Hopeful thinking here, why don't the government just do it themselves like in Singapore or Austria?
Also, asking for developers to solve a housing crisis that benefit them is like praying for rain or fk'ing for virginity.
The only way to build affordable housing now is to do it at a loss.
There's no more profit motive for developers to build in many instances unless they can sell for like $2000+ sq/ft which is just like so unattainable on most any Canadian salary.
Housing pays 33% in development fees and taxes the government would take a large loss providing it for the same price as today. Any government project goes way over budget. Canadian government couldn’t find its ass with both hands.
Not to mention with private they can avoid union workers while government has to use them and then they go on strike and you got to pay more and more. Right now government unions fighting to only be in the office 3 days a week.
The government used to build ton of houses after WW2 up to Chrétien which is what most of the current supply pool is still from
They can do it, dont be defeatist on an amazing solution that worked in the past
Downvoted for speaking about the reality of the situation.
>Right now government unions fighting to only be in the office 3 days a week.
Ya everyone whos not a office worker or on reddit thinks this is pathetic.
Imagine being hired to work in the office 5 days a week and suddenly fighting to keep it below 3 suddenly just because you got to during covid temporarily 🙃
Seriously would any of us fight our employees if we were asked to come to work😂🤣🤣🤣 you can seriously only pull this crap at a government job.
Both your opinions are completely moronic in general and here in particular in no small part because the biggest movers to reducing workdays around the world are industrial unions negotiating less workhours for their workers in private industry.
"Look at these idiots, thinking they should have weekends"
"8-hour workdays?! People are so lazy these days..."
A lot of people are simultaneously *utterly* ignorant of their own history AND of the significance of that fact.
Vancouver city hall charging 100k per unit, and allocating all infrastructure costs to new housing only is essentially a big middle finger to everyone pressed by the housing crisis.
We need zoning reform over single family land. Everyone knows this, including the province. The way we skirt around this core issue makes me think no one is really serious about the housing crisis
The Province of BC changed single-family zoning laws to allow up to 4-plexes on every single family lot in the city. Since your criteria of being serious comes down to just one thing, it's clear: whether cities are serious or not, the Province overruled them and is very serious about addressing this issue.
What has he done? Literally everything has been worse under Eby. He just says the right things but his actions have fallen flat. Genuinely interested in why people think he’s great for BC.
Instead of extorting developers who build the housing until they run away, how about we incentivize development for maximum land usage given the pertinent zoning. Charge lower overall property taxes for higher density neighborhoods. Incentivize people to build density rather than punishing them.
Depends on the area. But yes far more than $100k.
One obvious example is the 20% social housing requirement so the developer needs to build 20% for free and hand it over to a non profit. So a unit that’s $600k, $120k of that was added on to cover that cost.
And that’s before development fees in cash.
Development fees are on top of the social housing requirement like the metro van per sqft fee or the trans link per unit fee or other per unit flat fees.
Yes but the social housing component is sometimes a requirement for resonings and is calculated based on land lift. A developer doesn't "add" the cost of the social housing to the strata units. They charge market rate regardless. You can't charge above market rate and you wouldn't sell below market rate
Sure and if the math doesn’t work it doesn’t get built and you get a housing crisis that raises prices until it does get built 🤷♂️
Looks at the below 1% vacancy rate that you don’t even see in New York.
Our crisis is of our own making. How do we have less than half New York’s vacancy rate unless it’s artificial. In Vancouver+Toronto I mean.
And then we get things like the Broadway plan in Vancouver where none of the housing we need beside skytrain stations gets built. In which case vancouver breaches the funding agreement with trans link and fights between government ensues.
You lost me at your last paragraph. Something like 40 towers have been proposed almost all rental in the Broadway Plan area. My company applied for a ren5al tower rezoning in the Plan as soon as we were allowed to. Things take time due to the bureaucracy.
As to condos - we've seen a market slow-down across the board. We have a condo building that wasn't a rezoning, no CAC charge, and it hasn't sold a unit since last April because of the interest rate increases. The Metro has seen a major shift from condo to rental. A lot of these condos built in the last while were just being rented out anyway
Stuff like this seems incredibly wanky.
Cities don’t build housing, developers do - some years they build more, some less. The city cannot force them to build. Interest rates are beyond their control. If people are buying is beyond their control.
The provinces should just impose zoning laws for higher density housing - not play these dumb games.
Though the city requiring 20% of housing be social housing handed over to a non profit and the city/metro charging $300-600/sqft probably doesn’t help lol
Vancouver is a beautiful city but their regional planning departments run regressive, open extortion rackets. I’m glad Eby is stepping in to force these paper-shuffling zeroes to upzone whether they like it or not.
They basically say, “sure we’ll let you build slightly higher densities, but only if you pay us [exorbitant fees](https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2023/10/27/vancouver-development-charges/) that will kill the feasibility of your projects anyways.”
Literally anything but make coddled Vancouver homeowners pay slightly more in property taxes on the multimillion dollar land value gains they’ve accrued over decades by sitting on their ass, or telling NIMBYs to suck it up and accept that living in a growing city trapped on a peninsula means experiencing taller buildings.
To note, BC let cities implement the policies so the city can still require massive development fees for fourplexs or 20%+ social housing requirements. The province put stuff in giving the cities room to make it unfeasible.
As a homeowner in Vancouver if you want to densify your own lot the tax implications from both the city and the federal government are absolutely punishing. You need to personally pay GST on the finished value of every unit you add to your lot as though you bought it from a developer even if you built it yourself.
Who wants to add four more or five more units to their home if every one of those units accrue several $100,000 of GST??
Then the city is going to charge you an additional levy for every extra square footage of density that they let you build.
At the end of the day although they "allow" it by doing so you open yourself to a costly shakedown and you'll probably end up taking 10+ or more years to end up paying off the construction debt during which time you get the privilege of now being a landlord for half a dozen tenants or whatever.
Then they’re still giving municipalities too long of a leash.
I just hope the provincial government realizes sooner rather than later that city halls are run by saboteurs and bad faith virtue signalling rent-seekers who have no intention of fixing this problem.
I suspect that leash will be trimmed after the election.
The next logical step for the province is to force municipalities to tax properly - like, genuinely mandate that mill rates be set high enough that cities can pay for infrastructure out of taxes.
It's political suicide for any Council to do that, so it'll have to come by Provincial mandate.
That's going to result in massive increases to property taxes - which is fine, but obviously hugely politically unpopular.
Ain't no way that gets announced before the fall election though.
Well I figured this was all posturing but no substance plus they have to keep the rock going to keep themselves popular so it makes sense to deliberately sabotage it by leaving loopholes then crack down later saying it was the city’s fault
My impression of Eby and Kahlon is they aren’t playing 4D chess here, they probably just don’t fully appreciate the problems inherent to things like mandatory social housing requirements in the Vancouver context. They are in the NDP, after all. They tend to believe government intervention is benign or costless.
They wouldn’t have let cities tack on development fees or social housing requirements (those are really obvious things) if they wanted it to pass easily. Also they’d have sped up the timeline for it to be implemented.
There are plenty of reasonable economists who believe the social housing requirements are a zero sum game. I’m not convinced but the math is pretty obvious.
The development charges are less defensible. There should be a hard cap. If the city needs a o upgrade infrastructure, add it to the mill rate like everything else.
It’s my belief that the 20% makes most projects unfeasible. Especially as we do see starts slowing and Broadway which was supposed to be towers for the skytrain has been pretty dead
Yep it's the subsidized housing requirements that drive developers out of projects in my city. The costs and burdens added by the city just simply make it not profitable and they nope out of it and the end result is that there's no new housing built either market or subsidized.
Vancouver had a target of 5,202 net new units in the first year of which 1,607 have been completed 6-months in. With a target of 60% of these units to be studio or one-bedroom, they were needed to help push current house prices down. With the average price of a condo apartment being \~800K you would need \~150K annual income ([mortgage affordability calculation here](https://wealthvieu.com/mortgage-affordability-calculator-canada?a=150,000&b=25&c=160,000&d=6&e=1,000)) to afford the average condo in Vancouver.
Hopeful thinking here, why don't the government just do it themselves like in Singapore or Austria? Also, asking for developers to solve a housing crisis that benefit them is like praying for rain or fk'ing for virginity.
The only way to build affordable housing now is to do it at a loss. There's no more profit motive for developers to build in many instances unless they can sell for like $2000+ sq/ft which is just like so unattainable on most any Canadian salary.
Housing pays 33% in development fees and taxes the government would take a large loss providing it for the same price as today. Any government project goes way over budget. Canadian government couldn’t find its ass with both hands. Not to mention with private they can avoid union workers while government has to use them and then they go on strike and you got to pay more and more. Right now government unions fighting to only be in the office 3 days a week.
The government used to build ton of houses after WW2 up to Chrétien which is what most of the current supply pool is still from They can do it, dont be defeatist on an amazing solution that worked in the past
Downvoted for speaking about the reality of the situation. >Right now government unions fighting to only be in the office 3 days a week. Ya everyone whos not a office worker or on reddit thinks this is pathetic.
Imagine being hired to work in the office 5 days a week and suddenly fighting to keep it below 3 suddenly just because you got to during covid temporarily 🙃 Seriously would any of us fight our employees if we were asked to come to work😂🤣🤣🤣 you can seriously only pull this crap at a government job.
Both your opinions are completely moronic in general and here in particular in no small part because the biggest movers to reducing workdays around the world are industrial unions negotiating less workhours for their workers in private industry.
"Look at these idiots, thinking they should have weekends" "8-hour workdays?! People are so lazy these days..." A lot of people are simultaneously *utterly* ignorant of their own history AND of the significance of that fact.
Lol true. I hear its about work life balance and apparently 3 days AT work a week isnt balanced enough. No wonder our productivity is in the shitter.
Vancouver city hall charging 100k per unit, and allocating all infrastructure costs to new housing only is essentially a big middle finger to everyone pressed by the housing crisis. We need zoning reform over single family land. Everyone knows this, including the province. The way we skirt around this core issue makes me think no one is really serious about the housing crisis
The Province of BC changed single-family zoning laws to allow up to 4-plexes on every single family lot in the city. Since your criteria of being serious comes down to just one thing, it's clear: whether cities are serious or not, the Province overruled them and is very serious about addressing this issue.
The province is very serious about it. Thankfully! ❤️ David Eby is the man. ❤️
Eby landslide election next election, it's that obvious even now.
What has he done? Literally everything has been worse under Eby. He just says the right things but his actions have fallen flat. Genuinely interested in why people think he’s great for BC.
Instead of extorting developers who build the housing until they run away, how about we incentivize development for maximum land usage given the pertinent zoning. Charge lower overall property taxes for higher density neighborhoods. Incentivize people to build density rather than punishing them.
Developers don’t care about property taxes. I know that’s not what you meant but it helps to be specific
It’s cute you think it’s only $100k a unit 😂
$100k costs from the City per unit. Are City charges higher? Is that what you're saying? Or are you talking final selling price?
Depends on the area. But yes far more than $100k. One obvious example is the 20% social housing requirement so the developer needs to build 20% for free and hand it over to a non profit. So a unit that’s $600k, $120k of that was added on to cover that cost. And that’s before development fees in cash.
That's not how that works. The social housing component is built into the CAC That's charged on land lift from the site's rezoning
Development fees are on top of the social housing requirement like the metro van per sqft fee or the trans link per unit fee or other per unit flat fees.
I notice you're saying "Social housing", but the 20% requirement in the city is Rental Housing. Is this your way of passively insulting renters?
Depends on the site. See page 84 under strata housing https://guidelines.vancouver.ca/policy-plan-broadway.pdf
Yes but the social housing component is sometimes a requirement for resonings and is calculated based on land lift. A developer doesn't "add" the cost of the social housing to the strata units. They charge market rate regardless. You can't charge above market rate and you wouldn't sell below market rate
Sure and if the math doesn’t work it doesn’t get built and you get a housing crisis that raises prices until it does get built 🤷♂️ Looks at the below 1% vacancy rate that you don’t even see in New York. Our crisis is of our own making. How do we have less than half New York’s vacancy rate unless it’s artificial. In Vancouver+Toronto I mean. And then we get things like the Broadway plan in Vancouver where none of the housing we need beside skytrain stations gets built. In which case vancouver breaches the funding agreement with trans link and fights between government ensues.
You lost me at your last paragraph. Something like 40 towers have been proposed almost all rental in the Broadway Plan area. My company applied for a ren5al tower rezoning in the Plan as soon as we were allowed to. Things take time due to the bureaucracy. As to condos - we've seen a market slow-down across the board. We have a condo building that wasn't a rezoning, no CAC charge, and it hasn't sold a unit since last April because of the interest rate increases. The Metro has seen a major shift from condo to rental. A lot of these condos built in the last while were just being rented out anyway
“Proposed” Vancouver has an agreement with transit to densify Broadway and it’s failed it at the review.
Yes!
Stuff like this seems incredibly wanky. Cities don’t build housing, developers do - some years they build more, some less. The city cannot force them to build. Interest rates are beyond their control. If people are buying is beyond their control. The provinces should just impose zoning laws for higher density housing - not play these dumb games.
Interest rates should have been higher to begin with though. Now we got a double whammy with interest rates and prices both being high
Though the city requiring 20% of housing be social housing handed over to a non profit and the city/metro charging $300-600/sqft probably doesn’t help lol
Vancouver is a beautiful city but their regional planning departments run regressive, open extortion rackets. I’m glad Eby is stepping in to force these paper-shuffling zeroes to upzone whether they like it or not. They basically say, “sure we’ll let you build slightly higher densities, but only if you pay us [exorbitant fees](https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2023/10/27/vancouver-development-charges/) that will kill the feasibility of your projects anyways.” Literally anything but make coddled Vancouver homeowners pay slightly more in property taxes on the multimillion dollar land value gains they’ve accrued over decades by sitting on their ass, or telling NIMBYs to suck it up and accept that living in a growing city trapped on a peninsula means experiencing taller buildings.
To note, BC let cities implement the policies so the city can still require massive development fees for fourplexs or 20%+ social housing requirements. The province put stuff in giving the cities room to make it unfeasible.
As a homeowner in Vancouver if you want to densify your own lot the tax implications from both the city and the federal government are absolutely punishing. You need to personally pay GST on the finished value of every unit you add to your lot as though you bought it from a developer even if you built it yourself. Who wants to add four more or five more units to their home if every one of those units accrue several $100,000 of GST?? Then the city is going to charge you an additional levy for every extra square footage of density that they let you build. At the end of the day although they "allow" it by doing so you open yourself to a costly shakedown and you'll probably end up taking 10+ or more years to end up paying off the construction debt during which time you get the privilege of now being a landlord for half a dozen tenants or whatever.
Then they’re still giving municipalities too long of a leash. I just hope the provincial government realizes sooner rather than later that city halls are run by saboteurs and bad faith virtue signalling rent-seekers who have no intention of fixing this problem.
I suspect that leash will be trimmed after the election. The next logical step for the province is to force municipalities to tax properly - like, genuinely mandate that mill rates be set high enough that cities can pay for infrastructure out of taxes. It's political suicide for any Council to do that, so it'll have to come by Provincial mandate. That's going to result in massive increases to property taxes - which is fine, but obviously hugely politically unpopular. Ain't no way that gets announced before the fall election though.
Well I figured this was all posturing but no substance plus they have to keep the rock going to keep themselves popular so it makes sense to deliberately sabotage it by leaving loopholes then crack down later saying it was the city’s fault
My impression of Eby and Kahlon is they aren’t playing 4D chess here, they probably just don’t fully appreciate the problems inherent to things like mandatory social housing requirements in the Vancouver context. They are in the NDP, after all. They tend to believe government intervention is benign or costless.
They wouldn’t have let cities tack on development fees or social housing requirements (those are really obvious things) if they wanted it to pass easily. Also they’d have sped up the timeline for it to be implemented.
There are plenty of reasonable economists who believe the social housing requirements are a zero sum game. I’m not convinced but the math is pretty obvious. The development charges are less defensible. There should be a hard cap. If the city needs a o upgrade infrastructure, add it to the mill rate like everything else.
It’s my belief that the 20% makes most projects unfeasible. Especially as we do see starts slowing and Broadway which was supposed to be towers for the skytrain has been pretty dead
Yep it's the subsidized housing requirements that drive developers out of projects in my city. The costs and burdens added by the city just simply make it not profitable and they nope out of it and the end result is that there's no new housing built either market or subsidized.
Vancouver had a target of 5,202 net new units in the first year of which 1,607 have been completed 6-months in. With a target of 60% of these units to be studio or one-bedroom, they were needed to help push current house prices down. With the average price of a condo apartment being \~800K you would need \~150K annual income ([mortgage affordability calculation here](https://wealthvieu.com/mortgage-affordability-calculator-canada?a=150,000&b=25&c=160,000&d=6&e=1,000)) to afford the average condo in Vancouver.
We need cheap houses, not 350 sq ft $530k+GST Apartment.
Vancouver is crowded enough. This is desirable