Some operate with a credo that if you say things fast enough, and repeat them often, many will believe you. In that category I would nominate the City of Vancouver when it applies the word “affordable” to the word “housing.”
The Oxford Dictionary defines “affordable” as “inexpensive” and “reasonably priced.”
The Cambridge Dictionary defines “affordable housing” as “able to be bought or rented by people who do not earn a lot of money.”
The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp. defines affordable housing as “costing less than 30 per cent of before-tax household income.”
When it concerns quality of life, words should matter. When they disguise truth or distort for political advancement, we should worry.
The mayor last week announced, after more than two sputtering years of failure to achieve lift-off, the first four sites to be developed under the housing authority – the Vancouver Affordable Housing Authority (VAHA), for you wordsmiths. In the main, it is little of the sort.
A cursory examination reveals few of the rents we might expect from the four-site development will be “affordable” to anyone at the lower third of the city’s household income.
A few – we don’t know how many, but certainly not very many – of the units in only one of the four sites will be $375, the housing allowance for those on social assistance. Beyond that is precious little affordable shelter for the low- and average-income Vancouverite that the mayor says is the target.
Rents for singles and families at one site: $1,000 to $2,000.
Rents for singles and families at another: $850 to $2,000.
Rents for seniors at another site: $750 to $1,400.
That these sites will take another two to three years to build does nothing today to – as some media wrote in echoing the city’s press release – “stem the housing ‘crisis’ in the city.” This does no more stemming than does a Band-Aid to a hemorrhage.
That the city suggested other levels of government are needed to “keep the prices affordable” is yet more distraction from the admission in its own news release that rents will be merely “slightly” below market rates. Again, words matter: the city did not say “substantially” or “significantly,” but “slightly” below a market that almost all Canadians would call madness.
The mayor pledges to do “everything we can to tackle our affordability crisis head-on.” Which is not technically untrue. The city can’t tackle the affordability crisis head-on, so anything it tries is indeed everything it can do.
When a vacancy rate is less than one-half of 1%, it would take many thousands of new units to alter the market price. The city has a plan for 2,500 – again, many of them far from “affordable,” no matter what it says – over five years.
The city’s housing crisis – no quotation marks should be needed around the word – owes itself to decades of neglect in the supply of appropriate housing stock and unprincipled and undisciplined planning as Vancouver grew. The economics of rental housing construction generally defy viability. This context is not the current city administration’s fault particularly, but it does not help the situation with its latest pretension about the prescription.
It would not be wrong, though, to work with the province to tackle legislative problems that beset the substantial rental cohort being driven from the city.
It could work to permit more extended leases to provide security and predictability. Within renewed leases, it could effect greater stabilization of rents.
On its own dime, too, it could extend the mandate of its housing authority into an advocacy body that complements provincial efforts. Among other things, while it identifies empty homes under its rather unenforceable tax scheme, it could also identify owners who increase rent beyond the allowable limit under fixed-rate tenancy agreements.
On the eve of a provincial election campaign, and in the middle of a city mandate amid a rental crisis, a strategy of this sort couldn’t possibly be bad politics.
At least it would better serve the spirit and letter of “affordable housing.”
Kirk LaPointe is Business in Vancouver’s vice-president of audience and business development
