I dropped by the Cadillac Fairview-hosted open house last night (handily held in the very same hotel as the Urban Development Institute’s Christmas party, thanks), where more than 400 people had shown up in the first two hours to take a look.

This was CF’s effort to “engage the public” by displaying nine basic design principles it had come up with for the site (allow people to see the heritage fronts of Waterfront Station and The Landking, keep the gap with views to the North Shore open, allow pedestrian flows, etc.) and some renderings that showed a potential building now behind the station.

The most interesting part, though, was that the two big players here — Cadillac Fairview and the reps for Greg Kerfoot, who owns the rail lands behind Gastown and the station) — were present and clearly not happy with each other. It was definitely a trigger scene for any children of divorced parents.

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I’ve been waiting for the first efforts to take advantage of this piece of the new West End plan — laneway apartments.

And they’re here, at least in the render and development-permit-approval stage.

My story in the Globe on these new buildings, several of which have been designed by Tim Ankenman, an architect who specializes in infill on sites with heritage buildings. (Wondering why the buildings look so modern? Ankenman says having a different style helps set off the main, older building.)

No rents are set yet, so we don’t know how affordable these will be. Also, I’m waiting to see how they will change the lanes. The city is pushing to have builders put in landscaping and other features to turn the lanes into streets (which, by the way, will now have to names).

I get a lot of junk mail from clueless publicists. But, every so often, something good. This just landed. Perhaps we should all tune in.

27 November 2015

ECONOMIC AFFAIRS COMMITTEE OPEN INQUIRY INTO THE HOUSING MARKET WITH EVIDENCE FROM DAME KATE BARKER

The Economic Affairs Committee will next week open its new inquiry into the economics of the UK Housing Market with evidence from Dame Kate Barker, Martin Wolf and Chris Walker.

Kate Barker authored the Barker Review of Housing Supply in 2004, Martin Woolf is Chief Economic Correspondent for the FT and writes extensively about the housing market, Chris Walker is Head of Housing Planning and Urban Policy at the Policy Exchange think tank.

The evidence session will start at 3:35pm on Tuesday 1 December in Committee Room 1 of the House of Lords.

Areas the session will cover include the measures announced by the Chancellor in the Autumn Statement as well as:

 whether the Government’s ambition for one million new homes in the next five years is realistic or adequate to deal with the housing crisis;

 what impact introducing a new land value tax might have on motivation to build new houses;

 the impact of Help to Buy;

 how renting can be made a more attractive proposition for young people and others and not be seen as ‘throwing money away’.

Notes to Editors

1. The evidence session is open to the public. If you wish to attend you should go to Parliament’s Cromwell Green Entrance and allow time for security screening.

2. You can watch the session live on the internet at www.parliamentlive.tv

3. The Committee has issued a Call for Evidence for its new inquiry. The deadline for the submission of written evidence is Thursday 17 December. More details are available here

4. You can follow the Economic Affairs Committee on Twitter @LordsEconCom

 

There’s a lot of suspicion about whether Vancouver will really benefit from the viaducts or whether removing them will result in another new neighbourhood that seems to exist mostly for the benefit of investors and visitors (Coal Harbour anyone?).

Two people who were intimately involved in extracting public benefits for the city when the first part of the Expo lands were built — Larry Beasley and Ralph Segal — weighed in for my story on this question. They were part of a team that got a seawall, a school, a childcare centre, a substantial amount of social housing, several parks, and more in the early days of negotiations with Concord Pacific.

The city has promised to set up a stewardship group in order to get community input as the planning for the area goes forward. Beasley suggests something much bigger should happen: a giant public series of events to get the whole city talking about what should go into this new neighbourhood. That should be going on while the city negotiates with developer Concord Pacific and the province, so the power of the public conversation helps shape the deal. And Segal said city teams need to be empowered to bargain hard — something that hasn’t been the guiding principle of recent, according to him.

A side story to the main question I looked at was exploring what is under that dirt around the viaducts, the last of the old industrial land of early 20th-century downtown Vancouver.

I got to spend some fun hours looking at pictures from the Vancouver Archives that were a reminder of what used to be. Boats used to chug along under the old viaducts, when False Creek extended up to Prior Street. There were squatters huts on the shoreline. And there was a lot of junk that got used for fill as False Creek slowly got transformed in that area from swamp to land. Plus a lot of lovely chemicals that soaked in.

The archaeological report the city had done to check on the history underground has some cool maps showing the shifting shoreline, along with the locations of old industrial operations. Plus some historical pictures.

It was all a reminder that what happens next is far from a done deal. The conversation is just starting.

It’s been a struggle in Canada to create affordable housing since the federal government bailed out of supports for social housing under the Liberals in 1994.

Their withdrawal prompted many provinces to cut back or eliminate their programs.

That’s left cities, with a limited tax base, and non-profits to struggle with this on their own. For cities, the solution has often been to either provide free or discounted land, through a lease, or cover some of the costs through giving extra density to a site or both.

And even under those circumstances, it’s taken some creative thinking. The latest in that creativity is a new investment fund that’s been developed under the leadership of a former Scotia banker, who seems to have devoted considerable thought to how to get private investors to see putting their money into subsidized housing as a good deal.

The trick is to underscore the competitive returns the investment will get, compared to the private market. As Garth Davis explains, that’s possible because subsidized-housing projects get free or discounted leased land and they traditionally have the lowest (i.e. non-existent) vacancy rates, since there is a line-up for those units.

As I wrote in my Globe story last week, this creation, New Market Funds, is putting $11-million into Vancouver’s experiment in creating subsidized housing with no federal and limited provincial help.

There was quite a bit of discussion on Twitter about the risks and the structure of this kind of lending — and a lot of interest.

Funds like this aren’t new. There are many in the U.S. However, those are usually dependent on investors getting a return through the American tax incentives for low-cost housing. So this Canadian fund, which has to rely on other mechanisms, is really breaking new ground.

I can’t imagine what it’s like for average residents in Vancouver to try to square these two perspectives, which drifted across my screen last week.

Peter O’Neil’s story in the Vancouver Sun, titled “Canada a friendly home for illicit cash, corrupt real-estate buys, report says”

And this series in New Canadian Media, with a very different view of the Vancouver housing situation by local writer Ng Weng Hoong.

An interesting debate broke out at Metro Vancouver’s planning committee meeting last Friday, which I followed up on this week.

It started with a report on affordable housing or, rather, the startling lack of it in the region. There are lots and lots of apartments being built, theoretically enough to house all the newcomers who arrive every month. Problem is, most of it is priced too high for the lower-income people who arrive. There was a 6,800-unit shortage in the 2011-2014 period.

Michael Smith of West Van then proposed a stiff tax on properties that are left vacant, which he said are eroding the sense of community there. He said he pays high taxes on his Kauai property ($20,000, he told me later) because he is a non-resident and that could be applied here. (Links to maps on “dark census tracts” on the page turn.)

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It’s been a remarkable couple of days this week, for those who are interested in the hot topic of Vancouver housing and how much foreign money is flowing into it.

A study by UBC adjunct prof and planner Andy Yan was the latest to set off the fireworks, with his stats on 172 sales in the Point Grey area of town during six months last fall and winter. He looked at buyers with non-Anglicized names, the stated occupations of buyers on land titles, and whether they had mortgages.

There’s been a frenzy of debate about whether this was racist (with some opining that because Andy is Chinese, it couldn’t possibly be) or the clincher stats needed to understand what is happening with real estate in this crazy town or what.

I did a story for the Globe on some of the different opinions out there, with former NDP cabinet minister Darlene Marzari saying she welcomes the information with hard numbers and UBC law prof Margot Young talking about the need for more focus on the actual problem (global capital) instead of ethnicity.

And UBC prof David Ley, who has done the most work on trying to understand this phenomenon since it first started to appear in the 1980s, said he also worries that the debate over nationality of money is obscuring the essential problem: the way the Canadian and B.C. governments crafted policy in the ’80s that opened the door for wealthy people from around the world to park their money here, with programs designed to allow them to avoid taxes and with no requirement that they participate fully in Canadian life, taxes, and the social system.

The heart of this debate is about what information we think we need to have to understand this issue and to push for policy changes.

It seems to me that people in this city care about three essentials.

1. What impact is global capital having on Vancouver’s property market as a whole? How much is it increasing housing prices overall, making the city unaffordable for the people working in businesses and raising families here?
2. What impact is global capital having on individual neighbourhoods, because of houses being left vacant, houses that represent the history of the city being demolished, and the sense of community being eroded?
3. What federal or provincial policies are facilitating destructive global capital?

Unfortunately, Andy’s study from this week didn’t really answer the key questions. I know he’s got some other good work on the way that tries to tackle some of these questions. And his study Monday was interesting in its documentation of the fact that 82 per cent of the buyers of these expensive homes on the west side got mortgages, i.e. no bags of cash.

But what else did we learn and what is missing?

We learned that 66 per cent of the buyers of those expensive west-side homes had non-Anglicized Chinese names. We learned that 32 per cent of the purchases (52 homes) had “homemaker” on the land title and six per cent (8 homes) had students listed. I can’t find anything on Andy’s published study to indicate whether all those homemaker and student homes were among the Chinese-name group or whether some were Chinese and others were not.

What we didn’t learn: We don’t know if they were foreign investors, temporary residents, permanent resident, non-resident dads parking their wives and children here, or families who moved here wanting desperately to get out of China with its smog and suffocating education system — families who are fully planning to create a new life rooted in Vancouver. If I may remind people, it’s possible there are still some of them.

We didn’t learn how many homes that were purchased are sitting vacant or have been demolished and are being rebuilt and how many are being occupied by people trying to integrate into a new life.

We learned nothing about whether capital is being parked, whether there is flipping going on, what role speculation is playing, how many houses are being bought by someone who continues to work in China as a non-resident while leaving family here.

(One story that at least tried to get at part of that recently was Kathy Tomlinson’s in the Globe, where, in part of the story, she looked at the sales histories of more than 200 properties and showed which ones had changed hands rapidly and how the prices had increased.)

What we got was a small slice of sales history in one part of town that said pretty much what we’ve heard elsewhere for the last couple of years: People with Chinese names are buying property on the west side.

Andy did try to qualify his study with all kinds of caveats about what his data meant.

As he wrote: “The purpose of this study is not to necessarily solely focus on a single ethnic group, but in understanding how residential real estate might be consumed in the City of Vancouver with a focus on the enabling financial practices and structures in Canada.”

But that definitely got lost in the shuffle, especially because of the exclusive focus on the non-Anglicized Chinese names. It would be interesting if someone at least glanced at the Korean or other immigrant buyers on the west side, who are showing up as a small but steady stream.

Calling the study racist is really a stretch. But there are studies that seem to encourage conversations that are more about race (easy to ignite in this city with its long history of anti-Chinese sentiments) and other studies that seem to encourage conversations that are more about the role of global capital and government policy. It would be good to see academics discuss how to ensure the latter, if that’s really what they are aiming for.

A nice break of an assignment for me. An editor at Western Living asked me to do five restaurants in San Francisco. But I said our vow was to eat only at restaurants we could walk to in the Mission. So he let me narrow the scope.

The trick was picking only five. There were so many within walking distance of our VRBO apartment on 17th between Dolores and Guerrero. Delfina, Bar Tartine, several dozen taco shops, Mission Chinese, Flour + Water, various pupusa places recommended by my knowledgeable tweeps, and so on. Here are the five I picked in the end.

Of course, behind this decadence, it was impossible not to hear the waves of anxiety about the changes in the neighbourhood. Our place was owned by a former business writer from New York who’d bought it to live in the back apartment and rent out the front space through VRBO, as well as the duplex next door. (Occupied by our stay by a very heavy-footed French family with bicycles.) And she said it was disconcerting to realize that she could easily be bought a sold by the 20-something bazillionaires in the ‘hood, getting rich from their start-ups.

But it was interesting to see that gentrification can only go so far. I ended up at one point taking a city bus around the backside of Potrero Hill and through the area of the Mission east of Mission Street. It was still filled with obvious social housing in parts (which looked like a minimum-security prison) and pretty modest bungalows. A reminder that it takes more than a few years to transform a neighbourhood.

(Continuing from last week’s post …)

We all jump to conclusions quickly. Journalists are the most famous for it — three of anything within a week is a trend. But, in fact, we all do it, journalist or not, in an attempt to understand the world’s complexity.

So it’s normal to look at a few census tracts and think, Gee, that’s an area where I know a lot of new Chinese immigrants live (or that’s what the neighbours say). And it’s an expensive area. And it looks like a lot of people are claiming they have low incomes there. So, it must be that …

The flaw is that we don’t look beyond that. We don’t look at the neighbourhood next door, one that also has a lot of new Chinese immigrants, one that’s also in an expensive area, but one where the rate of low-income households is not that high. Or the area that is expensive and that has a high rate of low-income households but where the level of new Chinese immigrants is low.

Academic researchers run what are called regression analyses to test whether there is really a connection between different variables.

It’s a standard feature of almost any study that attempts to prove anything. Do people who do strength training have better results in retaining memory functions than people who do yoga? You need to make sure that the strength-trainers and the yoga-ites are comparable on every other scale: a mix of ages and occupations, a similar range of diets, comparable levels of crossword-puzzle and other brain-boosting activities, and so on. Otherwise you run the risk of concluding that strength training is better, when actually the kind of people who like to do strength training also do a number of other related things that tend to boost memory.

My last post got kind of long, so I skipped talking about this.

But I’m adding this to make the point to everyone trying to understand Vancouver by looking at a few census tracts at a time. It can’t be done, or at least not to the level that any serious researcher would think was credible. You have to look at the region overall and figure out, i.e. does the number of new Chinese immigrants correlate at a significantly high rate with the level of low-income households in that tract. (It’s also good if you can do these kinds of correlation over time as well i.e. as more and more new Chinese immigrants move into an area, does the rate of this or that other factor increase as well in something approaching lockstep?)

This is true for some of the research showing up related to students or homemakers being listed on land titles as owners. On the face of it, it seems weird that people in those categories are listed as owners in expensive areas. But to make the case absolutely solidly, you’d need to look at what occupations are listed everywhere. Maybe it will show that a suspiciously high number of homemakers and students are buying only in particular high-end areas. But maybe it will show that a lot of homes throughout the region are allegedly owned by homemakers and students and that there’s barely a difference between the west side and anywhere else in town.

Yes, it’s a lot of work to do that. Hardly anyone is doing that kind of work. Well, except for one of my researcher friends who has provided the analysis below. He ran the variables through the program to see whether there were any distinct correlations. There weren’t, except for very minor effects. I’ve provided his full analysis below. I can’t understand more than a quarter of it, but maybe some of you can. I can understand enough to see that, yet again, there’s no smoking gun yet.

I hope everyone gets that I’m doing this because I believe that ideas should be tested. It’s dangerous to have everyone spouting the same conventional wisdom.

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