[溫哥華本地新聞] Metro Vancouver communities struggle struggle, measures, created, housing, demand

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Metro Vancouver communities struggle to find ways to make densification gentler

New types of housing among the ideas being promoted as municipalities wrestle with the price pressures created by increased demand, rising concerns over measures to densify neighbourhoods



Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/Metro+Vancouver+communities+struggle+find+ways+make+densification+gentler/9191735/story.html#ixzz2lG8ih7G0
Vancouver is wrestling with the issue of housing affordability at the same time as it struggles with a need for more public transportation and how to pay for it. While the city is regularly named as one of the least affordable in the world, it is also often named one of the most livable cities.
New figures from the UDI/FortisBC Housing Affordability Index found that less than 11 per cent of the population can afford a single-family home in the city of Vancouver, which would take an annual income of $158,218 to finance.
Outside of Vancouver proper, the numbers are better, and the farther out you go, the more affordable housing is. But if an increasing number of people move farther and farther out of the city centre in search of home ownership, transportation infrastructure — roads, bridges, tunnels and how to pay for them — becomes a significant issue. In the Metro area, the issue of how to pay for transportation, from new transit lines to a bridge to replace the Massey Tunnel, is fraught with conflict. Earlier this month, the 2013 TomTom Travel Index suggested Vancouver is the most congested city in North America, surpassing even Los Angeles.
But attempts to stem the congestion by densifying existing Vancouver neighbourhoods have met with opposition, with neighbours reluctant to see towers built in their low-density neighbourhoods.
“We can either have the extreme of Los Angeles, which is now in a crisis and spending billions of dollars on transportation, or evolve perhaps more like a San Francisco, where you’ve got communities with mid-rise and low-rise buildings and more highrises in the downtown core,” said Anne McMullin, president and CEO of the Urban Development Institute. “People are coming to our region, and I think that’s what as Canadians we believe is good for our region, our economy and our country. We have to be very creative and figure out how to accommodate them.”
Each year, about 30,000 or 40,000 people move to Metro Vancouver, McMullin said.
The City of Vancouver is trying various strategies to improve home ownership affordability, with increasing supply to meet the demand from the arrival of newcomers at the top of the list.
“If you don’t do that, the prices will continue to go up because of the laws of supply and demand,” said Brian Jackson, the city’s general manager of planning and development services. “All of the easy choices for accommodating growth have already been made.”
He says the “easy choices” were tracts of industrial land downtown that were redeveloped and land along the major corridors.
“Now we’re looking at other arterials that people didn’t really look at before as needing to accommodate growth,” Jackson said.
One affordability measure the city has taken is to introduce laneway housing, so that every single family lot in the city can potentially have three suites, including two mortgage helpers: a main, a basement suite and a laneway house. Although only homes in Kitsilano can be made into strata with different owners for each unit at present, Jackson said the city is considering making this possible in other neighbourhoods of the city, such as Marpole, or Grandview-Woodland.
Two other new options in Vancouver are co-housing, where residents agree to take on more in terms of running a building and interacting with their neighbours as a condition of ownership, and below-market ownership, where developers build homes with less luxurious finishes and agree to sell them for 20 per cent below market price.
There is one co-housing project in the building permit stage, and most of the units are already spoken for, Jackson said, adding that the homes will be inherently more affordable because they will be discounted based on the restrictions of living in a co-housing community.
There are a few applications to the city of Vancouver to build below-market-price projects. However, the city is still ironing out the rules that would maintain the affordability past the first owner and that would target the units to people earning between $22,000 and $80,000 a year.

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Jackson said the city has a shortage of townhouses, row houses and stacked townhouses.

“We have very, very little of this type of housing,” Jackson said. “In Norquay area, we introduced a townhouse zone and were starting to see the kind of interest in building townhouses, which provide a kind of sweet spot that doesn’t exist in Vancouver.”

In New Westminster, non-strata row houses make up one of the most popular developments in recent years, a city leader says.

Lisa Spitale, chief administrative officer for New Westminster, said the row houses allow people to buy their own home at a more affordable price than a single family home, but without the need to belong to a strata.

“More (developers) throughout the region should be doing this,” Spitale said. “I believe that there will be more, because I think it really hits a certain market segment. We in local government need to be thinking more about examples like this as well. What is the market asking of us and what do we need to do ... in order to meet that need? We’re a service industry here.”

She said in some cities, building fee-simple row housing has been blocked because of insurance concerns about common walls.

Jackson said that provincial legislation has recently changed, so that such housing is now possible. He expects there will be more of this type of housing built, particularly in the Norquay area, but that other areas of Vancouver don’t have many large areas that have been designated for this type of use.

“I think that once people start to see the types of housing that is being offered in these areas, I think that there will be pressure on us to look at other solutions for affordability,” Jackson said.

Spitale said New Westminster residents tend to view their city as urban because of its history as the province’s first capital.

“Being an older city and a small city, we’ve always been a fairly dense city,” Spitale said.

“To understand some of the evolution here, you have to understand that New Westminster was once the capital of B.C. We had the first police department, first fire department, first library and with that comes an expectation of being a city from its roots,” Spitale said. “If you are a city, you tend to think more in urban terms. If you grew up somewhere in the Fraser Valley, you would have a certain expectation of open, green space and agricultural uses and those are all equally valid.”

She said densification is often controversial in cities.

“It hasn’t been easy in New Westminster — issues around densification are difficult in neighbourhoods, but we’ve had some very good examples that have just evolved over time and it has been seen as a natural progression,” Spitale said. “Some of the policies that other cities are looking at now, and in some cases have community acceptance and in other cases have some controversy, some of those practices have been going on in New Westminster for decades.”

McMullin would like to see more gradual change in the City of Vancouver as well as in the suburbs.

“Gradual change gives people the opportunity to stay in their neighbourhood. If you’ve raised three children, you want them to be able to stay in their neighbourhood, but the only way to do that is to bring in options,” McMullin said. “You can have highrises in Yaletown or in Coal Harbour, but perhaps in neighbourhoods like Marpole, you could gradually bring in duplexes or fourplexes or low-rise buildings.

Even in Queen’s Park, a more-upscale New Westminster neighbourhood of mostly heritage single-family homes, there is densification, but it has happened gently over decades, Spitale said. The city has used incentives for heritage conservation to build in some additional density in the area.

“You’re contributing an amenity to the community by conserving your home, so what can we do help in that regard. We’ve tried a few heritage revitalization agreements in Queen’s Park — we’ve had a few legal duplexes, suites, coach houses in garages or additional floor space,” Spitale said. “Some of them were historic. When you walk through Queen’s Park, you might look at a structure and think, ‘that’s kind of a weird door.’ Well no, it used to be the barn, but it’s evolved and changed in the 1930s.”

For the most part, residents have embraced these changes because they have been gradual.

“Residents have said you can’t go too far — you can’t push heritage conservation as a back door to density — and that’s a valid discussion,” Spitale said. “It’s an issue of balance between the need for heritage conservation and the costs around it.”

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Lisa Spitale, chief administrative officer for the City of New Westminster, pictured next to row houses in Queensborough, says the row houses allow people to buy their own home at a more affordable price than a single family home, but without belonging to a strata.