How other major cities deal with a housing crunch
Posted August 11, 2016 7:20 am.
Last Updated August 11, 2016 7:22 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – It’s being called a solution to a housing availability crunch in one of the biggest cities in the world, which has space-constraints much like Vancouver.
Like a lot of major cities, Tokyo is dealing with a growing population and skyrocketing rent. But what separates it from other urban centres, is how it approves residential developments.
“What Tokyo is doing is in order to manage house prices, they have to ensure the supply of new housing keeps up with the demand. They’re making it a lot easier for people to redevelop single-family lots into multi-family or to build housing to keep up with demand,” says Vancouver architect Michael Geller, who teaches at Simon Fraser University.
He adds everything politicians have tried so far in Metro Vancouver to curb home prices and increase vacancy rates, won’t make the same difference. “People will soon have their tax on foreign buyers, and they’ll have a tax on vacant units, and they’re going to see that come eight months or a year from now, that house prices have not significantly changed.”
“The issue of supply cannot be underestimated as a factor affecting affordability, not just in Vancouver but in San Francisco, Boston, New York, London — all of the cities which have high house prices, often have these very complex approval processes.”
Geller, who has 35 years’ experience overseeing developments, favours a less-complicated approach to developments across Metro Vancouver.
“You have to build more and you have to change the way the process is working. Somebody called me the other day to say it now takes a year to get a building permit in Burnaby, and Burnaby is generally considered one of the easier municipalities in which to work,” says Geller, who acknowledges the easier rules bring more densification.
“It is densification which I think most people have acknowledged is necessary here. But the problem we have in the Lower Mainland is we’ve become accustomed to accepting that it should take two, three or four years for a project to go through the approval process. That is not the case in Tokyo and in other cities where approvals can be granted much, much faster.”
