Tsur Somerville - a funny guy, and a UBC prof with a specialty in real estate - tells this story.
It's about the paradox of life here.
"There was this friend of mine," Somerville said, "and at the time, Gregor Robertson was running for mayor, and Robert-son was saying, 'We've got to make this city more affordable, and while we're at it, we're also going to make this the most attractive, wonderful, greenest city in the world.'
"And my friend went up to Robertson and said, 'Look, you can't have the city more afford-able AND the most wonderful, greatest place to live in at the same time. Those things are fundamentally incompatible. All those things you're going to do to make it the most wonderful, greatest, hippest place to be are all going to make it more expensive.'"
By which Somerville's friend meant, if you want affordable housing, live in Detroit.
If you want to live in paradise, it will cost you.
Affordable housing is hot these days. Everyone wants it: no one knows how to get it. Robertson promised a task force on it. Some want a restriction on foreign ownership. They put the blame for rising prices at the well-shod feet of wealthy immigrants.
Statistical evidence propel-ling that argument is slim. Because transactions are often done through intermediaries, it's hard to track foreign ownership sales. But the anecdotal evidence is eye-popping, and has a lot of people convinced foreign buyers are the main levers pushing up of house prices.
Somerville isn't so sure. They may be a factor on Vancouver's west side, he'd allow, but not in Surrey or Coquitlam. And if they are a factor, he said, they present yet another paradox.
"You want to promote Vancouver as a world-class city, and then you say to the world, don't come here? It seems a little contradictory, don't you think?"
Also, affordability means different things to different people.
One, if you own a house, you find yourself on the other side of the coin. You want house prices to rise. At the very least, you don't want them to fall.
Two, it depends on who you want affordable housing for.
"To me," Somerville said, "for someone wanting to live on the West Side but ending up in Burnaby because they can't afford to buy on the West Side doesn't strike me as a problem. But for a single mom who can't find a decent place to raise her children, that's a problem."
Densification - or EcoDen-sity, as it was known during Sam Sullivan's term as mayor - had been touted as a way to create more affordable housing.
Yet in a 2008 paper written for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a panel of authors (one of them Somerville's colleague, Penny Gurst-ein, director of UBC's School of Community and Regional Planning) found that despite increased densification in the city, affordability has decreased. Between 2001 and 2006, the number of house-holds living in single-family detached homes fell from 28 per cent of the city's population to 19 per cent. Meanwhile, the city's population rose steadily, housed increasingly in multi-family residences. Prices and rents still rose.
That study showed some-thing else. A map of the city's densification showed a startling divide. The west and south were underpopulated: the north and east were over-populated. In fact, most of the north and east side neighbour-hoods already met the targets of the EcoDensity plan. Those neighbourhoods on the west and south came nowhere near them.
This was a city divided.
There are strategies out there to increase affordability. Municipally owned housing corporations. Affordable housing property tax surcharges. Creative rezoning. Cities around the world have used them to good effect. Here in B.C., the Municipality of Whistler has excelled at supplying affordable housing.
The key to those successes, however, has been political will.
In many cases, it means changing the face of a neighbourhood. It's delicate work.
If Gregor Robertson wants to do it here, he should first look at where his political support came from. Those north and east side neighbourhoods that voted overwhelmingly for him have already shouldered their fare share of social and subsidized housing, and densification. He owes them a debt.
If affordable housing is to be built here, maybe those neighbourhoods on the west and south side, as seemingly unaffordable of their eye-popping prices are, should pay it. I have no doubt this won't happen.
pmcmartin@vancouversun.com
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun - BY PETE MCMARTIN, VANCOUVER SUN