August 3, 2016

Rezonings: Questions that should be answered

Elizabeth Murphy essentially writes one column.  Here’s the latest version in Business in Vancouver:
Rezoning - Murphy
The rush to rezone fuels speculative land inflation that’s further exacerbated by unregulated foreign capital flows. The fact that the City of Vancouver already has ample zoned capacity for 20 to 30 years of growth needs to be considered before proceeding down this road.
Governments are reluctant to address the real causes of unaffordability, such as foreign capital flowing into real estate and selling citizenship through Quebec’s foreign investor program, whose investors land in Vancouver. These factors are disconnecting residential prices from the local economy.
Instead, the government points to simple supply-and-demand economics, even though that is no longer working. …  Vancouver’s crazy real estate is being driven by land inflation leading to unaffordability in existing and new developments.
The so-called antidote of increasing housing supply through rezoning is increasing land value speculation and making the situation worse. …
According to a June 2014 city consultant’s report, “Over the last five years, the city has approved rezonings faster than the new capacity is being used. The city has sufficient capacity in existing zoning and approved community plans to accommodate over 20 years of supply at the recent pace of residential development.”
Emphasis is on the “over” 20 years, which could easily be over 30 years. …
With so much zoned capacity it makes no sense to rezone affordable neighbourhoods like Grandview (The Drive), which has so many affordable rentals, co-ops, social housing and multi-suited heritage houses.
 
So is Elizabeth right?  The City has ample zoned capacity to handle growth.  Rezoning increases speculation, and raises housing and rental costs.  Don’t do any more.

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  1. Let’s say that you have a large reservoir, located many miles from the place where people want/need the water. It is connected to the city by a long aqueduct. At the aqueduct’s connection to the city, water is sold. The price of water is set by the market. Some people come from outside the city to buy water, because they don’t trust the water quality in their city. They bid up the price of water so that the residents of the city can’t afford it anymore.
    There are two solutions: either charge the people from outside the city more to buy water, but that may not necessarily reduce the amount of water the outsiders buy, and the residents still don’t have much water for themselves, and/or they must still pay a high price to get it.
    Or, you could increase the size of the pipeline, to provide more water, so that the people from outside the city don’t have to bid higher prices to get their water, and the price stays affordable for the city’s residents as well.
    Simply having a big reservoir doesn’t solve the problem. The size of the pipeline has a greater impact on the price.

  2. Of course she’s not right. To suggest that there’s sufficient zoned land in the city because we can create 3 units on every single family lot is preposterous. Just as its preposterous to say we don’t need to rezone land because there’s a lot of unused capacity in C2 land along arterials.
    The fact is, while some may be happy in a basement suite or rental laneway house, or living above a store on a busy arterial, we need to continually rezone land to create more housing choices where people want to live.
    Elizabeth Murphy probably knows this too. At least she should.

  3. Obviously wrong. If it were right, we would have plenty of affordable rentals and homes for sale being developed.
    As well, using much of this “zoned capacity” would involve tearing down something that is relatively affordable and replacing it with not much more density that could even be less affordable.
    Puzzling why this nonsense keeps on being pushed as a “solution”.

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