Canada

In May, Victoria’s Housing Justice Project released a report that supported what low-income folks have been telling us directly: when you’re low-income, you cannot afford to rent most new social housing. 

Single mother of two Toni Love spoke at the project’s May 9 news conference at the legislature, pointing out that housing rules require her to rent a three-bedroom unit and make $85,000 a year to qualify for that unit.

When most people hear the words “social housing,” they imagine housing for low-income people.

But now the province — and many municipalities — don’t mandate affordability in social housing. 

B.C.’s current definition of social housing is “a housing development that government subsidizes and that either government or a non-profit housing partner owns and/or operates.”

In Vancouver, before 2015, social housing was defined as “residential units bought by the government or a non-profit using government funding in order to house seniors, disabled people and low-income families or individuals.”

Now, it’s defined as housing owned by a government or non-profit that has 30 per cent of the units with rent below BC Housing’s housing income limits, or HILs, meaning your income should be between about $40,000 and $58,000 if you rent a one-bedroom or bachelor apartment, and more for bigger units.

The other 70 per cent of social housing units are generally rented at what’s called “low end of market” — about 10 per cent below market rents. Average market for a two-bedroom apartment in purpose-built rental housing in Vancouver in 2023, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., was $2,181 a month.

Low end of market is around $2,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment, which is more than the total monthly income of a person on social assistance, disability or basic pension, about 74 per cent of the total income of a person earning minimum wage and 57 per cent of the income of a single person earning the median Vancouver income.

As a result, many social housing buildings in Vancouver actually exclude low-income people.

I love that "Tetrise" is now a verb:

Vancouver has long been nicknamed the “city of glass” for its shimmering high-rise skyline. Over the next few years, that skyline will get a very large new addition: Sen̓áḵw, an 11-tower development that will Tetrize 6,000 apartments onto just over 10 acres of land in the heart of the city. Once complete, this will be the densest neighbourhood in Canada, providing thousands of homes for Vancouverites who have long been squeezed between the country’s priciest real estate and some of its lowest vacancy rates.

Sen̓áḵw is big, ambitious and undeniably urban—and undeniably Indigenous. It’s being built on reserve land owned by the Squamish First Nation, and it’s spearheaded by the Squamish Nation itself, in partnership with the private real estate developer Westbank.

[…]

What chafes critics, even those who might consider themselves progressive, is that they expect reconciliation to instead look like a kind of reversal, rewinding the tape of history to some museum-diorama past. Coalitions of neighbours near Iy̓álmexw and Sen̓áḵw have offered their own counter-proposals for developing the sites, featuring smaller, shorter buildings and other changes. At the January hearing for Iy̓álmexw, one resident called on the First Nations to build entirely with selectively logged B.C. timber, in accord with what she claimed were their cultural values. These types of requests reveal that many Canadians believe the purpose of reconciliation is not to uphold Indigenous rights and sovereignty, but to quietly scrub centuries of colonial residue from the landscape, ultimately in service of their own aesthetic preferences and personal interests.

This looks good. I'm not mad about the enormous elevated stroad cutting the development in half, but it does promise:

There will be over 6,000 rental units at Sen̓áḵw. Included in these 6,000 are approximately 1,200 affordable rental units as defined by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). The balance will be market rental. Of the 1,200 affordable rental units, 250 will be set aside for Squamish Nation members, with the remainder serving residents of the City of Vancouver.

[…]

Sen̓áḵw is designed to be a transit-oriented, car-light community. With this car-light emphasis, combined with the already highly restricted parking regulations for the surrounding Kits Point neighbourhood, the impact on the surrounding streets will be insignificant. It is anticipated that the development will add 7 to 8 cars per minute on average, spread across the two site access points during peak hours.

As a result, the upgrades negotiated through the Services Agreement are focused on accommodating the mobility needs for all travel modes including upgrades to cycling, pedestrian facilities and improved access to transit.

[…]

Sen̓áḵw will be one of Canada's first large-scale net zero operational carbon housing developments. There will be a district energy system on site developed in partnership with Creative Energy, that will utilize excess heat from adjacent Metro Vancouver infrastructure to provide a source of carbon free energy for the project. The buildings will also meet Step 3 of the BC Energy code and will feature highly efficient triple-glazed envelopes to minimize both thermal and noise transmission. The units will feature energy efficient appliances and fixtures to minimize water use and the entire development is designed to encourage alternative forms of transportation while reducing resident dependence on the automobile.

The commercial building in Phase 2 will leverage 45,000 square feet of mass timber construction, a material with 50% less embodied carbon than typical concrete construction.

Other sustainable features of the project include: the use of green roofs, permeable paving materials, native plantings, and rainwater capture and collection for irrigation.

[…]

A new transit hub at the south end of the Burrard bridge will be created as part of the Sen̓áḵw project to support increased transit connectivity to the site. While current transportation infrastructure in the area prioritizes north-south connections, the new density from Sen̓áḵw offers the opportunity to improve east-west connectivity through the potential revitalization of the False Creek streetcar line, upgraded aqua bus and ferry services, and enhanced cycling options. Further, the project is located within walking distance of the new Broadway Subway extension.

Predictably, not everyone has been happy about it. Critics have included local planners, politicians and, especially, residents of Kitsilano Point, a rarified beachfront neighbourhood bordering the reserve. And there’s been an extra edge to their critiques that’s gone beyond standard-issue NIMBYism about too-tall buildings and preserving neighbourhood character. There’s also been a persistent sense of disbelief that Indigenous people could be responsible for this futuristic version of urban living. In 2022, Gordon Price, a prominent Vancouver urban planner and a former city councillor, told Gitxsan reporter Angela Sterritt, “When you’re building 30, 40-storey high rises out of concrete, there’s a big gap between that and an Indigenous way of building.” 

The subtext is as unmissable as a skyscraper: Indigenous culture and urban life—let alone urban development—don’t mix. That response isn’t confined to Sen̓áḵw, either. On Vancouver’s west side, the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations—through a joint partnership called MST Development Corp.—are planning a 12-tower development called the Heather Lands. In 2022, city councillor Colleen Hardwick said of that project, “How do you reconcile Indigenous ways of being with 18-storey high-rises?” (Hardwick, it goes without saying, is not Indigenous.) MST is also planning an even bigger development, called Iy̓álmexw in the Squamish language and ʔəy̓alməxʷ in Halkomelem. Better known as Jericho Lands, it will include 13,000 new homes on a 90-acre site. At a city council meeting this January, a stream of non-Indigenous residents turned up to oppose it. One woman speculated that the late Tsleil-Waututh Chief Dan George would be outraged at the “monstrous development on sacred land.”

To Indigenous people themselves, though, these developments mark a decisive moment in the evolution of our sovereignty in this country. The fact is, Canadians aren’t used to seeing Indigenous people occupy places that are socially, economically or geographically valuable, like Sen̓áḵw. After decades of marginalization, our absence seems natural, our presence somehow unnatural. Something like Sen̓áḵw is remarkable not just in terms of its scale and economic value (expected to generate billions in revenue for the Squamish Nation). It’s remarkable because it’s a restoration of our authority and presence in the heart of a Canadian city.

Calgary's downtown development incentive program, which offers $75 per square foot to building owners willing to convert underused office space to residential apartments, is unique to North America.

It was launched in 2021, at a time when the city — home to more corporate head offices per capita than anywhere else in Canada — was reeling in the wake of an extended downturn in oil prices and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Commercial property values in the city's core had collapsed due to a wave of energy sector layoffs and consolidation that had left close to a third of Calgary's downtown office space empty.

Desperate to fill nearly 13.5 million square feet of unoccupied space and boost its dwindling tax base, Calgary launched the incentive program with the goal of removing six million square feet of empty offices from the city's downtown by 2031.

Sheryl McMullen, who manages the program for the City of Calgary, said it was unclear at the time what the reception would be.

But the program turned out to be so popular that in October 2023, the city was forced to press pause after reaching its $253-million funding threshold.

I must admit I misinterpreted the headline. "Wait! This is the era of post offices? How wonderful! Why has nobody told me?"

Martinez Ferrada said the federal government is looking to support downtown revitalization through several agencies, but there are also opportunities to rethink the core purpose of downtowns, creating new ways to bring people back without relying on office workers.

“One of the opportunities that we see is for those cities to develop kind of a new stream of how can we use downtown cores,” she said.

[…] 

Montreal’s Morizio said the long-term solution may be to re-establish downtowns as a place for social connection rather than just going to an office.

She said Montreal has begun installing pedestrian-only streets to create public spaces, but such projects are costly and not applicable everywhere.

“People aren’t going to come to work more than two or three days a week ? So, I think to be able to counter that, what we need to do is we need our commercial streets to almost be our third place,” she said, referring to a familiar public spot that people can go.

“Besides our dwelling and where we work, we need a space where people can come and connect. That’s a lot of what we lost during the pandemic.”

The problem is not that the owners of multi-million-dollar homes, or those like the landed gentry of the Regency period who are deriving their income from investment properties, still believe that they are humble members of the middle class. It’s how this warped self-image is wielded, in ways that impact everyone—notably, the one in three Canadians who rent. This is most obvious in the inclination of owners to rent on Airbnb rather than long term; in North Vancouver, one Airbnb host complained to North Shore News that “people don’t want to deal with [long-term] tenants” who are less profitable and harder to evict. But it’s also evident in the way that homeowners frequently oppose new developments that encroach on their neighbourhoods, fighting—often successfully—against change and exacerbating unaffordability and insufficient housing supply in the process. This opposition frames apartment dwellers not as prospective neighbours but as interlopers; when BC’s NDP government introduced new legislation to end restrictive zoning in communities with more than 5,000 people on November 1, Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer described it as the latest escalation in a “war on single-family neighbourhoods.” 

As the number of homeless people rises, there are mounting calls for empty buildings around Halifax to be repurposed for affordable housing.

The Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia added its voice this week, with a statement calling Halifax Regional Municipality "negligent" for leaving the old Halifax Memorial Library on Spring Garden Road empty for nearly a decade.

[…] 

An untold number of other Nova Scotians are also looking at empty buildings as potential housing.

For the past two years, people have been dropping virtual pins on a provincial map to create a crowdsourced database called This Should Be Housing. Each pin represents an empty building or piece of land that the contributor thinks should be housing. 

Most of the pins are in Halifax. Some of the properties are publicly owned and some are owned privately.

Deanna Steele says she has never seen as many condo and vacation homes for sale in Kelowna, B.C. as she has this month.

The founder of Keys to Kelowna Properties Inc., a luxury vacation rental management agency, said the lake-front city's real estate market is "saturated'' by properties zoned for short-term rental use. Some of the sellers are people who bought not that long ago and are already trying to get out.

"They thought they were going to make a mint because they saw what was happening in the gold rush. And now they're realizing, 'Oh, big mistake,'" said Steele.

That gold rush — investing in short-term rentals in Kelowna and many other Canadian cities — could potentially slow to a trickle in the wake of new legislation to regulate short-term rentals introduced by the B.C. government in mid-October.

The limited number of existing units, combined with low turnover rates, make co-op housing an unviable option for most Canadians, despite being so in-demand.

Consequently, since market landlords aren’t competing against the affordability of co-op housing, they are free to jack rents as high as the market will bear, Thomas said. She points to pressure from industry lobbying the government against investing in non-market housing.

Geordie Dent, executive director of the Federation of Metro Tenants' Associations in Toronto, told Ricochet that’s an accurate assessment of what happened behind the scenes, that lobbying by landlords certainly played a key role.

“I don't think anyone ever came out publicly and said that,” he said. “It was always pitched as ‘market efficiency’ to the public, while I think privately, a bunch of landlords realized they were going to make a ton of money down the road. The government just swallowed everything they said and they didn't care if it was true or not.”

The proposed development will include 129 studio apartments for low-income people and those experiencing homelessness. A minimum of 50 per cent of units will be held for people who are currently homeless and on income assistance, with the other half for people earning earning between $15,000 and $30,000 per year.

More than 200 people signed up to speak to the city’s public hearing, with emotions high on both sides. Opponents argued the project was a “failed model of housing,” that would “warehouse” a high-proportion of proposed residents with complex issues. Opponents also raised concern about nearby schools.

Thursday’s ruling un-pauses the original judicial review application against the city, which was suspended in September pending the outcome of the MEVA 5 challenge.