The recent Vancouver mayoral election has led to a massive upheaval at city hall. Ken Sim of the ABC (A Better City) party resoundingly defeated the incumbent mayor Kennedy Stewart with 85,732 votes to Stewart’s 49,593. Sim had narrowly lost the last mayoral election four years ago to Stewart by mere 958 votes. Sim’s success wasn’t just limited to the seat of Mayor. The city council, park board, and school board all now have an ABC majority. Vancouver is Ken Sim’s city.
Coming into this election, housing affordability consistently polled as the most important issue for Vancouver voters and served as the primary issue former Mayor Stewart focused his campaign around. For instance, Stewart emphasized his ambitious housing platform to add 220,000 new homes to Vancouver over 10 years, changing zoning to legalize multiplexes in all neighborhoods and passing a litany of renter protection policies.
By contrast, Sim did not release a platform on housing until two weeks before election day and has treated it secondary to his primary campaign promise of increasing safety. At times Sim seemed outright flippant towards housing. When pressed by Stewart in a debate to name the Federal and Provincial Housing Ministers Sim admitted he could not and remarked that “it didn’t matter”. Communicating with the ministers is the primary means of garnering federal money for housing projects in the city, so it’s disconcerting for a mayoral candidate, now the mayor, to be incapable of naming the ministers. But Sim has a whole platform of policies on housing, and with his majority, there’s little stopping his party platform from being implemented. So how would Ken Sim address the housing crisis?
ABC’s housing platform is split into two sections: one for social, supportive, and non-market housing and the other for market housing. For non-market housing Sim, like many political platforms, gives many vague statements of intent. Such as promising to “Double the number of co-operative (co-op) housing units in Vancouver within the next four years;” without any details about how. Promising to pilot projects, “champion” the role of nonprofits in housing, and develop a 20-year housing plan. It might just be me, but promising to start and prioritize things without any plan of “how” doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that proper action will take shape– Much less promises to develop “a 20 year plan”. One of the more suspect points is Sim’s promise to shift the city’s housing strategy to focus on the “delivery of quality, livable housing units’ ‘ over the current “quantity-first approach”. The implication here seems to be that the dense social housing being constructed by the city is not “quality” or “livable”. This appeals to the NIMBY sentiment that apartments, like public transportation, are “for the undesirables”’. It’s a paternalistic stigma arising out of the attitude that “we should only build housing that I would want to live in”. Something that was iterated in the contentious public council hearing over the project.
My fundamental problem with Sim’s housing platform is that while many of the proposed actions are sensible it avoids giving Vancouver any real bold action to take when there needs to be a shift away from the status quo. Keeping social and supportive housing investments in line with inflation is great but it’s simply maintaining the status quo. We need to be making things more affordable, keeping things in line with inflation so it doesn’t decay is a great basic first step but can’t be the extent of our action. Sim’s proposal to remove federal and provincial taxes on public housing is just passing the buck to the Federal and Provincial governments. To do so would also require Sim to work with the Federal and Provincial Housing Ministers which based on his inability to name them indicates it was not in his consideration. Trying to identify areas where more non-market housing could be constructed is scraping the scraps we’re given when so much potential market and non-market housing is being withheld by restrictive zoning.
Sim has continuously maintained that permitting is the key issue for housing over zoning and land use. Often citing his proposal to accelerate the permitting process with his 3-3-3-1 housing strategy. Which cuts permitting times across the board when it comes to “professionally designed multi-family and mid-rise projects” where “where existing zoning is already in place”.
Cutting permitting times is necessary and a great policy but combined with Sim’s lack of zoning reform this would lead to accelerated demolitions, reconstructions, and evictions without increasing the overall housing supply. If you limit the land where you can build apartments, the only place where you can build new apartments are on top of old ones. Making it faster to build housing without changing the underlying land use that dictates what kind and how much housing we can have is simply avoiding the problem. The caveat on multi-family and mid-rise projects” to only three months. However, the caveat of “where existing zoning is already in place” means it does nothing to create new housing. New multi-family or mid-rise projects are the results of rezonings not existing zoning.
Other permitting actions listed are pre-approving “five standard laneway home designs,” exactly the kind of non-dense car-dependent housing that we need less of. While any more housing is helpful, more laneways would serve as a barrier to actual densification and locks in the sprawl and car dependence that has ruined our cities.
Another proposal to initiate (another) review on “missing middle” housing, rather than taking action on it just amounts to doing nothing. Despite his great support for loosening the overbearing government restrictions on housing construction Sim seems perfectly fine to maintain the suffocating bureaucracy on housing policy.
Sim’s plans are unambitious and unclear; that’s not what Vancouver needs in this dire housing crisis. But it’s still fairly soon and I hope that within the next four years Sim will make progress on housing and maybe even turn his mind around on zoning. Vancouver’s future rests on this.
