Five front-runners in the Vancouver mayoral race challenged each others’ plans to tackle Vancouver’s housing supply and affordability issues at a debate on Thursday evening.
The debate — hosted by the Sauder School of Business Centre for Urban Economics and Real Estate — featured incumbent Kennedy Stewart of Forward Together Vancouver, Fred Harding of the Non-Partisan Association (NPA), Ken Sim of A Better City (ABC), Mark Marissen of Progress Vancouver and current city councillor Colleen Hardwick of TEAM for a Livable Vancouver.
All candidates agreed the current housing situation has reached a crisis point, reflecting recent polling that showed Vancouver citizens citing housing as the most pressing issue this election.
However, candidates disagreed, often vehemently, on how best to go about solving the problem. When asked what their first housing motion would be if elected, there were a variety of answers.
Stewart proposed increasing the housing targets to approve 220,000 new homes over the next ten years. Marissen said he would lift the apartment ban , which would allow higher-density residential buildings to be built in single-family neighbourhoods. Hardwick proposed using city-owned land to build a mix of low-, medium- and high-income co-operative housing. Sim advocated for speeding up the process of granting building permits to developers, Harding agreed with Sim and emphasized the need for community amenity contributions (CACs).
CACs are contributions from property developers when the city approves rezoning allowing for a new development. In theory, those contributions allow the city to build and expand affordable housing and child care services, among other things.
The debate heated up when the panelists were allowed to pose questions to each other. A major area of contention focused on the permitting process for new developments.
Sim, who lost to Stewart by a narrow margin in the 2018 mayoral election, challenged the mayor on the slow rate of residential building permitting in Vancouver.
“[This debate has] all come down to permitting, when what we actually need is a housing plan to move forward with, which is exactly what you’re not offering,” Stewart countered. “We have to build much more housing, much more density.”
In 2018, Stewart promised to build 85,000 new units over the next ten years if elected. The current City of Vancouver goal is 72,000 in ten years. Council approved 8,800 new housing units in 2021.
Harding asked Stewart to address the gap between approved buildings and what was actually being built. Stewart said the residential units currently under construction are 60 per cent rental units, with a significant portion reserved for those making minimum wage. Stewart accused Harding of wanting to speed up development permits in order to build luxury homes.
“No, that’s not true … we want to speed up the process because the process is broken,” Harding said.
In both of these exchanges, members of the audience cheered, laughed or called out, mostly in support of Kennedy’s challengers, forcing modrators Jen St. Denis and Mo Amir to remind the audience to remain silent.
Both Harding and Sim continually emphasized the importance of catering to developers, with Sim stating that the process of obtaining permits was prohibitive to builders.
“[Developers] keep bringing up the same thing. It is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to build in our city, to get the permits, and a lot of builders are leaving.” Sim said, “Housing becomes less affordable and there will be less will be built.”
Harding criticized the city for creating an environment that was pushing developers away.
“We have to create conditions where we’re bringing developers back,” Harding stated, “[The housing market] is not just for people just trying to get on, but the middle class as well.”
Hardwick had a different opinion. She argued that the rate of population growth in Vancouver did not match the proposed number of new housing units to be built.
“The supply deficit … is not based in reality,” she said.
Instead, Hardwick pointed to the rezoning of residential areas for developers to build higher density housing as the culprit behind the affordability crisis, claiming this practice increases land value.
“We have the ability to slow down the rate of inflation by stopping the huge volume of rezoning that we’re doing just to sell zoning to generate revenue to fund our expansion.”
Advanced voting for all of the City of Vancouver's elections is open on October 8, 11 and 13. People can also vote on Election Day on October 15.