Vancouver 2050 plan before council, critic slams housing promises

A plan to shape the future of Vancouver is before city council Wednesday.

The Vancouver 2050 plan has been in the works since 2019. It has also been the subject of several public input campaigns and is now moving ahead to the implementation stage, which includes council voting on everything from more green spaces in the city, to better transit, to housing affordability for the next 30 years.

It also comes ahead of the municipal election, which could see the plan delayed further or scrapped entirely, depending on the outcome at the polls.

While the plan itself involves broad-based city planning, it would not change any existing bylaws, but instead create a framework for the next three decades in terms of strategies and frameworks.

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However, ahead of Wednesday’s council meeting, Mayor Kennedy Stewart promised to introduce a motion to amend the plan to include renter protections.

Taking a page out of the newly-passed Broadway corridor plan, Stewart says he wants to guarantee all renters have the same offerings if their building is redeveloped.

“Enhanced protections include paid relocation to and from interim housing, developer-backed subsidy for any rent increase, right of first refusal to return to newly developed property at the same or lower rent, and vacancy control mechanisms to guarantee these rents remain 20 per cent below CMHC’s city-wide average for the life of the building,” the statement from the mayor reads in part.

Expert critical of the plan

UBC professor Patrick Condon, who teaches in the urban design program, tells OMNI News he is critical of the plan.

He says the city is just too attractive to investors and if council moves ahead with allowing massive redevelopment projects without addressing that issue, the affordability problems won’t be fixed.

“The plan shows every indication of making it worse by opening up every neighborhood in the city to speculation,” he said. “The plan seems to naively believe that just adding new housing units is going to fix the affordability problem.”

Condon says the city has already added more housing units per capita than any other city in Canada and the U.S. He argues that should make Vancouver the cheapest place for housing in North America, but obviously, that is not the case.

The plan does say speculation is a part of the rise in land prices, but adds that growing demand for homes is another factor.

The city says the Empty Homes Tax and Short-Term Rental regulations are already in place to address speculation, but argues “rising ownership prices are increasing the divide between who can own their home and who cannot. This divide is worsened by senior government tax and financial policies that privilege ownership over renting.”

Condon says putting the onus on the federal government to ensure affordability, without putting measures in place at the municipal level, won’t help.

“If the city insists on 50 per cent on all new units would be affordable as a minimum, that would mitigate land price inflation,” he tells OMNI News.

Vancouver is also not growing at the substantial rates other cities, like Surrey, Langford, Squamish, or Burnaby, in the province are.

“By 2050, Vancouver is expected to add about 260,000 more people for a total population of about 920,000 and up to 210,000 more jobs, for a total of about 638,000,” the report reads in part.

Condon says that “seems ridiculous.”

“The population growth figures are ambitious to say the very least because they exceed the basic population growth out to the next 30 years, which is now less than one per cent a year. So they’re already overly ambitious.”

He says the plan calls for dropping high rises into every neighbourhood in the city, something he argues isn’t the best fit for everyone, adding each neighbourhood should have a different vision.

The plan does outline that some neighbourhoods could see higher buildings than others in the future, and that areas close to transit are top of mind for opportunities to densify.

By 2050, Vancouver could see more buildings taller than 30 storeys in core areas, 25 storeys plus in the town centres, as well as 12-storey buildings in neighbourhood centres. It would encourage multi-unit complexes such as more townhouses in neighbourhoods which had traditionally been filled with single-family homes.

To watch Wednesday’s meeting, head to the City of Vancouver’s website.

Read the full plan here. 

With files from Lily Lam, OMNI News