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Originally published on railvolution.org. Rail~Volution is now Mpact: Mobility, Community, Possibility.
The second plenary at Rail~Volution 2019 in Vancouver, BC, featured a strong panel of speakers, led by Frances Bula, an urban affairs contributor to The Globe and Mail with decades of experience covering development and transit expansion. “Vancouver has done a lot of good things” in terms of developing density along transit, she said. But, “what has come with transit has not necessarily been the best housing for low income communities.”
Andy Yan, Director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University, set the stage. Then Bula moderated a discussion with Jay Pitter, a placemaker, author and city-builder from Toronto, ON; former Vancouver city councilor and Harvard University Loeb Fellow, Andrea Reimer; Tim Grant, a Vice President with Vancouver’s PCI Developments; and Janice Abbott, Chief Executive Officer of Atira Women’s Resource Center in Vancouver. The diversity and strength of panelists’ lived experience shone through in the very honest and real conversation that ensued.
What were the key take-aways?
The overall thrust was to re-center the conversation about transit-oriented development. To address the issue of displacement and seize the promise of building more livable communities through transit and related development requires stepping back – to see the systemic issues involved. It requires stepping back from cookie-cutter solutions. It requires stepping up to recognize that each place is different, requiring solutions arising from the lived experience of the communities excluded from involvement in the planning and delivery of transit and housing projects.
“Our job is to have good questions, to create space and facilitate information finding. And if we are good at what we do, we don’t we do any project the same way twice. Because every place has such a distinct history and character. I know that that makes my fellow city builders and urbanists really upset. And I’m super good with that.” – Jay Pitter
“Displacement is not inevitable,” Andrea Reimer said. She and the other panelists shared several specific approaches and policies.
- anti-displacement toolkits
- renter protections, including: rental-only zoning, rate-of-change bylaws, short term rental bylaws; empty homes tax
- community land trusts and other provisions to put more ownership in the hands of the community
- more regulatory flexibility and speed, especially with zoning
- financial tools and levers to address the basic need for there to be enough funds to cover the costs of affordable housing development
Scroll down for a full accounting of the plenary discussion. It is clear, from both the history of Vancouver’s success and the region’s current challenges that it’s fundamentally important for there to be alignment about the goals around transit and housing development and among leaders across every level and community. And to step back and step up.
“Folks need to be flexible and listen to community. And we need more land in the community hands and more power in the hands of community. Does anybody need to have a hundred million dollars or two hundred million or a billion dollars in the bank when people don’t have a place to live and can’t afford to eat and are living in tents? It’s a complete restructuring of the way we live and the way we think about life.” – Janice Abbott
Rail~Volution 2019 – Tuesday Plenary
The Challenge of Getting it Right: Success, Housing Affordability and Displacement in the Vancouver Context
Andy Yan Sets the Stage
Andy Yan’s presentation covers the region’s planning history and the evolution of the current affordability challenge. Vancouver’s 20 percent mode share for transit – the highest on the west coast – arises out of multi-generational collaboration among governments. Development has tracked with transit expansion, with one in five new housing units near SkyTrain stations.
But housing values have streaked upward while area incomes have not. Even with a large expansion of housing over the last ten years, low income communities have been pushed away from transit. Residents, no matter where they live, face a “transportation mortgage” (the accumulated cost of 25 years) that together with housing insecurity makes the Vancouver region one of the most challenging for affordability.
As Yan notes, the region is bringing its planning mojo to the challenges (see, for example, Metro Vancouver’s Housing and Transportation Cost Burden Study, as well as new policies from cities around the region). And TransLink, Yan said, is pushing to new levels by focusing on both technology and the “culture” of transit, centering the user experience. The challenges ahead include climate change and sea level rise. Another era of alignment around planning, transit, and land use is definitely called for.
Introductions: Working with community at the nexus of transportation and housing
Frances Bula opened up the discussion of housing affordability and displacement in the Vancouver context, asking each of the four panelists to share their experience.
Jay Pitter – So much we cannot know from statistics or maps.
Jay Pitter’s research and practice are focused on urban design and social justice. Her thinking about transit-oriented development was shaped, she said, by an experience twenty years ago, working for the City of Toronto with a team trying to determine whether gaps in the transit network were contributing to problems of violence and kids missing school in a low income, high-immigrant suburban Toronto neighborhood. While the team did uncover gaps and frequency issues, they also learned through students’ stories that kids were getting on and off the bus as it crossed gang boundaries. They learned that some kids worked night shift jobs to help support their families, walking home in the middle of the night. And that young women experienced gendered violence on the buses.
“There’s so much that we cannot know from statistics or hard infrastructure or by looking at the map. When I approach transit and transit-oriented displacement, I always also think about social networks, unheard stories and those types of nuances that stats simply cannot gather.” – Jay Pitter
Andrea Reimer – Trying to build the modern city
Andrea Reimer served three terms on the Vancouver city council, for most of that time as chair of planning, and led on such issues as becoming the greenest city, reconciliation with First Nations, child care, open data and (through her work on regional governance) preservation of industrial lands. Her real expertise is her lived experience as a renter. In 24 years she has moved 15 times, 12 of those as a result of “demovictions.” Renters take what they can get.
Tim Grant – Shifting to a diversity of housing tenure
Tim Grant is a vice president at PCI Developments, a company that works exclusively in metro Vancouver. Developers of Marine Gateway (on the Canada Line) and King George Station in downtown Surrey, PCI is becoming more involved with rental and below-market housing. They have five transit-oriented projects under construction plus ten projects in development planning, each with secured rental or below-market housing. Grant is also chair of the board of nonprofit Catalyst Community Development. Between them, PCI and Catalyst demonstrate that there is “an intersection or nexus where community, private investment, public and transportation objectives can all be addressed, particularly in these transit-oriented, complete communities.”
Janice Abbott – The lived expertise of single moms
Janice Abbott runs Atira, a nonprofit organization that builds housing for women. As a young mother, she had to move “every 5 minutes,” because of creepy landlords, too high rent or new jobs. While she now lives close to work, that is not the reality for most of the women who work at Atira or the women they serve. “I’d like to see the staff of Atira (there are 850) able to walk or get on transit and be at work in 15-20 minutes. But most women who work for us can’t do this. They’re single moms. They have multiple kids. They can’t afford to live anywhere close to where they work.” Most of the housing built around transit stations also excludes both the “women we work with and women we house. Women we house can’t afford transit let alone housing, so they are forced to live in places where they prefer not to live. Housing is getting more and more scarce, so we’re starting to see camps.”
First question: What’s working – or not – for TOD (transit-oriented development) and communities?
Andrea Reimer: While (as Andy Yan’s presentation indicated) there are more housing choices over the last ten years, Reimer questioned if they are available only to people making $70,000 or more per year? She called for more definition of who we want TOD to work for – what we mean by community.
Vancouver suffers from “the waterbed effect” and “the aspirin effect.” The waterbed effect is pushing down in one area without attending to the effects elsewhere in the region. And the aspirin effect is the tendency to think that “if one is good, a thousand must be awesome.” She tied this to the increasing tendency to up-zone places people work for residential development, a pattern that undercuts the promise of transit-oriented development (TOD). If the goal of TOD is to get to work and back again in a reasonable time, the constant up-zoning gets you only from where you live to where you live. We need to recognize that things are good only in a specific context.
Tim Grant: Complete communities are very symbiotic. They can’t be just residential and transit, but also need industrial and good job space. Marine Gateway was a location with potentially 75 jobs in a vacant car-processing center and now has 2000 jobs and 460 housing units. There is a need for diversity of housing tenure. It can’t all be condos. Though it is very hard to do, there is potential for private development of below-market housing.
Jay Pitter urged the conversation to take one step back. “Before we start talking about projects, it is critically important to acknowledge that the issue of transit oriented gentrification and displacement is not one that is project based. It is a phenomenon that is structural and systemic.” Transit and housing development come out of a colonial history that has privileged a certain class and race of people. In addition, urbanism and land use planning have been “weaponized” against very particular communities.
Transit development historically has been shaped by people with a lot of economic and political power. Painting the historical picture – of new transit investments going to people who already have options – Pitter zeroed in on the dynamic happening across North America today, with places where poor people live seeing new transit and development – but not for them.
“Poor people are getting very excited because finally they are going to get connected and linked up. But the problem is the transit isn’t really for them. The transit is for individuals who are in a higher class bracket who are being pushed out of the core because the core is so impossibly expensive. So now they need to be accommodated where poor people live. The focus is on those middle class income earners. So, the housing values are going up to accommodate this group. And the folks who have been disconnected historically are now being pushed out of places once seen as being undesirable. This is a phenomenon that is happening right across North America. I think It’s critically important that as we discuss this, we discuss it within a framework that is sophisticated, courageous and comprehensive, that looks at class, race and place-based displacement.” – Jay Pitter
Frances Bula affirmed this in the Vancouver experience, pointing to rapid transit lines being built “through areas that wouldn’t resist too much because they were poorer.” She cited Metrotown as an example of an area with a huge number of low-cost, low rise apartments that were replaced with high rise condos unaffordable to people living there previously.
Janice Abbott: “Who is being excluded are single women with children.” Abbott points out that as more developments are built with smaller units, women with children have to look elsewhere. They end up living farther from where they work, making it hard to raise their families and sometimes they lose their jobs. Women who are indigenous and racialized are particularly affected. She said developments with smaller units also need amenities, community gathering spaces and public spaces.
We hire women with lived experience. They get excited when a new development is going up along a transit line, but then find out there are no units for them and their children. – Janice Abbott
Second Question – What would be your ideal for transit-oriented development that serves communities?
Jay Pitter: “Every community is extraordinarily different.” Instead of focusing on any ideal solution, she spoke for putting communities at the center, recommending anti-displacement tool kits as a way to “articulate a set of values and policy levers that can be used and referenced at the front-end of a transit-oriented development (TOD).” Before getting into “infrastructure or fleets and networks and modes of transportation,” involve the community with other stakeholders (decision-makers, developers, elected officials) in auditing existing policies and identifying new policies needed to facilitate equitable urban development. The process includes case studies and stories that center the lived experiences of the people involved.
“As a city builder, I resist the urge of solutions type framing. This is why cities are shitty right now. Because a small group of people considered to be brilliant experts have come up with these very prescriptive approaches to places where people live. Places where they haven’t gone and learned and observed and collaborated in deep and meaningful ways. None of us in this room actually has the right to have an ideal. Our job is to have good questions, to create space and facilitate information finding. And if we are good at what we do, we don’t we do any project the same way twice. Because every place has such a distinct history and character. I know that that makes my fellow city builders and urbanists really upset. And I’m super good with that.” – Jay Pitter
Tim Grant: Displacement is a very real issue, one that wasn’t in everyone’s consciousness say ten years ago. Very much a local company, PCI believes they understand the local dynamics. He said several years ago the company made a commitment not to buy sites with existing residents. Given the crisis we’re in with affordable and rental housing, it is all the more important to get it right with sites that don’t have existing residents and are appropriate for more density. This is especially true given the size of the public investment in transit.
Janice Abbott pointed out that displacement happens even when sites don’t have existing residents, because of increasing land values. She said there has been a bit of a cookie-cutter approach across Vancouver, building towers and increasing density without paying attention to what it does to the communities around it. The new projects don’t reflect what women want, which is to live close to employment and to the schools their children attend. They want housing that’s affordable and big enough to accommodate extended families. She said that what is needed looks different in different places.
Abbott worked for nine years to complete a 198 unit, mixed-income building. While she started out thinking the project might be replicable, the reality is that the process is arduous, with expensive land, protracted zoning changes, a million partners needed to secure the money and neighborhood opposition. It is a good project for that place and time.
Andrea Reimer: “As Jay has brilliantly articulated, it’s irresponsible to say, ‘here are examples that you can take home and do amazing things,’ because they were created in context. What is translatable is principles.”
- The new projects built in the last ten years were built within a specific context of conservative governments nationally and provincially. We were trying to solve problems using the market because that’s all we had available to us. It’s the same market that created the problems. That cannot work. The market cannot solve the problems it creates. You can make band-aids but you cannot make permanent solutions for community.
- We know the people that are most interested in living near transit are renters. And yet we’re using housing and transit to create money for municipalities to displace renters. As a principle we should first and foremost keep or build low income housing near transit. Stop thinking of it as cash cow, start thinking of how you’re going to build a smart community.
- Keep in mind the three things that are constantly on renters’ minds: affordability, security of tenure, and the safety of housing.
- Displacement is not inevitable. Policies that work include Vancouver’s rate of change bylaw. It protected existing rental in most cases while in neighboring Burnaby, many more were displaced because they weren’t protected from new development. A short term rental bylaw addresses people using housing as hotels. The empty homes tax has helped control building of housing for speculation as opposed to for people.
Third question – What do various players need to do to improve a very uneven system?
In her closing question, Frances Bula asked the panel what they thought was most needed by various players (from governments to private sector) to improve a very uneven system.
Tim Grant: Whether for PCI (a for-profit developer) or Catalyst (a nonprofit developer), the fundamental need is to have enough funds to cover the cost of a development. Grant listed different levers to get the cost down, including looking at fees and providing a federal GST rebate for affordable housing developments. He called for more density for housing, office or industrial projects, in order to average down larger fixed costs, like land value. Grant said it is good to see progress with the cost of capital, citing federal and provincial funding programs targeted for affordable housing. These tools have been a game-changer for nonprofit developers, such as Catalyst, and are enabling the private sector to address affordability.
Frances Bula raised the question of the high price of land. She asked Tim Grant about rental-only zoning. He said, “Rental only zoning could be a really interesting tool in properties that don’t already have residential entitlement. To land that already has residential entitlement, that’s very punitive and would start call into question the fundamentals of the market economy.” Which, Bula responded, some people may want.
Andrea Reimer spoke to government and the private sector. She urged elected officials to stay away from waiting games and to “do absolutely everything you can do,” even in adverse environments, to lay the groundwork for policy change. As in the case of rental-only zoning, success may take ten years.
Reaffirming that governments cannot do what people don’t support, she urged elected leaders to make sure that people often left out for structural reasons can be heard. For example, recognizing that renters in Vancouver were not going to organize themselves, she created a renters’ advisory committee at the city, which became the seeds of a strong YIMBY movement.
Lastly, she called on the private sector to support government not only in specific transactions around developments but in an on-going way, “through the provision of taxes that allow for supports for people in community to be spread out and not dependent on a transactional moment. Support governments that make life easier for you, your workers and your family and community.”
Janice Abbott called for a more flexible, project by project, approach to issues around zoning, financing and site requirements (e.g., whether to have or not have such features as community rooms). Building affordable housing for women takes miracles, which is too high a bar given the size of the problem. She would like to see a guaranteed income, so that more women could afford places to live. She would like to see more land in community hands, with people able to build what works for them. “Does anybody need to have a hundred million dollars or two hundred million or a billion dollars in the bank when people don’t have a place to live and can’t afford to eat and are living in tents? It’s a complete restructuring of the way we live and the way we think about life.”
Jay Pitter called on government to step up and reclaim its responsibility for housing and transit, and not let outcomes “be left up to the market or partisan priorities.” She grew up in a community fraught with urban design and social issues, but she could walk to public transit. It provided a way to venture into other neighborhoods, see disparities and develop a sense of what might be possible. “Public transit,” she said, “is not just about moving people from point A to point B. It is tethered to ideas of freedom and possibility and healthy spatial entitlement.”
In her closing comments, Frances Bula compared transit-oriented development to the game of Twister. “Everyone made us backup and look at the fundamentals before you get into the Twister game and possibly how to eliminate the Twister game.”
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