Thank you very much, and thank you for the invitation.
For 30 years I've held a position at the University of British Columbia's School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. During that time, my teaching, research and publications have been in the field of sustainable design. This has allowed me to partner with Canadian municipalities in executing path-breaking sustainable community projects, most notably the East Clayton sustainable neighbourhood project, a project that provided affordable homes in a walkable neighbourhood for over 10,000 new residents.
I have published a number of books about sustainable communities, leading up to the one entitled Broken City, which I have brought and will leave with the committee. This book contains the conclusions that bring me here today.
In my discipline, the challenge is to facilitate plans that balance social, ecological and financial considerations. This community planning and design process has always put housing affordability at the top of a long list of objectives, because a sustainable community that no one can afford to live in is indeed an oxymoron.
For over three decades, I have had the privilege of working with hundreds of others on the mission of a truly sustainable Vancouver region. During these decades, Vancouver and its region have gained world fame for its path-breaking livable region strategic plan. Even more globally well known is Vancouverism, a model of urban density done right.
All of these efforts, supported, importantly, by local voters, led to an eventual tripling in the number of housing units in the city of Vancouver, an already completely built-out city, in just four decades. Thus, all of this new housing was and is in the form of infill housing units, units already added to completed residential districts, or on converted industrial lands. No other centre city in North America has come even remotely close to this heroic achievement—this tripling of housing supply—in just four decades.
Unfortunately, all our efforts to keep housing affordable through this heroic addition of new housing supply have been in vain. Adding 200,000 new housing units did not lead to lower home prices and the lower rents that we had hoped for.
Indeed, if adding new supply to existing urban neighbourhoods would lower prices, Vancouver should have by now North America's lowest home prices. It has the highest by far.
My recent attempt to answer this puzzle is contained in my most recent book, Broken City. The answer appears alarmingly or fairly straightforward. Adding new supply in conformance with what many call “the law of supply and demand” did not lower home prices for renters and buyers in Vancouver. What it did correlate with is a tremendous increase in our urban land prices.
Presently, the assessed value of Vancouver urban parcels is typically 10 times greater than the assessed value of the structure above it. In just the year 2016, the aggregate value of all privately owned parcels in the city increased by an eye-watering $100 billion.
Even though Vancouver has it worse than most cities, this is not just a Vancouver problem. This is not even just a Canadian problem. This is a global problem: a global problem that is afflicting most of the world's major cities, the so-called global cities, like Vancouver and Toronto.
The more these cities attract investment enthusiasm from both here and abroad, the higher the land prices go, and the more impossible it becomes for builders and developers to provide homes at prices that average wage earners can afford.
What can we do? My suggestions are explained in my book.
Step one, stop using tax dollars to incent private developers. That only adds one more buyer to the already overcrowded market for urban land.
Step two, use new land use authorizations to stream publicly generated new land value into social benefit and away from the already overstuffed pockets of land speculators.
Step three, use the funds thus acquired to support the expansion of Canada's non-market housing sector, a sector that was the envy of the world before this body discontinued supporting it in the 1990s—