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.