HomeMy WebLinkAbout7/5/2017 Item 12, Bren
Christian, Kevin
From:leebren15@aol.com
Sent: 11:57 AM
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Subject:Walkable urban areas can become playgrounds for the rich. Is there any way to
prevent that?
This is an interesting and thought provoking article about urban housing, planning and zoning strategies from a
Canadian perspective.
See click below.
Happy 4th!
<div>Lee Bren
https://www.vox.com/2017/6/27/15716412/toderian-affordability
</div>
1
7/3/2017 Walkable urban areas can become playgrounds for the rich. Is there any way to prevent that? - Vox
Walkable urban areas can become playgrounds for the
rich. Is there any way to prevent that?
Urbanist Brent Toderian reflects on how to keep livable cities affordable.
Updated by David Roberts I @drvox I david@vox.com I Jun 27, 2017, 9:2Oam EDT
Publicly owned family rental housing in Vancouver's Olympic Village. I (Brent Toderian)
The most frequent criticism of dense, walkable, livable urban areas is that they are too
expensive to live in.
Cities like New York, Seattle, and San Francisco, which contain some of the most
celebrated examples of US urbanism, also boast some of the highest real estate prices.
Longtime residents have come to see the arrival of condos and bike lanes as harbingers of
rising rents.
Not only do livable cities struggle to provide low-income housing, they also risk losing the
broad middle of the income spectrum. They risk becoming playgrounds for wealthy
professionals, which can lead to resentment and social unrest of the sort popping up in
San Francisco.
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7/3/2017 Walkable urban areas can become playgrounds for the rich. Is there any way to prevent that? - Vox
On some level, any attractive, growing city is going to struggle with affordability. When
there's only so much city, and lots of people want to live there, prices go up. It's supply and
demand. (Urbanists support density precisely because it increases supply — you can't
make more urban land, but you can fit more housing on the land you've got.)
No city has come close to "solving" this problem, and it's not clear that solving it is even
within municipal power, but there are things cities can do — regulate low-income and
rental housing, or take measures to prevent outside investors and speculators from
bidding up valuable urban housing.
I asked urbanist Brent Toderian, who was chief planner in Vancouver, BC, from 2006 to
2012, how cities can address affordability. He cited a range of programs and initiatives that
take the edge off, but was realistic about the limits of municipal government. (You can find
more of our conversation, on a range of city -making topics, here.)
The colorful building in the middle is "social housing," i.e., public housing. I (Brent Toderian)
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7/3/2017 Walkable urban areas can become playgrounds for the rich. Is there any way to prevent that? - Vox
David Roberts
What do you think about the impression that walkability is basically for wealthy
professionals?
Brent Toderian
I don't accept it — some of the most walkable urban communities of the past have been
low-income communities that are older and more traditional, not urban -renewal
communities. They're front -stoop communities.
You don't have to build [urbanist communities] in an expensive way. Getting the
fundamentals of urban design right doesn't add to the cost. In fact, it's a fair argument to
say that good urbanism by definition isn't more expensive. You can do urbanism at any
price point.
David Roberts
Still, many cities are facing a huge challenge with affordability. Has any city solved it?
Brent Toderian
Yes, cities have solved the affordability problem by not being attractive.
David Roberts
Other than by not attracting people!
Brent Toderian
Affordability is a problem borne of success. The more successful you are, the bigger your
affordability challenge. When you build a great city and do your design and planning well,
more people want to come. But I would be the last person to suggest that we should do a
poor job of planning and designing just to help with the affordability problem.
David Roberts
So what's the answer? You've said that when it comes to affordability, we need to look at
the bigger picture. What do you mean by that?
Brent Toderian
First, a useful conversation on affordability has to go beyond what the average single -
detached house sells for. That specific measure is often used as a lazy shorthand.
Here in Vancouver, for example, the price of a single -detached house is increasingly less
important — such housing has become a smaller and smaller percentage of the housing
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stock. So even if we're myopically focused on how much it costs to buy a home, which we
shouldn't be, that shouldn't necessarily be the type of home that gets all of our attention.
Second, we should look beyond the price of buying a home, to the price of having a home
— including rental housing and creative housing types like co -housing.
Third, we should discuss all costs of living, not just housing costs. Living outside the city
involves surprisingly big transportation costs, energy costs, and costs for all the stuff you
feel pressure to fill your home with as your house gets bigger.
Brent Toderian
@BrentToderian
Follow
5 Ideas for More Affordable Vancouver. "Need to discuss
affordable cities, not just affordable housing." bit.ly/12niAAl #yvr
@TheTyee
10:53 AM - 11 Feb 2013
2
Fourth, we have to discuss the other side of the affordability equation — the salary side of
things. That's affected by policies like a livable minimum wage and the protection of job
lands in our region. Do you have the space and opportunities to attract and fit secure, well -
paying jobs, ideally downtown and on public transit, or have you only made space for
housing and the service sector?
All of these have to be part of a robust conversation about an affordable city — it's not just
about real estate. And all that is before we even start to talk about the huge issue of
homelessness.
David Roberts
Vancouver, in particular, is known as an expensive city to live in. Whenever I sing its praises,
someone replies that, fine, that's nice, but it's just a playground for the rich, so who cares?
What's your perspective on that?
Brent Toderian
Vancouver is one of the most expensive cities in North America — maybe even in the
world, depending on what ranking you believe. And it's a double whammy, because we
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actually have slightly below-average salaries compared to the rest of Canada.
But it is also a city that is doing more to try to address the affordability challenge than any
other city I've seen, at least in North America. The sheer number of initiatives, programs,
and interventions around affordability is remarkable.
For decades, we've been requiring that 20 percent of space in all major housing projects
be set aside for social housing [what Americans call "public housing"]. That requirement
has been a powerful tool — finding and acquiring land or airspace can be the toughest part
of a social housing project.
Part of the success of the program is that social housing is now built into all major projects
around the city, in an integrated and often almost invisible way, with management
programs to help that integration succeed.
Vancouver also uses density bonusing [explained here] to achieve additional social
housing, to restore and improve single room occupancy units [SROs, i.e., studios], and to
achieve purpose-built rental housing. The city has also recently announced a program to
develop publicly owned land for affordable -housing projects.
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The Woodwards project, which mixes market housing with "hard -to -house" social housing, non-profit services, and community amenities.
(Brent Toderian)
So many tools are being focused on trying to improve affordability that occasionally other
municipal goals — park -building and place -making, arts and culture, heritage preservation,
and so on — wind up getting too little attention. The fact that we haven't succeeded in
making the city universally affordable just demonstrates that the problem is not really
solvable by cities alone, and perhaps not solvable at all in a "hot market" city, unless
something cataclysmic happens to the underlying market system.
But what these affordability initiatives and programs can do is make it better than it
otherwise would be.
Vancouver has particularly put energy into homelessness. Ironically, if you can afford to
buy or rent real estate, you may be fine, and if you're homeless, or under threat of being
homeless, there are programs that can help you (albeit insufficient ones), but the people in
the middle — the middle class, the service sector, and the so-called "working poor" — are
often passed over by these strategies.
It can be hard to create successful programs that apply to the middle, except for providing
much more purpose-built rental housing. Hence, Vancouver has put significant energy in
the past 10 years or so into rental housing. We've designed various rental housing incentive
programs since 2008, such as "Short Term Incentives for Rental" (STIR) and "Rental 100:'
The programs have had success in the form of thousands of new units of rental housing,
but always at a controversial cost, in the form of foregone development fees and foregone
opportunities to use our tools to address other municipal needs.
The city has also put in place policies to protect existing rental stock, including "rate of
change" policies for older rental stock and recent limitations on Airbnb, to try to keep it
from essentially replacing rental housing opportunities.
All of this is being done, as I say, at a level of complexity and ambition I have yet to see
elsewhere in North America. But the fact that it's still, and will probably continue to be, a
struggle shows that many of the forces at play aren't within the power of a municipality to
address.
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7/3/2017 Walkable urban areas can become playgrounds for the rich. Is there any way to prevent that? - Vox
New social housing in Vancouver's Yaletown. I (Brent Toderian)
David Roberts
What role do outside investors — people who buy housing but don't live there, just using it
to flip or make rental income [often Chinese investors or their children] — play in driving
up Vancouver real estate prices? What is Vancouver doing to address that problem?
Brent Toderian
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There have been massive debates about the role of outside investors, a.k.a. "foreign
buyers;' in Vancouver's housing demand — and a lack of credible, independent research.
I tend to believe outside investors play a bigger role than some would like to admit, but
"home-grown investors" are just as real an issue. Does it matter if new condos are being
bought by so-called outside money (which is very hard to define) or by someone born and
raised in Vancouver who is buying multiple units and renting them out as part of their
retirement plan?
The problem is when homes are seen as a commodity, rather than a home, no matter
where the money is coming from. Homes bought as investments are usually rented out
and actually represent a large percentage of our rental stock — but it's unsecured rental,
subject to ownership changes and other unpredictabilities.
The provincial government recently applied a significant tax on so-called foreign
ownership. There are debates about what that has done to market demand. There have
also been new taxes applied to so-called "vacant units;' but the way these were defined
makes me question how useful the new taxes will be in meeting any policy objectives.
All such mechanisms have strengths and weaknesses, benefits and consequences. I
believe the key issue isn't so much where the money comes from as whether units are
owner -occupied, so I'd prefer tax approaches that focus on that. If someone comes from
overseas, buys a home and lives in it (or their kids live in it), do we think that's worse than
someone who was born here buying multiple units as an investment?
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Vancouver units. I (Shutterstock)
David Roberts
Some urbanists argue that, ultimately, the only solution to the affordability problem is to
increase supply — more density, wherever possible. Is that the right mental model?
Brent Toderian
Well, smart, strategic density has to be a big part of the affordability conversation. More
density doesn't guarantee affordability, especially when demand continues to outpace
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supply, but more strategic density is a necessary precondition for improved affordability,
and for mitigating even higher prices.
But we have to avoid overly simplistic statements when it comes to land development and
affordability. For example, those who argue that we could solve affordability by just
allowing all of our agricultural land to be developed for new suburbs, or our job lands for
new condos, are profoundly wrong. When it comes to smart region -building, you can't
undermine your ability to provide a balanced local economy and flexible space for well -
paying jobs, or local food security for the long term, by trading those things for a quick fix
of new housing.
When it comes to more housing supply in our lower density areas, I'm a strong champion
for zoning reform allowing mixed housing types, but not in a one -size -fits -all way. Different
densities make sense in different places.
Obviously we want density downtown, in walkable neighborhood centers, and near public
transit. But we also want strategic density in low-density neighborhoods. In Vancouver, I
used terms like "gentle density" (rowhouses, stacked townhouses, etc.), "hidden density"
(laneway houses), and "invisible density" (secondary suites in the primary home) to make
the point that density can come in many forms, including more ground -oriented housing
choices in places where mid -rise or high-rise density isn't politically supported.
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A Vancouver laneway house by Lanefab. C (Lanefab Design/Build)
reject the notion of abolishing zoning and just "having at it." Tools like zoning should be
fixed, not abolished. As a matter of fact, in my experience, when the floodgates are
opened too much, and with not enough done to ensure the quality of outcomes, the
inevitable community and political backlash can end up killing the density idea. I've seen
that too often in my career.
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Smarter, contextual planning and design will always be the key to densifying successfully,
both physically and politically, for affordability and many other reasons.
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