Developer of ‘workplace housing’ fears results of ‘theme park for high-end’ homes
Pete McMartin
Sun
The news, trumpeted on the front page of The Vancouver Sun yesterday, sounded as if the city had just won something. It was just the opposite.
The headline was:
“$193-million Olympic village bid blows away competition.”
All that headline needed was an exclamation mark. But it was there, nonetheless, in absentia, in its implication of either “Hey, we’re world-class!” or “Hey, the world’s gone mad!” It was hard to decide which. Possibly, it was both.
No matter. It’s not good news any way you look at it.
The winning bid to develop the southeast False Creek lands — which will house the Olympic village — was $23 million above the next closest bid, which at $170 million was substantial enough. This makes what is at present a hodgepodge of outdated industrial land into the most expensive piece of residential real estate in the country, and it makes the Millennium Group, which submitted the winning bid, either (a) foolhardy or (b) prescient. Time will tell.
Howard Rotberg was not so unsure when he heard the news. He described the bid as “a disaster” for Vancouver — the latest example of the city’s drift toward high-end housing.
This is a curious view, since Rotberg is a developer. But he’s a different kind of developer.
“I used to call what I do building ‘affordable housing,’ ” Rotberg said, “but I’ve changed that. I call it building ‘workplace housing.’ “
Why “workplace” and not “affordable?”
Because he tries to build housing for the middle class, he said, families whose combined incomes are between $50,000-$100,000, and who want to live near where they work. Most people, he said, associate “affordable housing” with government-subsidized social housing for low-income people. That segment of the market has been well-serviced in Vancouver, Rotberg said.
“But we have an equally serious problem for affordable housing for what we know as the middle class. And for middle-class earners in the workforce — such as firemen, policemen, teachers, nurses, the people who pour your coffee, who work in the downtown offices, the salespeople who work in downtown shops — the possibility of affordable housing is increasingly becoming out of reach for them or their children here. Vancouver seems to think the [middle class] workforce should work in Vancouver but live in Surrey.”
Which is to say, there is such a thing as affordable housing for the middle class: It’s called the suburbs. But that, Rotberg said, creates a whole new range of problems for the urban landscape and the people who live in it — long commute times, pollution, traffic congestion, stress, high debt load, and possibly worst of all, an increasing stratification of society. High housing and land prices dictate that developers and home buyers maximize the worth of their properties, which squeezes out more modest housing, which turns cities like Vancouver, he said, into “something of a theme park for high-end housing.”
“You can see it in cities like Paris. The inner city is this beautiful theme park of expensive housing. But outside the inner city, it’s a different story. You send all your troubles to the peripheries, and you don’t care about your young. And what’s happening there? The outer areas of Paris are surrounded by grim suburbs. The young there are rioting.
“We must do something to make sure that doesn’t happen here because this theme park will not stay like this here forever.”
His company, Rotberg Development Group, has done almost all its work in southern Ontario, where he used to practise law specializing in real estate. Government policies there are more conducive to the work he does, he said, and his most recent project was the conversion of an old fire department headquarters in Kitchener.
Working with the CMHC’s Residential Rehabilitation Assistance program, which provides loans to developers, he built 19 affordable units that, because of built-in income criteria and rent caps, meant the units went to middle-class earners. The City of Kitchener sold him the land at a fair price, he said, because it made a political decision to get that kind of housing built.
But the most enlightened policies for the building of affordable workplace housing, he said, originate in the U.S. There, governments have pioneered a variety of policies to create workplace housing for the middle class: community land trusts that set aside portions of land; demolition levies against buyers who tear down modest homes to put up high-end residences; affordable housing investment funds, which can give investors returns of 12 to 16 per cent (Rotberg cited the Genesis Workforce Housing Fund in Los Angeles, which specializes in downtown townhomes for middle-income earners); flexible zoning laws that introduce a mix of housing into single-family residential neighbourhoods, or allow residences among industrial or commercial properties.
“Our zoning bylaws have to move into the 21st century,” Rotberg said. “The effect of single-family zoning is meant to maintain your property values. You don’t want denser properties or guys who drive pickup trucks near you, because that would affect your property values. And I understand why people don’t want that.
“However, in our effort to give everybody increases in property values — which, in my opinion, are now obscene — we are no longer living in a real world.”
© The Vancouver Sun 2006