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Housing
How about a Lower Income Housing Land Reserve?
The Agricultural Land Reserve works, more or less, and the same legislation could inexpensively guarantee adequate housing at all levels for the city
By Kevin Potvin
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It was learned last year that Vancouver was rapidly losing its small industry base. This caused alarm not only because small industry has always been a traditional economic base to the city, but also because it provides a lot of employment and spawns other small industry.
The reason the small industry base was shrinking, we learned, was because land on which small industry was typically perched was rapidly rising in price as market speculators began imagining condo towers in place of the tin sheds. No one can buy a small manufacturing firm that generates only a modest return if the land it sits on is worth millions of dollars as a potential site for a condo tower because no one can afford to finance the cost of such a land purchase without building the condos on it and selling them.
The solution, said some, was to mimic the success of the Agricultural Land Reserve and create an Industrial Land Reserve. The idea is this: if a certain parcel of land can only be used for small industrial purposes and there is legislation in place ensuring that that will always be the case for that certain parcel of land, then its value on the market will remain low, making it affordable to purchase for someone contemplating using it for small industrial purposes. If speculators are forcefully assured that the land can never be used to build condos on it, they won’t bid up its value.
So long as the legislation is written strongly enough and so long as succeeding governments take the principle of inviolability seriously enough, the land reserve idea seems like a cost-free and effective solution to the problem of the shrinking small industrial base.
Which makes me wonder: can we not also begin thinking about a Lower Income Housing Land Reserve idea.
If a certain parcel of land, say an abandoned lot in the downtown eastside, were designated as Lower Income Housing Land Reserve, and speculators were made certain that it would never be removed from this land reserve, the value of this land on the market would fall to the level that would make it economic for someone to build lower income housing on it.
The system would take advantage of the normal and natural mechanisms of the marketplace to establish what the value of this or that piece of land should be, without the City or the Province having to dictate the prices, or even needing to get involved in the tricky and expensive processes of land acquisition and building development. By declaring a parcel of land as forever restricted in its use to lower income housing, whatever return is possible to a building developer in putting up and renting out lower income housing will determine what that piece of land will be worth on the market, and that price will always naturally fall low enough so that there is a reasonable return for the builder contemplating putting up lower income housing.
There are problems, of course: how would lower income housing be defined? How do you ensure it is lower income earners who are getting the lower cost housing? How would you ensure that a building owner is only collecting lower income rents? And how do you compensate owners of land who lose value when their land is put in the lower income housing reserve?
The first three problems can be sufficiently addressed, I think, by creating a co-operative of housing co-ops. Housing co-ops, rough at times as they are, have at least to a practical degree mastered problems that arise from trying to define fair rental rates, trying to ensure renters are honest about their income, and combating fraud in rental collections. Disputes would invariably arise, but at least the general outcome would be defensibly democratic and workable enough to ensure a significant quantity of lower income housing is created and sustained in Vancouver.
The bigger problem is in getting owners of land to acquiesce to inclusion of their land in the lower income housing land reserve. But this is a one-time problem: once a piece of land has been so designated, it never has to be reduced in value again. Maybe we can invite developers to purchase land and agree to not challenge its inclusion in the land reserve in exchange for allowing them height exemptions on other land they want to build market-priced condos on.
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The Republic of East Vancouver masthead
The Republic of East Vancouver supports no party, advocates
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