Former Vancouver mayor with mixed record on housing appointed federal housing minister

Good morning, 

Nate with you today. Thank you to all the readers who reached out to us on Friday and over the weekend, sharing resources and their thoughts and suggestions on unique neighbourhoods in Vancouver. Getting community tips and feedback is such a rewarding and helpful piece in our story process so thank you all so much and please keep them coming!

On another note, we’re always trying to improve things here at the Lookout. We’re testing a new section of recommendations from the Lookout team, full of events, art shows, food, important stories and more, that we think are worth checking out. It’s all part of our goal of bringing you everything you need to understand Vancouver even more.

As always, we’re trying to strike the right balance of news, current events, arts, and activities, served up with a dose of levity and fun. If you haven’t had the chance yet please let us know how we’re doing by filling out our reader survey! Your feedback, like your tips and leads, are invaluable to our work here. 

With that, let’s get to today’s newsletter!

– Nate Lewis, Vancity Lookout

As always, you can send your gripes, pet peeves, and kindly-worded criticisms to Nate at [email protected].

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WEATHER

Wednesday: 14 🌡️ 7 | ☁️

Thursday: 9 🌡️ 7 | 🌧️

Friday: 9 🌡️ 9 | 🌧️

THE LOOKOUT RECOMMENDS

What’s opening: The company behind Blue Water Cafe, Araxi in Whistler and the ostentatious Marilena in Victoria have a new spot in Kitsilano called Provisions, but unlike those other spots, the goal is, according to Scout, to be a locals-focused spot. They’ll have both breakfast and dinner options. Located at 2296 West 4th, no exact opening date. 

What to do: In tragedy, goodness still finds a way to shine. Top Chef Canada Season 6 runner-up Mark Sigson, who is Filipino-born, is hosting a food fundraiser for those affected by the accident, from May 21-23 at Bar Susu, and then a block party the following day. It’s also one last chance to visit Bar Susu before it closes on May 30. There are only a few spots left, but the block party is for everyone. 

What to watch: Cinematheque is featuring the films of the great Robert Bresson. I’d recommend the classic Au hasard Balthazar, a tale of a donkey that will have you in tears. Showing May 29, June 7 and 16. 

For the visitors: Look, everyone has relatives or friends visiting in town. Skip suspension bridges, shorten your time at Granville Island Public Market and take a Harbour Air sightseeing tour that starts at $159. That’s something they won’t forget.

A cocktail in style: Meo really should be your next date night. The vibe is immaculate, and the Turkish Sbagliato, a Campari, rosso vermouth, Bella Buddza and rose water concoction, screams “it’s summer time.” And their non-alcoholic drinks, like the duck fat washed Old Fashioned, are a non-drinker’s dream.

— Curated by Geoff Sharpe, Lookout managing editor

HOUSING

Former Vancouver mayor with mixed record on housing appointed federal housing minister

What happened: Member of Parliament Gregor Robertson, Vancouver’s former mayor, was appointed as the new Minister of Housing and Infrastructure by Prime Minister Mark Carney on Tuesday. 

The look back: Robertson, who led Vision Vancouver from 2008-2018 during a dominant decade for the civic party, was mayor for 10 years. He presided over the 2010 Olympics, expanded the city’s active transportation networks, and set ambitious climate goals. Meanwhile, on housing, his term in office was marked by significant cost increases, denser development, and rising homelessness in Vancouver.  

It’s undisputed that housing costs (ownership more so than rents) skyrocketed in Vancouver between 2011 and 2018. However, it’s difficult to tell how much of that can be pinned on the local government of the day, given there were similar trends across Canada, albeit to a lesser degree.

• Experts we spoke with explained that a constellation of external factors contributed to rising housing costs in Vancouver during the Vision days, while internal policy decisions both contributed to and attempted to reduce the problem. We also heard how Robertson’s party influenced the current BC NDP’s approach to housing policy.

What we heard: “I think Vision tried to tackle both the supply and the demand side,” Tom Davidoff told Vancity Lookout. Davidoff, who specializes in the economics of real estate, has been an associate professor at UBC since 2009. 

“I would have preferred they've been a little bit more aggressive, but I think they pushed the envelope,” Davidoff said, pointing to Vision’s moves to increase density through extensive rezoning for towers, area plans, and allowing duplexes across the city.   

While those policies may have helped housing supply, they didn’t address affordability concerns, according to CBC and Marc Lee, a senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Area plans like the Cambie Corridor inflated land prices along Cambie south of King Edward, leading to widespread land assemblies and development, a lot of which are “not affordable at all,” Lee said.

“Arguably, [Vision] botched the whole thing,” Lee said of the Cambie area plan. 

External factors: Part of the problem with housing policy is that it’s always multifaceted, Lee told Vancity Lookout. 

Foreign ownership, domestic speculation, low interest rates, population and income growth, zoning, and geography all played into Vancouver’s surging cost of housing in the 2010s, Lee said. 

Lee and Davidoff both brought up the city’s empty home tax, established in 2017, as an example of demand-oriented policies brought in under Robertson’s leadership. The tax led to a 58 per cent reduction in vacant properties and generated about $170 million for affordable housing initiatives between 2017 and 2023, according to the city.

Davidoff pointed to “very active” overseas investment, largely from China, high levels of immigration, and low interest rates as three major demand factors that put Robertson and Vision in a “really challenging situation” around housing in the 2010s. 

• About 52,000 immigrants settled in Vancouver between 2006 and 2021, which accounts for about 62 per cent of Vancouver’s population growth over that time, according to data from the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation and Statistics Canada census.  

Foreign home ownership was also a significant driver of housing demand during that time, which Robertson didn’t take as seriously as he could have, Lee said. 

“Gregor was actually one of the people who was dismissing the arguments about foreign ownership, saying… this was just being racist. Not to deny that there might be some racist elements to it, but I think there was an issue of Chinese capital seeking to escape China and park it somewhere. And Vancouver was a pretty convenient place for that,” Lee explained. 

Rental incentives: Other notable Vision-era housing policies included encouraging the construction of rental housing through a number of programs (STIR, Rental 100, and MIRHPP) by offering concessions like more density, reducing parking requirements, and waiving some city fees.   

A 2019 consultant report found that the introduction and adaptation of these various concurrent rental incentive policies was confusing for everyone involved, while also saying the incentives were helpful and necessary but insufficient to make rental housing more or equally desirable for developers to build compared to condos. 

• Between 2009 and 2018, STIR and Rental 100 resulted in the approval of 8,680 new secured rental units

A major criticism of the STIR and Rental 100 programs was their lack of affordability. That led to the creation of MIRHPP in 2017, which required projects to keep 20 per cent of projects below market rate. With nine projects under construction, seven under rezoning, but none completed under that program by 2023, the city decided to raise the below-market unit rate to encourage the projects to move forward, according to CBC.    

Worsening homelessness: Despite Robertson’s well-intentioned but now infamous 2008 promise to end homelessness, the number of people without a home increased during his ten years in office. Estimates went from 1,576 in 2008 to 2,181 in 2018, according to the city’s point-in-time homeless counts, which are generally recognized to undercount the actual number of people experiencing homelessness.  

“It was probably foolish of him to make that promise without having senior government support,” Lee said, while Davidoff pointed out there wasn’t much social housing investment from the province or federal government at the time.

• “When you had accelerating housing costs, it isn't surprising that you had accelerating homelessness here,” Davidoff said, pointing to other very expensive cities with lots of homelessness like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Toronto.  

One housing policy that did help increase housing options for people who were or at risk of being unhoused was the creation of the city’s temporary modular housing program. Started in 2017, the program received provincial funding to create as many as 760 housing units on empty lots. Today, there are still over 600 units across 10 sites in Vancouver and surveys have found significant well-being improvements for residents. 

However, from a financial perspective, it’s been rather inefficient, with the modular units being expensive to upgrade and repurpose from site to site. About 145 units have been removed from two Vancouver sites now under development – at Little Mountain and downtown near Cambie and Dunsmuir – and would need pricey renovations to be used in other BC communities, according to the Globe and Mail.     

Density bonuses: Vision oversaw the creation of community plans (planning documents that set out specific zoning and land use priorities based on the neighbourhood or area) for the West End, Grandview-Woodland, Cambie Corridor, Downtown Eastside, Marpole, Joyce-Collingwood, and False Creek Flats, which included additional height and density incentives for the development of rental housing. 

But community plans have not kept up with the pace of policy change. Provincial policies like those around transit hubs now allow for more height and density, beyond what’s laid out in many community plans. Municipalities like Vancouver are only able to leverage “bonus” density to get affordable or social housing included in a new building once they’ve met the higher, denser provincial requirements. 

Moving on up: Lee pointed out that many of Vision’s policies and approaches to housing policy were eventually exported to the provincial level and adopted by the governing BC NDP in many of their housing policies today. Robertson and Vision heralded measures like housing targets, taxes on empty homes, and restrictions on short-term rentals, as “the first of their kind in Canada.” Those ideas “percolated up” to the provincial NDP, Lee said. 

• One part of that link between the two political parties was Geoff Meggs, a three-term Vision councillor who left the local government to become Premier John Horgan’s chief of staff in 2017 – a role Meggs held until 2022.

Vision also took with a developer-friendly, market-oriented approach to building housing, much like we see from both the province and current city council.  

​​”It's still kind of the dominant framework we're talking about today,” Lee said.

Gregor, the Minister: Now that Robertson is the Minister of Housing, Davidoff thinks Robertson’s decade at 12th and Cambie will give him a lot of insight into the concerns of mayors he’ll now have to work with from the other side of the table. 

“A big part of the job is twisting the arm of local politicians to approve more housing. He certainly has empathy for the challenges [mayors] face when [they] add housing, in terms of infrastructure costs,” Davidoff said. 

• Given his new role, Lee sees the potential for a major shift in Robertson’s approach toward market-oriented housing solutions. 

“I think the political strategy that [Vision] had was much more around not offending private sector developers and trying to work more with the market. It feels like that is no longer the case,” with the Liberals’ election promise to create a new public-sector development agency called Build Canada Homes. 

“I'm cautiously optimistic about what we can expect next,” Lee said

VANCOUVER NUMBERS

🎉 $80 million: The payout on the largest single-ticket lottery prize in Canadian history, which has yet to be claimed since it was drawn on Friday. The winning ticket was sold in Surrey. [Vancouver Sun]

🌳 9%: The percentage of tree canopy cover in Strathcona, the lowest among the city’s neighbourhoods as of 2022, while Shaughnessy boasts the highest at 41%. The park board is now aiming to have 30% canopy cover across the city by 2050. [Park board]

DREAM HOME

Geoff here. I visited Powell Street this weekend. The restaurant scene is blowing up, which you can read about in my latest story. So I thought it would be worthwhile to feature a home from around there.

Eating in style means you need to live in style, and this trendy loft in the Cannary Row area of town fits the bill. At 920 square feet, with hardwood floors, a partial brick wall and a large kitchen layout, it’s a great place for anyone looking for one-bedroom and two-bathrooms (I did not know those existed). 

Of course, a trendy loft ain’t cheap…

THE AGENDA

💬 The province appointed a consultant to improve services and fix issues in the DTES in February. But they didn’t announce it publicly or consult with the city, causing concerns for some service providers and Mayor Ken Sim. Other local leaders have praised the consultant's listening skills as he starts to meet with people in the community. [CBC, Global News, Twitter/X] 

👕 A mother is raising concerns after her six-year-old son came home from school at χpey̓ Elementary in Hastings-Sunrise wearing different clothes than he went to school in that morning. Her child said a man changed his clothes in the school’s basement. The mother has only gotten limited information about the incident from the school’s principal, while the VSB and VPD said they’re gathering more information. [CTV]

⚖️ The family of Tamara Redman are remembering her as a happy, fun-loving daughter, sister, and mother. Redman died in March 2024 after being hit by a car on Kingsway and Victoria. The case will be proceeding to a trial for the driver, who has been charged with dangerous driving causing death and failure to stop at the scene. [The Tyee]

🏗️ Another day, another Safeway redevelopment. This time it’s the site at 4th and Vine, which was approved without a rezoning application because the proposal is generally aligned with existing zoning and city policy. Next up on Thursday, the first of what may be multiple days of public hearings on the controversial and long-simmering proposal to develop towers at the Commercial and Broadway Safeway site. [Urbanized, COV]

ART GUIDE

Performance

It’s the last week and half to see the Arts Club’s Casey and Diana, a powerful drama set in a Canadian hospice during the peak of the AIDS crisis. Inspired by true events, the play dramatizes an early 1990s visit from Princess Diana, which sparks profound joy and transformative moments for patients and caregivers, even in the face of overwhelming loss. Tickets $29+

LIFT is a festival of intergenerational dance, featuring performances, workshops, and discussions exploring strength, vulnerability, age, social division, family dynamics, and more. Attend for the full two days of programming (pass $70) or attend a specific show or workshop (tickets range from free to $40)

Movies 

The Rio is hosting a screening and Q&A with director Sook-Yin Lee, featuring her new film Paying For It. It’s an semi-autobiographical exploration of labour, sex work, queer culture, and forward-thinking freedoms. It would be fascinating to hear from Lee about the film, as it’s an adaptation of her exes’ graphic novel about their break-up and his subsequent sexual adventures. Tickets $18

In a series of bittersweet vignettes, the 2018 film Tehran: City of Love explores the struggle of three lovesick people as they try to find romance across the city at weddings, funerals, beauty parlours, and gyms. Playing Thursday evening at VIFF. Tickets $16

Art

Liz Magor’s exhibit Arrange Your Face showcases a series of sculptural works, which manifest the movements of storms and the forces of weather. On now until June 28 at Catriona Jeffries.  

Umbrage is a vulnerable, intimate, and satirical exhibit that uses the concept of shade/shadow and storytelling to reoccupy multiply-colonized times and spaces. The three-artist exhibition is showing at Centre A on Keefer now until June 7. 

Artist and filmmaker Lindsay McIntyre is presenting Tuktuit, a film installation exploring the interconnectedness of lichen growth, caribou populations and land use in the North. Showing now until September at the Contemporary Art Gallery on Nelson. 

OPINION

Is this the best concentration of restaurants in the city?

You might deduce from the title that I’m referring to Main Street, or somewhere downtown, swathes of streets imbued with twinkling Michelin-starred restaurants. 

Not so. I humbly submit to all you readers that it’s a little block on Powell St. between Victoria and Sudbury, tucked away in East Vancouver. There may be no higher concentration of high-quality restaurants in such a small area in the city.

Sandwiched together like a tight sushi roll, the quality of food has always been there. Aleph has served high-quality vegetarian Middle Eastern dishes, Andrea Gail with its snacks and congenial atmosphere, have always been local favourites. And who could forget Straight and Marrow before it shut down?

But it’s the new generation of restaurants that piqued my curiosity and are putting the area back on the food map.

Read + subscribe to our free Vancouver food newsletter

PHOTO OF THE DAY

Film just has a way of looking better than digital… These shots from around Vancouver and the North Shore have a real vibe to them.

COMMUNITY HIGHLIGHTS

• Some sad news for sauna lovers — Havn, which operates a popular sauna barge in Victoria, isn’t opening one in Vancouver anymore. [Vancouver is Awesome]

• Nooo, not them too. Pizzeria Farina in Chinatown is set to close on May 31.

• There are even more Petterssons that the Canucks could pick up in the NHL Entry Draft this year. [Vancouver is Awesome]

• Not sure if you knew, but the hockey towel wave originated in Vancouver. [Canucks Army]

• Snoop Dogg himself is set to perform Jun. 7 at the BC Lions opener against the Edmonton Elks.

• If you’re looking to pick up some art, The Show, Emily Carr’s student art exhibition, is on now until May 21.