Suites will keep families together, city hall claims

Andy Ivens
Province

Vancouver will soon be home to more smaller homes.

City councillors voted unanimously Tuesday to allow laneway housing in a bid to keep families together and help aging homeowners stay where they are.

The new bylaw — popular in other parts of the world, but new to Canada — allows garages of single-family residences to be replaced by free-standing suites, or so-called “garden cottages.”

Instead of a house for your car, laneway houses will provide a house for your parent, adult child, caregiver or a regular tenant.

“It provides people to age in their neighbourhood and stay in the neighbourhood that they grew up in,” Coun. Raymond Louie told The Province.

He said the market will determine whether the added stock of housing will bring down rents in Canada‘s most expensive urban area. “I hope it will bring up the vacancy rate,” which Louie said was 0.3 per cent.

By having more people living nearer their workplace, he said, it could also cut down on commutes by car.

“I am thrilled that this has passed,” said Coun. Suzanne Anton, the lone NPA voice on council.

“This is a piece of the EcoDensity initiative,” she said of an urban planning program by the previous, Non-Partisan-Association-dominated council.

“I think it shows Vancouver‘s continued leadership in urban design and our continued awareness of how to live better. These laneway cottages will help families, they’ll help people with their mortgages.”

Before the vote, staff reported to council most people who attended two public hearings in the past week were in favour of the idea, but a substantial minority voiced strong concerns about higher density in their neighbourhood.

“I am very concerned about their concerns, and that’s why I’m interested in monitoring it,” said Anton.

Council voted to review the entire program after the first 100 applications have been made to city hall.

Areas of the city zoned for multi-family dwellings or apartments aren’t included.

© Copyright (c) The Province

Stuart Hunter
Province

Another piece in solving Vancouver‘s homelessness puzzle fell into place Tuesday.

Donning a white hard hat and wielding a silver shovel, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson joined Housing and Social Development Minister Rich Coleman and Liz Evans of the PHS Community Services Society to officially break ground on the $21.6-million Station Street supportive-housing development.

“There’ll be homes here for 80 people. How important will that be to the community? It will be astronomical,” said Evans, who has been working on Station Street for two years and on housing advocacy since 1991.

“It is going to make a massive difference to have a home with a bathroom and a door you can shut.

“It sets things in place to break that cycle.”

Standing six storeys when it is completed in early 2011, Station Street will offer 80 studio apartments and commercial/retail space on the main floor. It is between the Ivanhoe and American hotels and will be the first of 14 developments on city-owned sites jointly built by the province and municipality.

“It’s another important piece of the puzzle,” Robertson said, noting city staff helped expedite Station Street by fast-tracking the approval process. “The other [13 sites] are in various stages of development. The first six are already committed with funding.”

Victoria is providing $16.7 million in funding, with the city contributing $4.9 million in land, development waivers and commercial/retail space reimbursement.

The project will create 222 jobs and be designed to be greenhouse-gas neutral. It will offer support services and be managed by PHS, with the city leasing it to Victoria for 60 years.

“We are celebrating one more step toward eliminating homelessness in Vancouver,” Coleman said. “It is a huge investment you can only judge by people, and one person at a time.

“Understand there is more to come.”

Robertson, who has vowed to end homelessness in Vancouver by 2015, said he and Coleman hope to sit down soon and discuss the future of the Howe Street shelter.

© Copyright (c) The Province

USA Today

NEW YORK (AP) — A widely watched index shows home prices posted their first monthly increase since the summer of 2006, indicating prices are finally stabilizing.

The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller home price index of 20 major cities released Tuesday rose 0.5% from April, but was still 17.1% below May a year ago.

The 10-city index rose 0.4% from April, but was off 16.8% from May last year. It was the fourth consecutive month both indexes didn’t post record annual decline. Home prices are now at levels not seen since mid-2003.

“The pace of descent in home price value appears to be slowing,” said David Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at Standard & Poor’s. “This is the first time we have seen broad increases in home prices in 34 months. This could be an indication that home price declines are finally stabilizing.”

“While many indicators are showing signs of life in the housing market, we should remember that on a year-over-year basis home prices are still down about 17% on average across all metro areas, so we likely do have a way to go before we see sustained home price appreciation,” he said.

Metropolitan area	May 2009 index	Change from April	Change from May 2008
Atlanta	105.69	0.3%	-15.0%
Boston	148.77	1.6%	-7.2%
Charlotte	119.80	0.9%	-10.0%
Chicago	123.68	1.1%	-17.5%
Cleveland	102.11	4.1%	-6.2%
Dallas	116.54	1.9%	-4.1%
Denver	123.78	1.3%	-4.6%
Detroit	70.05	0.2%	-24.5%
Las Vegas	109.49	-2.6%	-32.0%
Los Angeles	159.18	-0.1%	-19.8%
Miami	144.59	-0.8%	-25.2%
Minneapolis	109.77	1.2%	-21.7%
New York	170.51	0.0%	-12.2%
Phoenix	103.56	-0.9%	-34.2%
Portland	146.97	0.1%	-16.3%
San Diego	145.06	0.4%	-18.5%
San Francisco	120.16	1.4%	-26.1%
Seattle	148.96	-0.3%	-16.6%
Tampa	140.35	0.0%	-20.8%
Washington	169.49	1.3%	-14.9%
20-city composite index	139.84	0.5%	-17.1%
Source: Standard & Poor’s and Fiserv

The index has a base value of 100 in January 2000; so a current index value of 150 translates to a 50% appreciation rate since January 2000 for a typical home.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

HST could be a hurdle for buyers in a recovering market, they predict

Brian Morton
Sun

Homebuilders are worried that B.C.’s proposed harmonized sales tax will add significantly to the price of a new home, and perhaps slow down the real estate market’s signs of recovery.

Rob Grimm, co-owner of Richmond-based Portrait Homes, said in an interview that recent sales have picked up as buyers take advantage of lower real estate prices, but that the new tax — which will add a provincial sales tax to the federal goods and services tax on new homes, effective July 1, 2010 — might change that trend.

Like others in the homebuilding industry, he’s concerned the new tax will turn off buyers.

“Costs have come down, [and] we’ve had about 35 starts this year,” Grimm said of his company, which builds single-family homes. “Now, we’re going to reverse that. It doesn’t make sense.”

Under the plan, a previous exemption from the provincial sales tax for new homes will disappear, resulting in an extra seven-per-cent tax. As some of that tax was already built into prices because it covered things such as building materials, the effective tax rate will climb about five per cent, according to the B.C. Ministry of Finance.

The new plan will offer a five-per-cent rebate of the provincial portion of the single tax, but only up to a maximum of $20,000, which will ensure that new homes up to $400,000 will bear no more tax than under the current tax regime.

Buyers of new homes over $400,000 will still receive the maximum rebate of $20,000, but will see the purchase price above that level subject to the extra five-per-cent tax rate.

The tax harmonization also applies to such things as fees for lawyers and notaries public, but these are already subject to the provincial sales tax so should not result in additional expense.

Grimm said he’s still not sure exactly how much extra buyers will end up paying, only that he believes it will be significant.

“I haven’t done the calculation yet, but it will add a lot to the bottom line of a house.”

Grimm said there was no consultation with industry by the government.

“Unfortunately, the government thinks the homebuilding industry can be targeted because purchasers don’t know about all the taxes and fees. I’m very disappointed in this. It’s absolutely stupid. Home building and home sales drive a lot of the economy.”

Greater Vancouver Home Builders’ Association chief executive Peter Simpson said the new tax will significantly increase the cost of buying a new home, although he couldn’t provide numbers.

“We’re seeing marginal improvement and sales increases. But this plan will place another impediment in front of the people, and we don’t need an impediment at this time.”

Simpson said he believes there’s room for flexibility on the part of the government.

Scott Russell, president of the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, said he did not yet know all the implications of the new tax, only that it will result in a big price increase for buyers.

“We certainly feel it will affect the buying public. We’re definitely opposed to it.”

Meanwhile, Keith Sashaw, president of the Vancouver Regional Construction Association, which deals mainly with non-residential construction, said he believes the new HST will result in a lot less paperwork.

“On the non-residential side, we’re supportive of a harmonized sales tax,” Sashaw said.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Location, location, location IQ

Marke Andrews
Sun

If, say, you want to start a chain of coffee shops in the Metro Vancouver area, Sean Gorman recommends using visual intelligence (also called location intelligence) which provides digital maps and data to give a snapshot — actually more a panorama than a snapshot — of an area.

Using this technology, you can determine the abundance and location of competitors in various neighbourhoods, the demographics of a specific neighbourhood to see how many high-income earners live there, transit routes, transit stops and roads, crime rates, unemployment rates, the number of home foreclosures over the past year, even the number of parking tickets issued on

nearby streets.

Visual and location intelligence has fast become essential not only for starting new businesses, but for managing existing businesses, says Gorman, who is CEO of Arlington, Va.-based FortuisOne and a speaker at this week’s GeoWeb (today through Friday at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue), the annual conference devoted to geographic information systems.

FortuisOne has a system called GeoIQ, which retrieves data and creates maps that allow people to analyze information. For entrepreneurs, the maps can be very useful as they plan their next move.

It is important to make the maps easily readable by the public.

“We invested a lot of time in focus groups and user studies and worked with cartographers at the University of Wisconsin,” Gorman said in a telephone interview. They came up with something called a map brewer, a process that creates an “aesthetically pleasing and statistically accurate map.”

For a story last February, The Vancouver Sun used FortuisOne to help map where the most parking tickets are written in Vancouver.

“Before computers, when maps were paper-based, artists drew maps that were interpretive to try to convey a message,” said Ron Lake, chairman and CEO of Vancouver-based Galdos Systems, and a GeoWeb organizer. He cites the tourist maps with icons of landmarks, large buildings and museums that may be out of scale and have a kind of cartoonish look but communicate with the map-reader.

Gorman says visual intelligence is not only valuable to those thinking of starting a chain of coffee shops, it also helps existing chains of coffee shops. Using it, they can find out why certain outlets succeed while others fail.

Lake said location intelligence can help consumers make informed decisions, citing the example of a home buyer looking for a West Vancouver home with a view. If all the realtors with West Van homes for sale had photos from their front and back decks available, the homebuyer could narrow his search. If you want to open a new bank branch and your clients tend to shop at certain stores, you may want to find an area where those kinds of stores are.

GeoWeb’s first two days will be devoted to workshops, with speakers and panels Wednesday through Friday.

For full information, go to geowebconference.org.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Alan Zibel, AP Real Estate Writer
USA Today

WASHINGTON — The government says new U.S. home sales rose by the largest amount in nearly nine years last month, in another sign the housing market is finally bouncing back from the worst downturn in decades.

The Commerce Department says sales rose 11% in June to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 384,000, from an upwardly revised May rate of 346,000.

It was the strongest sales pace since November 2008 and exceeded the forecasts of economists surveyed by Reuters, who expected a pace of 360,000 units. The last time sales rose so dramatically was in December 2000.

Sales have risen for three straight months. The median sales price of $206,200, however, was down 12% from $234,300 a year earlier.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.