VANCOUVER – As home prices continue to rise across Canada, Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart says he has a vision for the city that he believes will help ease the burden of housing cost while generating economic benefits. and social derivatives.
If done, the city could be dotted with structures consisting of up to six separate housing units on lots originally intended for detached single-family homes.
“Because they are smaller, they will be more affordable,” Stewart told the Star. “But they are facing the ground, which makes them very different from a condo.”
Despite being an issue of great concern in Vancouver for years, the city has not become more affordable for those trying to enter the housing market. The trend has taken hold across Canada and has not skimped on the two traditionally most expensive markets in the country.
According to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board, prices in that city increased 18.3 percent year-on-year in September, while the Greater Vancouver Real Estate Board reported a 13.8 percent increase over the same period.
On Wednesday, Stewart, a former New Democrat federal congressman, announced his plan called Making Home. The plan will go before the city council as a motion by a member in January, he said.
Calls to allow 2,000 individual lots in Vancouver to be converted into “small-scale multi-family homes.” Depending on the size of the lot, the units may be stratified or have permanent “reserved units”.
Stewart’s scheme pegs the current median cost of a single-family home in the city at $ 1.8 million. As part of the plan, steps will be taken to ensure that units cannot be speculated, such as a deal or some other way to limit the amount of profit a seller can make. The spin-offs will create jobs and income to help with other housing problems in the city.
“We have to act soon, or things will get worse,” Stewart said. “In January I have high hopes that we will pass it.”
The idea has mixed reviews. One housing expert in the city thinks it’s a scattered approach, and some real estate workers question whether it’s likely to make a real dent in what has become a pitiful market for hopeful buyers.
But Sal Lucia, who recently sold her mother’s home in East Vancouver, said she would have considered keeping the property if the plan was already in place.
“If I had known that I could have built a six-story building there and sold it, I probably wouldn’t have sold it,” said Lucia, a construction superintendent with more than 30 years of experience.
Lucia said her experience makes building a six-story building an option, but overall, the success of the plan would depend on where the lots are and who is building them.
While a homeowner might contract and organize the design, construction, and permitting for a single-family home, Lucia cautions against a group of homeowners doing the same for a six-story home, saying it is a project best left to the owners. developers.
“If they have knowledge in the business, great, but if you only have an average of six people and they are going to try to continue managing this process through permits and all that other stuff. Good luck, ”he said. “I would have a lot of lawsuits or people just walking away from things.”
Mortgage broker Jeff Evans said the plan could cause property values to rise, despite the mayor’s promise to take steps to prevent it.
If there is money to build such projects, values will go up, he said.
“I just don’t see how you can stop the forces of the free market from stopping that from happening,” Evans said. “Homeowners would start incorporating those kinds of price increases into the price.”
He also expressed concern about the strain such development could put on public services, adding that a better way to build projects is to speed up the permitting process.
Stewart said he is confident that the measures to avoid a radical change will avoid drastic price increases.
“What we don’t want to happen is for a big company to go and buy 500 lots and then flip, flip, flip,” he said. “There is an antispeculation built in.”
Andy Yan, city program director at Simon Fraser University, said the plan raises a lot of questions about funding for those who want to participate in a project together or even simple questions like finding parking for buildings with up to six families in areas where singles exist family homes.
Yan said he is concerned that the proposal did not consider city planning and cautioned against “edicts” by individual city council members that determine city planning. Such planning is a team sport “like hockey, not golf,” he said.
He said the details do not appear to be fully formed, saying “policy without investigation is guesswork” and questioned how much has been invested in the plan.
“You are calling it a pilot plan, what is the plan?”
Yan said that depending on where people decide to build the units, multiplexes could cause problems, while in other parts of the city they could be very successful.
Reference-www.thestar.com