Jean Swanson's speech on the Broadway Plan

June 27, 2022

On June 22, Vancouver city council voted on the Broadway Plan. There were amendments that offered some benefits to tenants who are displaced, and there were other amendments that made it a bit better. A motion to apply full rent control didn’t have the support of the majority of council. Only a watered-down version to 'look into it' passed. 

I’m still really worried that the 10s of thousands of renters in the area could be displaced, and that many won’t be able to afford the new expensive housing that will be built there. It was clear to me that the plan was going to pass. At the end, I voted against it, and here’s what I said to council:

“At a Seniors Advisory Committee meeting about heat domes, one of our staff said ‘we need to centre vulnerable people in our planning’. Vulnerable people are not centred in this plan. In order to centre folks who are vulnerable, we can’t rely on the private sector. 

We need something comprehensive that will get us the affordability we need, and this isn’t it. It’s not the city’s fault. It’s not the staff’s fault. Everyone is trying to work with givens. Given we have no vacancy control. Given we don’t have enough money to buy land. Given we don’t have enough money for construction costs. Given SAFER limits are too low. Given social assistance rates are despicable.

I think the amendments have improved the plan, but I’m still worried about it.

I worry because small businesses will be gentrified. I know our staff knows this, and are talking about it. But we have to have measures to protect them before we implement the plan, not way down the line.

I worry because there’s nothing in here for the poorest third of renters. They won’t be able to afford the 20% below-market units—and even social housing only requires 30% to be affordable to people earning basically $50-80K. So, nothing for low income people.

I worry because we haven’t looked into the idea that if we require affordability, it reduces land prices and helps make affordability actually possible. I think we need to explore that theory more, as opposed to the theory that building more and more expensive supply will bring down housing prices, especially when landlords can raise rents as much as they like when tenants leave.

I worry because the vacancy control amendment was watered down, as was the phasing amendment, and my amendment to build housing for demovicted renters in addition to the 20% below market rental was defeated. These are all blows to renters.

I worry about the 1000s of units of precious moderately-priced apartment units already in this area, with rents averaging about half of what 80% of the new rental units will be—I’m worried that they’ll be sacrificed for the more expensive supply.

I love the idea of denser housing by transit, but I wish the people who can’t afford cars could afford to live in it. I worry that the folks who work at Starbucks, as janitors, people who work in the new hotels we want in the corridor, will still have to commute in from Langley or Surrey because they can’t afford the housing in the corridor. 

I worry about the 86,000 households in our city who are in housing need—and the 50,000 more that we expect to be in need over the next ten years. There is no mechanism in this report to help meet that need.

If this report even acknowledged the huge need for housing affordability with some pointers, including what the province and feds could do to actually address the housing crisis, that would have been good. For example, if it said we need X amount of housing that lower income renters can afford. This plan could provide X percent of that, and we need the province to do X and Y and the Feds to do Z to get us to our goal. Then at least we’d have a map of how to get out of this crisis. 

After WWII, our governments wanted to house people. They made massive investments in building housing, co-ops, social housing. Why don’t we do that again? The investor class is not going to build the housing we need for the working class with or without jobs. But we can build it ourselves. We could zone it, subsidize it, borrow at lower interest rates, build it to last and be kind the environment.

We’re supposed to be planning for everyone in the city, and it seems to me that a lot of people are left out of this plan as it is. If we had agreed to vacancy controls and the phasing, I could have gone for this.

I think this motion will pass, so my no vote can be taken as a plea for all governments to get their acts together and make housing affordability a real priority, including the city with zoning, the province with money, vacancy control, increases to SAFER and social assistance, and the feds with massively more money.”

Thanks for reading this, and thanks to everyone who is organizing and speaking out to win a just city. 

While I’m worried that if we keep letting the for-profit market guide our housing policy, we can’t address the housing crisis, I also believe that if enough renters and workers in Vancouver volunteer and vote in the coming city elections, you can help turn things around so that that vulnerable people, and all the people struggling to get by, are finally at the centre of our planning. 

Thank you and be safe,

Jean Swanson