Increased density, infill among solutions
BOB RANSFORD
Sun
I spent the last week working with planners, architects and housing professionals from across North America. We have been working on a development plan in Tsawwassen that promises to be a world-class model for how our sprawling suburbs can become more livable, more sustainable and more affordable.
As we drove around the local neighbourhood in which we were working, I chatted with one of the out-of-town housing experts about housing prices in the Vancouver area.
“You live in a beautiful area, but what you are doing to your people with the price of housing is obscene.”
Andres Duany is a global leader in town planning and community housing. He is based in the U.S., but has worked all around North America, in South America, in Asia, in Britain and in Europe.
The Vancouver region is the priciest metropolitan region in the country to own a home. Owning a detached bungalow in Vancouver takes up 74 per cent of a household’s income. A typical detached house in the Vancouver area costs more than $750,000, up nearly 15 per cent from a year ago.
I explained to Duany that municipalities all over B.C. are commissioning studies and debating a range of government initiatives to try to combat what has become almost a housing crisis.
“I can’t believe what I am hearing,” he responded.
“Why do you allow your citizens to hinder the supply of housing? Don’t you people understand supply and demand? This is so cruel.”
My friend is right. Why do we allow people to hinder the supply of housing?
We like to think we’ve done things right in the way we plan our communities here in this region. We talk about our livable region strategy with pride. In reality, we only have downtown Vancouver to point to as a true example of success.
Most of our suburbs can hardly be called livable. They are sprawling car-dependent places with little identity and little to support civic engagement.
Most suburbs offer the usual monoculture of housing in the form of the large single-family home — that highly priced “average bungalow.”
While we hold firm to the artificial line that was drawn to contain sprawl and supposedly protect farmland, we know that it is merely a policy tool as vulnerable to politics as any other policy is.
We’ve done little to demonstrate the value of agriculture and elevate local food security as part of our culture to ensure the true protection of that land.
Meanwhile, we’ve allowed pockets of development to continue in areas dislocated from established neighbourhoods, while every attempt to infill in established neighbourhoods is met with a horrible outcry from the public.
Any attempt to increase the supply of housing is met with resistance from those who fear change. The opponents of density in infill locations universally talk about protecting their quality of life.
In reality, all they are doing is restricting supply and guaranteeing continued high home prices.
High home prices are, in fact, eroding quality of life.
Those who dream about some magic bullet to deal with housing affordability are doing just that — dreaming. Government will never be able to solve the problem. Our housing is provided in a market governed by supply and demand.
Ending the obscenity of high housing prices means increased urban densities, more compact development in the suburbs, smaller homes, infill in established neighbourhoods and a reconciliation between urbanism and agriculture at the urban edge.
That means ordinary citizens need to advocate growth. Unfortunately, most people are more inclined to take action only when they feel threatened. Then they are quick to oppose.
Quality of life is threatened in our region by high housing prices. It’s time people rose up to oppose the restrictions that constrain our housing supply.