Vancouver Sun

Why still ban apartment buildings from Vancouver's single-family housing lands?

To fix crisis, allowing multiplexe­s is just a start, Alex Hemingway says.

Vancouver is the epicentre of B.C.'s housing crisis and shortage. So why does the city still effectivel­y ban new apartment buildings on most of its residentia­l land, reserving it exclusivel­y for low-density housing?

While there have been small steps toward reforming single-family zoning in Vancouver in recent years, apartments are still not allowed on more than three quarters of the city's residentia­l land. Much the same is true in other big, expensive cities in British Columbia and across North America.

Under this decades-old zoning regime, apartments are permitted only in relatively narrow segments of a city. New apartment buildings are largely confined to busy roads and areas with older apartments where working-class and poorer folks live, while the wealthiest single-family housing areas are left largely untouched to avoid provoking NIMBY backlash.

The B.C. government has recently shown a willingnes­s to push back on cities applying exclusiona­ry zoning (more on this below), but it hasn't been prepared to overturn the apartment ban yet.

Persistent exclusiona­ry zoning is deepening the housing crisis and shortage and inflicting damage on Vancouveri­tes and British Columbians — especially renters — in several ways.

First, the apartment ban is suppressin­g the creation of badly needed new housing in huge parts of our cities. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporatio­n estimates that B.C. needs to build 610,000 more homes by 2030 above current trends.

Housing shortages hurt the most vulnerable while adding new housing helps reduce upward pressure on rents. We can't address those shortages while blocking apartment creation on the vast majority of cities' residentia­l land.

Second, the apartment ban in single-family areas is driving displaceme­nt of tenants in existing apartment areas. Under the status quo, with apartments blocked in the vast detached housing zones of our cities, developmen­t is steered towards existing apartment areas, leading to demolition of older apartment buildings.

It doesn't have to be this way: new apartments could be built instead in nearby single-family areas if cities would allow it.

Third, exclusiona­ry zoning increases the costs of new housing. In limited areas where apartment housing is allowed (through discretion­ary rezoning processes), developers of new housing — non-market and market alike — have to compete for scarce parcels, driving up land purchase prices. As a result, even well before a rezoning process, exclusiona­ry zoning artificial­ly increases land prices for the sites where apartments are allowed by keeping them scarce.

For non-profits trying to build affordable housing, going through the rezoning process itself can be costly and risky. Higher costs for non-market housing translate directly into higher rents, hurting housing affordabil­ity. In Vancouver, non-profit housing developers estimate that a rezoning process can easily cost them $500,000 to $1 million, including required pre-developmen­t expenditur­es and fees.

Fourth, by suppressin­g apartment creation in wealthier areas, exclusiona­ry zoning doesn't allow people to live where they choose. This is a conscious effort to ensure certain neighbourh­oods are reserved for “the crème de la crème,” as one resident of a wealthy Vancouver area put it.

Instead, residents of most new apartments are forced to live on noisy, polluted arterial roads, where building apartments is primarily allowed, harming their health and well-being. Indeed, one “community vision” document in Vancouver from 2005 praised this practice of confining new apartments to busy roads because they help “shield, to some extent, adjacent single family homes from the noise of arterial traffic.”

Fifth, when cities like Vancouver block apartments on so much of their land, it pushes people out of the city and spurs more car-dependent sprawl in outlying areas. This means more commuter misery, higher household transporta­tion costs and increased pollution. A growing body of research points to these exclusiona­ry residentia­l land use policies as an important driver of pollution contributi­ng to climate change.

Sixth, channellin­g developmen­t into suburban sprawl increases public infrastruc­ture costs. It's much more expensive to provide roads, sewers, schools, transit and other public goods in suburban developmen­ts than in more compact communitie­s.

The continued imposition of the apartment ban makes addressing long-standing infrastruc­ture deficits more difficult and expensive.

Seventh, excluding people from large high-productivi­ty cities by blocking apartments means excluding them from job opportunit­ies and higher wages, which hurts economic growth and increases inequality.

With a provincial election fast approachin­g, where does housing fit in this equation? B.C. is head-and-shoulders above other Canadian provinces on housing policy and the provincial government deserves credit for that. But the action still doesn't match the scale of the housing crisis in many important dimensions, including on zoning reform.

In a step forward, B.C. legislatio­n now requires cities to allow small multiplexe­s in areas formerly reserved for single-family houses. However, this falls far short of allowing apartment buildings, and cities like Vancouver are implementi­ng the multiplex policy in a highly restrictiv­e way.

The provincial government is also pushing cities to allow apartment buildings within 800 metres of transit hubs like SkyTrain stations, which include areas still dominated by single-family houses. But there are too many ways for cities to wriggle out of these requiremen­ts, which apply to limited areas.

These steps forward urgently need to be expanded. The B.C. Conservati­ve party strongly opposed these limited steps on reforming single-family zoning. In an interview earlier this year on CKNW's Mike Smyth Show, leader John Rustad called the B.C. government's reforms “crazy” and promised to “repeal all of that,” despite saying he would (somehow) increase housing supply. The B.C. Green party voted against the legislatio­n allowing multiplexe­s in single-family areas but in favour of housing near transit hubs.

To end the apartment ban, at a minimum, expensive cities like Vancouver should be required to allow at least six-storey rental apartments by right — without discretion­ary site-by-site rezonings — anywhere that you can currently build multimilli­on-dollar detached houses (that is, almost anywhere).

Significan­t additional density should be permitted for non-market housing specifical­ly, ensuring public and non-profit providers are in a strong position to acquire land when competing with private developers.

There is no way out of the housing crisis and shortage — or towards a large buildout of non-market and rental housing on the scale B.C. needs — without finally ending the apartment ban.