Let’s Make Cooperative Housing Great Again

Some topics are too big to cover in a single column. So for the next two weeks, Max Fawcett will tackle the housing crisis and ways we might tackle it in a series of them.

Here you can find the first and second column of your series.

In a city where new architectural marvels seem to spring up almost every month, it’s easy to forget the importance of the low-rise, red-roofed buildings in Vancouver’s False Creek South neighborhood.

The two complexes, built in the early 1970s and designed by famed local architect Richard Henriquez, are among his most significant buildings. They serve as the standard-bearer for a cooperative housing movement that had a brief but bright moment in the political sun more than four decades ago, and the impact is still being felt by people lucky enough to live in the buildings that resulted. .

For a brief moment, public-minded values ​​like community engagement and communal decision-making were allowed to overshadow private interests. Governments at all levels collaborated to build housing forms that emphasized security of tenure over wealth creation and exemplified the kind of design that urbanists like Jane Jacobs held as their platonic ideal.

And then, almost as quickly as the movement flourished, it fizzled out in the face of sky-high interest rates and the shift to austerity that followed in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Now, we need more housing cooperatives. And building them will require more public ownership of land and buildings than we have been willing to consider in this country.

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It’s an idea Paul Hellyer’s commission explored when it kicked the notion that the federal government directly manages land use in urban areas. It’s probably not a start in 2022, but there are other ways to substantially increase public home ownership in this country, whether through the Canada Pension Plan and its $541 billion in assets or the federal government’s own balance sheet. That money could be mobilized to support the cost of construction or help acquire land, all with an eye to making the math more favorable for groups seeking to create new cooperatives.

If done correctly, that could change the math for other non-owners as well. look towards Vienna, where 44 percent of the rental stock is subsidized housing and the city is by far the largest owner. Because they keep their unit rents affordable, that has a ripple effect on the rest of the housing market. As Justin Kadi, a researcher at the Vienna University of Technology, put it Market, “Low rents in the social housing sector also keep rents in the private sector low.”

It’s probably no coincidence that Vienna is routinely ranked as one of the most liveable cities on the planet.

21st-century co-ops will necessarily look different than them, and they won’t be able to take advantage of the same inventory of unused public land that helped make things like False Creek South possible. But they could add some much-needed density to land that hasn’t been fully or adequately developed, as the City of Vancouver is proposing on False Creek South.

And we have other assets that can be leveraged, and new leverage points that can be exploited, in the pursuit of more publicly owned and managed housing.

All that is really missing at the moment is the political will to use them. As we have seen in the last two years, governments are capable of doing much more than some people had previously imagined. It’s time they did the same here, before it’s too late.

Next up: Why it’s time for a rental renaissance.