Bill 23 creates residential rental tenure zoning. The initiative is perhaps the first of its kind provides local governments a tool to ensure important rental housing assets remain rental housing and that town councils can identify areas to zone future rental housing.
The Bill amends the Local Government Act and the Vancouver Charter to allow for local governments to enact zoning bylaws specifically for rental tenures.
It is critical that communities are building for diversity and a wide range of interests and opportunities and this is just one more tool for planners and elected officials to use if they wish.
[Transcript]
I started with very brief notes, and they seemed to grow and grow and grow, the longer that the previous member spoke.
It’s an honour to stand and speak to Bill 23, a bill that starts to take action on developing a zone specifically for residential housing. I think one of the most important pieces of this bill and one of the first things that I want to highlight with this bill is that it adds a level of protection and preservation of rental housing stock that is currently in the market.
We’ve seen a history over the past number of decades — two, three decades — where purpose-built rental housing, which we were doing very, very well in our country and in our province for a number of years, started to turn into strata units, condos. So we lost a lot of the rental housing units that we had in our cities, and they turned into condo buildings, strata buildings.
One of the things that this tool allows is for municipalities to identify important buildings that exist as rental units, and to say these units are going to stay as rental. So whether they be in high density areas, and the property goes back up for sale, developers will know that the future of that property will remain as part of the rental stock.
I think that the previous member highlighted some important reasons for why we would want to keep rental units in and around universities, for an example, and colleges. We would want to ensure that, in fact, those units stay within the rental stock. As well, there are a number of other reasons why we would want to keep rental units, and I think what we’ve seen is actually a gutting. What I hear on a regular basis is that there’s been a gutting of the rental stock in our communities and in our cities, and it’s created a serious imbalance.
Housing biggest issue in 2017 election
In fact, I would say that in the last election, the biggest issue that I heard at the doorstep day in and day out was housing. The biggest problem that people faced in my riding and in ridings right across this province was a substantive housing challenge.
So while members in the official opposition stand and talk ad nauseam about the amazing housing plans that were put in place, I would suggest that, in this case, elections were either won or lost on a substantive housing challenge — whether it be going and leaning in too heavily to just the markets, saying: “The market’s going to fix everything for us. We’ll just let the market fix it.”
I think that there is some confusion amongst the free enterprise coalition on this really. Just leave the market. We’ll just increase supply forever and ever and endlessly increase supply — like there’s an endless supply of land out there to just keep building and building and chasing — building new schools, increasing costs everywhere in our society, in order to just continue to endlessly build supply.
We know that that doesn’t work. You can’t just continue to endlessly build supply. You create communities that people don’t want to live in. They’re not nice communities. They’re not diverse communities. As the member before me was saying, it’s important that we have diverse communities. I think that one of the things that this bill does is it ensures that there are going to be renters and that part of the demographic within our communities.
What is the quickest way to the opposition benches?
The narrative that we hear quite often is: don’t raise taxes and ignore the social problems. Those two have to come hand in hand. You can’t not raise taxes and pay for social programs and support people. So that’s another part of it. We’re going to build houses endlessly, and we’re going to ignore the social problems. As we found, that was probably the quickest way to the opposition benches, to take that approach.
We as a government have a responsibility to find balance and to legislate balance. One of the ways that we do this is we create zones such as this. We’ve created many zones in our cities. In fact, every piece of property that has anything built on it is part of a zone, whether it be a residential zone or a commercial zone or an industrial zone. Then we take those zones, and we further break them down to residential single-family or residential multifamily zones.
As those on both sides of this House that have been in local government know, the reality is that we need to have zones to ensure that our communities are balanced. I think that one of the threats that was identified in the debate here today was that, all of a sudden, there are going to be vast swaths of communities that are only going to be rental — which would be similar, I guess, to the vast swaths of lands in my communities that are residential single-family, or the vast swaths of lands in my community that are residential multifamily.
I would suggest that the planners and the city forefathers that built our communities like that didn’t build enough diversity, frankly. In fact, is causing a lot of the same problems: increasing costs, pushing children and youth and young families out of communities, making them essentially just retirement zones, which is a substantive challenge. It’s happening in my riding. We’ve got great schools. Yet by having it just left to the market, there’s less diversity in our communities.
Real estate regulation
I think that this is the government’s role. I think it’s very difficult to just argue that real estate is a free market. I think the fact of the matter is that every piece of property, every building built, is in a zone, is in a regulated environment. The real estate industry is a highly regulated environment. Some would suggest it needs to have more regulation even. So this is a highly regulated area. I think that there are high costs to imbalance.
City planners and city decision-makers, community decision-makers, have got to weigh those costs very carefully — the social, environmental and economic costs of having too much of one type of housing or one type of zone and not enough diversity. I don’t think that municipal governments necessarily….
I mean, there is, obviously, a chance that they may zone vast swaths of rental housing. I would suggest that they should use this and that they would use this new tool at their disposal to preserve rental units within their residential neighbourhoods. And to ensure that the market, which would say, “This would be a great piece of property to go from being a rental unit, a rental building, to a strata building or a condo building….”
Of course, the developer and the development community could gain a lot more profit from doing that, from making that move. It might not be what’s in the best interest of the community. So this would be a tool for city councils, for town councils, to use.
Tools for local decision-makers
I think it’s important for us to be giving tools, and this is an example of a bill in which the provincial government is enabling another tool for municipal councils to use. I think that that is important. As someone who comes from local government and someone who champions the local level of government and the decision-making that’s made on the ground, I think that it is important that the provincial government is providing tools.
In fact, I think that we could do this a lot better. Provide tools to local decision-makers. They’re the closest to the people and have the most direct access.
To that point, I think another interesting point that was raised is that the provincial government should get involved in accelerating the approvals process — and then long and loud complaints, in fact, that there are X number of units being held up by city councils, like that is, somehow, just a recent situation, that it’s not been a situation or a complaint that’s been going on for many years.
Respecting good public process
I would caution, though, in fact, the provincial government getting involved in local government and “accelerating approval processes.” Of course, there’s a public hearing process in which local governments have to work with the local community to ensure that the local community is aware of what is being proposed in their neighbourhoods. That process does take some time.
Where I think that municipalities might be able to accelerate the process is in some of the application timelines. Perhaps that could be the case. But again, I think that it’s important that inspections and building inspections and such play out over an appropriate level of time to ensure safety. It’s easy, I think, to say: “Oh, the provincial government should jump into the middle of these and accelerate these approval processes.”
But I think that there are also some drawbacks to that in that a very fundamental part of the job of a city or district council is to engage the community and to ensure that they’re aware of how their communities may or may not be changing.
At this stage, I’m going to take my seat. I just wanted to point out that I think giving local governments the opportunity to use this as a tool in order to direct, guide, preserve and, indeed, in the future perhaps build new rental housing stock by using this zone is a good start.
Perhaps as we work to unpack some of the challenges that were inherited and that have been dealt with over the past year with respect to a wildly unsustainable housing market, more tools will be given to the municipalities in order to be able to make some of the decisions that they need in order to make both market and non-market houses, homes, available for people.
I thank the minister. I look forward to the committee stage of this bill, and I’ll take my seat at this time.
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