Regional Urban Development Institute serves up lower-cost-housing dilemma over breakfast meeting
Derrick Penner
Sun
Homelessness and housing affordability in Greater Vancouver have become hot enough topics to pull for-profit developers and non-profit housing societies together to at least talk about solving the region’s problems.
The Urban Development Institute’s Pacific region invited non-profit groups and municipal politicians to a breakfast meeting Tuesday to keep a discussion going that all parties hope will result in cooperation to build housing.
“Everybody understands the crisis now,” David Negrin, UDI Pacific’s president said in an interview. “Now it’s time for everybody to move forward.”
Negrin said the UDI became more involved in the low-cost housing issue last fall in part because it had become such a big issue among members.
However, members were also concerned that discussion was starting to turn toward new development charges on residential development to finance social housing.
Negrin added the UDI believes there are better ways of encouraging developers to get involved in building more affordable rental or social housing than hitting them with new fees, which just increase the cost of market housing.
Allowing developers to build more condos on a piece of property than zoning allows, as long as they include apartments with lower rents — so-called density bonusing — is one option, Negrin said.
Reducing costly building requirements, such as parking spaces, would be another way of allowing developers to build cheaper rental units .
The UDI also has ideas for a formula that would get its members into public-private partnerships to build social housing.
Negrin added that Vancouver developer Robert MacDonald is already working on a project that will use density bonusing. And Concord Pacific, where Negrin is senior vice-president, is also talking with the City of Vancouver about the same measure.
“The next step is to meet with municipalities … to try and take the red tape out of development,” and start working with the non-profit sector to create partnerships to build lower cost housing, he said.
Alice Sundberg, executive director of the B.C. Non-Profit Housing Association, said it has been gratifying to see the UDI reach to the non-profit sector to begin the discussion.
“You see [UDI members] popping up all over the place talking about affordable housing, and not in the old ways, but in new ways that are about collaboration and partnership,. It’s really uplifting.”
Sundberg said a goal for Tuesday’s meeting was for non-profit entities to make informal connections with the development community.
However, she said the two parties have also discussed organizing an event that would focus on “rolling up our sleeves and getting people to work out what kind of opportunities are out there, and how can we make a deal happen.”