperate service - those are included in the rent. They also aren't required to have a separate address - in many places they can't have one. For example - in Coquitlam "A suite will not be assigned a separate address by the City or be eligible for separate services, such as garbage and recycling". In many municipalties they're legal with one exit to the outside, although they may have one into the main house as well.

[ecbin]

Originally Posted by Kisai

"Illegal suites" are ALL basement suites without a separate address.

This is not true in all cities - in Burnaby you are not given a separate address if you have a legal suite.

Originally Posted by Kisai

A "legal" suite has to minimally have two means of egress (which basement suites never have, let alone two), and separate addresses for electricity, gas, water, sewage, internet, etc to be billed to. Most importantly, parking spaces ON the property for all suites, which is another thing that illegal suites rarely have.

This is not entirely accurate either as pointed out above - this varies by city. Regarding egress - this is covered by having a window that's large enough to climb out of it.

Parking requirements for suites are silly for suites especially near transit friendly areas and it's even sillier when laneways have no parking requirements (Burnaby requires a parking spot for a secondary suite but not for laneways, Vancouver lets you go "drop" a spot by adding a laneway).

[s211]

Originally Posted by Kisai

Go look at the strata fees in Vancouver and then look at the fees in Calgary and Edmonton. Strata fees in Edmonton are as much as rent is in Vancouver, with sometimes seeing $900 to $1200/mo for places that are $400 in Vancouver. So "the grass isn't greener" when people get told to move somewhere cheaper.

It may be appropriate to look at what services are or not included in strata fees in all three cities.

[Jebby]

Originally Posted by Kisai

- Build housing out of wood instead of concrete. So now it costs 3 times as much to heat in the winter and becomes an oven in the summer. If you want to build housing out of wood, you need to make that a property cooled by a heatpump, otherwise you're just burdening the person living in it with extortionate electricity costs to operate the crappiest heating and cooling solution. It would be better to build everything out of concrete for thermal and acoustic reasons. Not to mention after the leaky condo saga, I don't see why you'd build any MDU out of wood. Developers just do not give a crap about building good housing unless a gun is to their head.

This is such a dumb comment. You can have extremely well insulated and airtight buildings with wood. It's not about the inner skin or frame that determines whether a building is well insulated.

[whatnext]

Originally Posted by Sheba

I think this is the right thread - Ottawa to provide nearly $500 million in loans for new rental housing in Vancouver

Right off the top at least one of those buildings (UBC) was already underway like their previous River District announcement. That's my beef with many of these announcements, they aren't necessarily spurring new construction. Does anybody really think a Vancouver-area developer is going to pull the plug on a building already well along in construction because interest rates have risen?

[Vin]

Originally Posted by Jebby

This is such a dumb comment. You can have extremely well insulated and airtight buildings with wood. It's not about the inner skin or frame that determines whether a building is well insulated.

That's not a dumb comment. Wood does warp or shift over time, allowing more gaps to loose heat. What's more, it's a fire hazard. I dare say that the majority of those 100 people in Hawaii did not have to perish if the buildings there were all built of concrete.

[FarmerHaight]

As housing prices have soared in major cities across the United States and throughout much of the developed world, it has become normal for people to move away from the places with the strongest economies and best jobs because those places are unaffordable. Prosperous cities increasingly operate like private clubs, auctioning off a limited number of homes to the highest bidders.

Tokyo is different.

In the past half century, by investing in transit and allowing development, the city has added more housing units than the total number of units in New York City. It has remained affordable by becoming the world’s largest city. It has become the world’s largest city by remaining affordable.

Two full-time workers earning Tokyo’s minimum wage can comfortably afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in six of the city’s 23 wards. By contrast, two people working minimum-wage jobs cannot afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in any of the 23 counties in the New York metropolitan area.

Maintaining an abundance of affordable housing has its downsides. Green space is scarce in Tokyo, living spaces are small by Western standards, and relentless redevelopment disrupts communities.

But the benefits are profound. Those who want to live in Tokyo generally can afford to do so. There is little homelessness here. The city remains economically diverse, preserving broad access to urban amenities and opportunities. And because rent consumes a smaller share of income, people have more money for other things — or they can get by on smaller salaries — which helps to preserve the city’s vibrant fabric of small restaurants, businesses and craft workshops.

...

The Tokyu Railways Company developed the line in the 1950s as the backbone for a series of suburban neighborhoods of single-family homes inspired by the leafy suburbs of European and American cities — places like Garden City on Long Island, a New York City suburb of single-family homes similarly developed along a commuter railroad line.

As Tokyo grew and demand for housing increased, the railroad has rebuilt the areas around its stations with condominium towers, shopping malls and office buildings. Around Futako Tamagawa Station, the largest of these new urban centers, Tokyu knocked down more than 100 homes to make way for more than 1,000 units in new apartment towers

...

The communities around the stations have grown denser too, with apartment buildings interspersed among single-family homes. The population served by the Den-en-toshi line has increased from 20,000 people to more than 600,000. And the railroad, which once ran two-car trains three times an hour, now runs subway-style trains every few minutes, many of which continue into central Tokyo on a subway line.

...

Some cities, like Singapore and Vienna, have bucked the trend by using public money to build affordable housing. Almost 80 percent of Singapore residents live in public housing.

In Tokyo, by contrast, there is little public or subsidized housing. Instead, the government has focused on making it easy for developers to build. A national zoning law, for example, sharply limits the ability of local governments to impede development. Instead of allowing the people who live in a neighborhood to prevent others from living there, Japan has shifted decision-making to the representatives of the entire population, allowing a better balance between the interests of current residents and of everyone who might live in that place. Small apartment buildings can be built almost anywhere, and larger structures are allowed on a vast majority of urban land. Even in areas designated for offices, homes are permitted. After Tokyo’s office market crashed in the 1990s, developers started building apartments on land they had purchased for office buildings.

“In progressive cities we are maybe too critical of private initiative,” said Christian Dimmer, an urban studies professor at Waseda University and a longtime Tokyo resident. “I don’t want to advocate a neoliberal perspective, but in Tokyo, good things have been created through private initiative.”

Tokyo makes little effort to preserve old homes. Historic districts subject to preservation laws exist in other Japanese cities, but the nation’s largest city has none. New construction is prized. People treat homes like cars: They want the latest models. Between 2013 and 2018, new homes accounted for 86 percent of home sales in Japan, according to the most recent government data. In the United States, new homes typically account for about 15 percent of sales, according to data from the National Association of Realtors.

...

And on Japan’s crowded coastal shelves, the price of preserving the past can simply feel prohibitively high. In Tokyo’s cemeteries, for example, families must pay an annual fee to maintain graves; if a plot is not maintained, the headstone and remains can be removed and the land can be resold for a new burial.

Parks, too, are sometimes treated as unaffordable luxuries. Parks and gardens occupy just 7.5 percent of the city’s land, far below the figures for New York (27 percent) and London (33 percent). Mitake Park, once one of the few green spaces in the dense Shibuya neighborhood, is being transformed into a 26-unit apartment building. In the nearby neighborhood of Shinjuku, the government this year authorized construction of three high-rises that will eat into the Meiji Jingu Gaien, one of the city’s oldest and best-loved parks.

A very interesting opinion piece from the NYT on Tokyo's relative affordability compared to other large global cities. How much should cities change to accommodate newcomers?

• NIMBYs might say not at all. "Build new development in the suburbs, or in the downtown slums, or on available industrial land. But don't build them here, in my neighbourhood, which I worked hard to break into."
• Progessives may say cities need to change, but I can't see Jane Jacobs fans clamoring for the elimination of park space, graveyards, or heritage buildings. "Why would we need to do any of those things? There is plenty of space in the NIMBY's backyards."
• And young workers are often unwilling to "settle" for anything less than their parents owned when the city had half the population and the economy was in the dumps. "What do you mean I may have to change my expectations and buy a 1,500 square feet townhouse instead of a 3,000 square feet detached home? My parents bought a detached home when they were my age, and I deserve to do the same!"
  
  I think there are a lot of drastic things Vancouver could do to tackle affordability, but none of them will be palatable for the public. For example, maybe SROs are a solution for minimum wage workers without a family? And no, I'm not talking about old SROs with broken plumbing and heating and a rat problem. I am talking about modern modular buildings, with shared bathrooms and kitchens. I.e., dorms for grown ups.

[jollyburger]

Just listening to that old PCI/Colliers podcast and PCI mentioned they have 10 projects next to or kitty corner to rapid transit stations/bus loop.

RBC approached PCI first about getting out of their office space lease. They also helped CrossRoads get built since they sold their corner lot to PCI during that redevelopment.

Developing sites with existing rental towers doesn't make much sense right now.

100 pending rezoning applications along the Broadway corridor (?)

Doesn't like the office only zoning for the Broadway Plan. Mount Pleasant industrial land retention is too strict. Would have preferred more retail along the West side instead of at-grade industrial.

Employee zones with bonus density to build rental towers on larger sites. Lower parking ratios. Balance height limits with office floorplans with 13-15 foot high ceilings.

https://renx.ca/pci-and-vancouver-broadway-plan-development

[Sheba]

How not to do things...

A developer has filed a legal petition asking the B.C. Supreme Court to order the City of Kelowna to allow a 25-storey building to proceed after council revoked permits for the project last month, citing a "tainted" approval process.

The source of the conflict revolves around a $250 per diem payment Appelt Properties provided students through a public relations company last summer for speaking favourably to city council about the project and the need for more rental housing in downtown Kelowna.

The city became aware of the payments last fall after council granted Appelt Properties development, and development variance permits to build a 25-storey mixed-use building on a city-owned plot near the Kelowna waterfront.

Last month, city council voted in favour of a staff recommendation to rescind the permits over what it called a "tainted approval process" and allow the developer to reapply.

...

This week, the developer, now known as 350 Doyle Avenue Holdings Inc., followed through with a threat of legal action by filing a petition asking the court to quash or set aside council's decision.

"It was unreasonable for the City to conclude the per diem reimbursements tainted the ... process at all or to the extent warranting rescinding the development permit/development variance permit authorization," the petition states.

...

[Changing City]

In a surprisingly fast one day public hearing "Vancouver City Council unanimously approved the “Missing Middle” proposal on Thursday, making room for up to six homes to be built on one lot."

[GMD]

Originally Posted by Changing City

In a surprisingly fast one day public hearing "Vancouver City Council unanimously approved the “Missing Middle” proposal on Thursday, making room for up to six homes to be built on one lot."

Density theatre, sadly (won't lead to any meaningful new level of development due to FSR and other limits), I guess we will see more of this, cities pretending to take action to get the province off their back, while minimizing the rate of change at the same time.

[Changing City]

Originally Posted by GMD

Density theatre, sadly (won't lead to any meaningful new level of development due to FSR and other limits), I guess we will see more of this, cities pretending to take action to get the province off their back, while minimizing the rate of change at the same time.

Vancouver has tended to create new potential density in the detached home zones cautiously, then open it up, so I think this is significant. Basement suites were only introduced initially in RS-1S zones (the S stood for suite) - on the Eastside, while the west side stayed exclusive. Laneway houses were allowed everywhere (that there was a lane), but there was an initial limit on the number of permits that could be issued before Council checked out how they were being built. They approved some tweaks to the regulations for details that weren't working. Now several hundred are added every year, with over 5,000 built from 2012 to 2022.

The multiplex policy has been introduced everywhere, with no pilot. There are supposedly over 500 inquiries already. It would be a relatively easy move for Council to come back in a couple of years and change 1.0 FSR to 1.2 FSR if it turns out that's what it takes to get more activity, because the current proposals aren't attractive enough.

[MIPS]

If the value of the residence on a high density plot made sense I can see this working but given how a laneway house barely brought the price of a home down I'm doubtful a plot with 6 new suites on it will be any more economical after applying the Developers Premium.

[Migrant_Coconut]

6x the units is thrice as much as 2x; whether that's enough of a difference to bring prices down is debatable, but there is a difference.

[chowhou]

Originally Posted by Changing City

The multiplex policy has been introduced everywhere, with no pilot. There are supposedly over 500 inquiries already. It would be a relatively easy move for Council to come back in a couple of years and change 1.0 FSR to 1.2 FSR if it turns out that's what it takes to get more activity, because the current proposals aren't attractive enough.

Minor detail, the West Side, "middle side", and East Side are in fact treated differently (at least according to the draft proposal, haven't seen the one approved but I'm assuming it's barely changed). The density fee is different in each sector.