‘Innovative’ change coming in 30 to 60 days
Frances Bula
Sun
SOURCE: BC HOUSING VANCOUVER SUN
Housing Minister Rich Coleman appears poised to introduce a dramatic change in how the B.C. government helps people with housing, a move that is making housing groups, poverty advocates and some city politicians nervous.
On the other side, associations representing private apartment owners and landlords are optimistic and excited that their years of lobbying for a rent-subsidy system may finally be bearing fruit.
Coleman refuses to give details about the plan, which he told The Vancouver Sun will be released in 30 to 60 days, except to say that it will be “very innovative,” “very exciting” and something that will kick off a much-needed debate about better ways to provide housing.
However, Coleman, who was Liberal housing critic during NDP years, has always supported the idea of providing rent subsidies to low-income families so they can rent from private landlords, rather than having government provide subsidies for building social housing.
He told a Canadian Home Builders Association convention in January that the era of government housing has passed and that he favours providing rent subsidies in private buildings.
“Major cities all across North America today are bulldozing their [housing] projects and they’re doing it so they can redevelop their communities and integrate people into society,” Coleman told the builders. “You want to see the worst experiment of social housing in British Columbia, go to the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver — it’s a failed experiment, because we forgot about the fact that people need to be integrated.”
That statement, plus the hints of his plan to move to rent subsidies, have outraged some and alarmed many more about his intentions.
“In the Downtown Eastside, social housing is mostly the best housing. It’s the private housing that is often quite disgusting,” said Jean Swanson of the Carnegie Community Action Project. Rent subsidies benefit landlords more than tenants and don’t provide the kind of security a subsidized unit in social housing does, she said.
Alice Sundberg, executive-director of the B.C. Non-Profit Housing Association, says Coleman is misleading people when he talks about the problems of American social housing as though it were relevant to B.C.
Sundberg says that of the almost 80,000 units of social housing in the province, 70,000 are in relatively small operations run by non-profit groups that aim to work with communities and blend in — a far cry from the infamous public housing tower-slums of Chicago or New York.
Like many housing experts, Sundberg says rent subsidies are a good idea in some circumstances and part of a toolbox of strategies any government should use. The province already provides $36 million in rent subsidies to 14,200 B.C. households, mostly seniors.
Subsidies work best for communities that have a relatively high vacancy rate or for people who have special needs, she said.
“They work very poorly in areas like the Lower Mainland, Victoria, the Okanagan, where the vacancy rate is too low.”
Rent subsidies have been favoured in the U.S. since the 1970s. Exhaustive studies comparing rent-subsidy programs to subsidized housing have indicated rent subsidies can end up concentrating low-income people in one small area where the lowest-cost private housing is available and can have the effect of pushing up rents.
But Al Kemp, the CEO of the Rental Owners and Managers Association, said he doesn’t believe that will happen under the “portable housing allowance” he believes Coleman will bring in.
Kemp said his association has lobbied for the subsidy system because “we want money to be given to the tenant.”
“We’re not an industry looking for a handout,” he said. “We’re looking to help people with an income problem.”
Vancouver housing centre manager Cameron Gray said the city will continue to help non-profits buy sites and build social housing on city land, because developing a long-term stock of affordable housing is the only thing he sees working in an expensive, growth city like Vancouver.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006