Kerry Gold
Other

Old Vancouver housing, which has been under fire from rampant new development, got a bit of a break this week. The two neighbouring historic mock-Tudor houses nicknamed “the Dorothies” look like they might be saved due to an effort by the developer and an architect to relocate them.

And city council moved to update Vancouver’s heritage registry and look at its options to preserve buildings built before 1940.

Residential developer Rob Chetner, who was reluctantly about to demolish the Dorothies at 2827 and 2837 W. 43rd St., found a way to save them with the help of architect Timothy Ankenman. He and Mr. Ankenman went searching for a nearby Kerrisdale property to relocate the houses to, and found it a couple of blocks away, on W. 41st Avenue.

“I tried my best to save them, and it’s not easy to do,” said Mr. Chetner. “The reality is they’re not easy to save. The city needs to give us incentives that enable us to do something that we’re otherwise not able to do. To the city’s credit, they came through in a way that I think is going to work.

“And if they are serious about retaining heritage buildings in the city, we have to find a way to make it work.”

If it passes public consultation, the houses will be preserved and restored inside and out, with their basements converted into garden suites and four coach houses built to the rear of the new location, totalling eight suites, says Mr. Ankenman.

“It’s much more expensive to do this than tearing down and building new. But a piece of 100-year-old history is preserved so it is worth doing,” said Mr. Ankenman, who has five such heritage revitalization agreements in the works. “The level of interior detail in those houses is unprecedented – I’ve never seen new construction that has that level of detail.”

The Dorothies only came close to demolition, but other beautiful historic houses aren’t so lucky. About 850 old Vancouver houses are getting knocked down each year, figures writer Caroline Adderson, who, with husband filmmaker Bruce Sweeney, lives on a Kerrisdale street, surrounded by ongoing demolition and new construction.

Ms. Adderson oversees a popular Facebook community page that documents the demolitions, called Vancouver Vanishes. As she told city councillors on Wednesday, those houses range from good to superb condition, and many of them are replaced with new houses that stand empty for several years. If heritage preservation, sustainability and density are the city’s goals, then senseless new development is the major obstacle, she says.

Reached the day after the council meeting, she said of the new heritage action plan: “I’m disappointed in the timeline. Any measures to preserve neighbourhoods are at least a year away.”

The report focuses on updating the heritage registry, which would include additions, but also removal of buildings that have been deemed irreparable and already demolished. It aims to give the director of planning more room for negotiation to save heritage stock, and it looks at increasing demolition fees. However, a bigger demo fee would become the price of doing business for anyone who’s committed to building an $8-million home.

Critics argue that the plan doesn’t take immediate steps to address the reality that too many homes are being torn down and sent to the landfill. According to a consultant report from 2011, 74 per cent of Vancouver’s demolition, land clearing and construction (DLC) waste came from residential demolitions. And if hundreds of houses are coming down each year, it’s not hard to see why.

Jake Fry, co-founder of Small Housing B.C., sees two problems for Vancouver. One is the fact that on average, 84 per cent of our monthly incomes go toward our housing – it’s unaffordable. The other is that new houses are simply too big. Mr. Fry is an early advocate of small, sustainable housing, and founder-owner of Smallworks, which builds laneway housing.

“Our building practices are providing more square footage per person than you had with old construction. We’re allowed to build bigger,” he says.

“Houses have become commodities, and this is where the city short circuits. We never got beyond the boom-and-bust mentality. We build stuff to make as much money in as short a time as possible. There’s no thought in what happens afterward.”

Mr. Fry and others have suggested that if zoning laws changed to cap the amount of square footage allowable for a single-family dwelling, it might curtail the new construction boom for monster homes, particularly in prestige areas of the city.

Councillor Heather Deal says the city will explore zoning as a tool, but first staff has until 2015 to identify those neighbourhoods with a concentration of heritage and character housing stock for such zoning. She added that “down zoning” someone’s property could be controversial.

“It potentially decreases the value of the land that the house sits on, and in Vancouver, the value is all in the land. That’s just our market economy,” she said, in a phone interview.

Later, she had staff send me an e-mail that said by 2015, Metro Vancouver also plans to put a ban on wood being sent to the landfill.

Ms. Adderson told council that houses are coming down at a rate of 70 a month. If they wait another year, they might have a tough time finding a “concentration” of character homes.

“I’m not exaggerating,” she said. “The street next to mine has one original house remaining on the south side.”

Elizabeth Murphy, former property development officer for the city, also takes aim at the city for a slow response on the issue.

“There are many things the city could be doing right away. They don’t need to be waiting this long,” she says.

“The city does not have retention as their priority. They really don’t get the fact that the greenest building is the one that already exists.

“If you can do more with what you have and create more units and house more people, but still keep the existing form, it’s a much more sustainable way of accommodating growth.”

She’s described the Dorothies development that Mr. Ankenman and Mr. Chetner are proposing. And to the city’s credit, says Mr. Ankenman, the staff worked as a team with them to find a financially viable solution for the Dorothies.

“A couple of the sites we looked at meant we would have had to split up the Dorothies, and they would have lost all their integrity if we did that. We had to find a lot big enough and a receiver site that would accept both of them. That’s the only way it was going to work.”

Score one potential victory for Vancouver’s old houses.

© Copyright 2013 The Globe and Mail Inc.

South China Morning Post story considers a levy on international buyers in Vancouver

Other

Vancouver’s sky-high real estate prices and the influence of offshore investors has come under fire again, in a controversial article on the South China Morning Post website.

The Post article, by Vancouver correspondent Ian Young, focuses on translator Joy Mo, who was born in China and now rents a house with her husband and two children in Coquitlam, B.C..

Mo, who has lived in the Vancouver area since 2002, blames her fellow countrymen and women for driving up local housing prices without contributing sufficiently to the local community.

“I’m not saying they shouldn’t buy,” said Mo in an interview with the CBC. “I mean, nobody can stop them from buying. I’m saying for international buyers, shouldn’t we set a different tax standard like a lot of other countries do?”

Vancouverites have long complained that wealthy real estate speculators from Hong Kong and mainland China have driven up housing prices. (Andy Clark /Reuters)

Mo is expecting her third child and has been trying to buy a house in the TriCities area. She and her husband have been outbid twice, once by a foreign buyer, also from China.

She thinks the way to go is an extra premium — a tax — for offshore buyers, similar to the 15 per cent tax on non-residents that Hong Kong has implemented.

“I’m not sure it would actually push the real estate prices down, but at least [offshore buyers] would contribute a little bit more to society,” says Mo.

Journalist Ian Young acknowledges that singling out one group to blame is contentious, but thinks his article serves an important purpose:

“The fact that a large number of these buyers are Chinese should not deter a discussion about whether or not it is a desirable situation.”

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Roberston says the market is nowhere near as hot as Hong Kong’s, but that his task force on housing affordability is checking out options.

“We don’t want to take any rash actions that might impact investment in the city,” said Robertson.

“We’re not Hong Kong. They saw real estate prices rise 26 per cent last year, which is unbelievable – they had to take rash actions to deal with that.

“We’re not at that stage. But there are warning signs that we have watch very carefully, and we may have to take action in the future if it’s warranted.”

Copyright © CBC 2013

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Want Vancouver real estate to get cheaper?

Raze the mountains, fill in the ocean, build a wall around it to stop any more people from coming, and sabotage the economy.

Those were the innovative suggestions urban economists offered when asked what they thought of a hot-button debate that popped up Thursday on a popular online forum about London, England’s possible move to introduce a capital gains tax on foreign property investment.

The post on Vancouver’s Reddit forum, which asked, “Should Vancouver do the same?”, garnered hundreds of “upvotes” and comments.

“Yes!” posted one commenter. “Doesn’t Australia have something similar?” – (it does) – “Won’t ever happen here though, too many people with their finger in the pie.”

Despite a lack of rock-solid data on the role of foreign real estate investment in Canadian housing prices, since it is not explicitly tracked, local experts who have looked into it using proxy data have been saying for years that it is not a significant driver in Vancouver.

“One of the myths we see in Vancouver is this idea that foreign investors are driving the market place,” said Cameron Muir, chief economist at the B.C. Real Estate Association.

“The stats really suggest that anywhere from one to four per cent of home sales in any given month are to foreign investors. I think often times what’s mistaken for foreign investors are, in fact, recent immigrants.”

He said the tax under consideration across the pond is a political reaction to very different market forces, since London is a “world city” and much more of a playground for the “uber-rich” than Vancouver — pretty and outdoorsy as it is.

Some recent stats are telling: London house prices rose by 9.7 percent between July 2012 and July 2013, according to Britain’s Office for National Statistics. During a similar period, from November 2012 to November 2013, Vancouver’s prices only rose by one per cent, according to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver.

Reached by phone in Zurich, Switzerland on Thursday, Tsur Somerville, a professor of urban economics and real estate at UBC’s Sauder School of Business, said the only thing beside self-sabotage that can be done to make Vancouver real estate more affordable is to perhaps streamline the approval processes that restrict the construction of new supply.

“If you have a place with 40,000 people moving here a year and you don’t have any land, it’s not going to be affordable,” he said, “as long as people keep coming here.”

Copyright 2001-2013, Free Daily News Group Inc.

Other

The Bank of Canada today announced that it is maintaining its target for the overnight rate at 1 per cent. The Bank Rate is correspondingly 1 1/4 per cent and the deposit rate is 3/4 per cent.
The global economy is expanding at a modest rate, as the Bank expected. Although growth in several emerging markets has continued to ease, growth in the United States during the third quarter of 2013 was stronger than forecast. Even if some of this pickup was due to temporary factors, the data are consistent with the Bank’s view of gathering momentum in the U.S. economy.
In Canada, underlying growth is broadly in line with the Bank’s projections in its October and July Monetary Policy Reports. Real GDP growth in the third quarter, at 2.7 per cent, was stronger than the Bank was projecting, but its composition does not yet indicate a rebalancing towards exports and investment. The housing sector has been stronger than expected but is consistent with updated demographic data and a pulling forward of home purchases in light of favourable financing conditions. The Bank continues to expect a soft landing in the housing market. Non-commodity exports continue to disappoint and the price of oil produced in Canada has eased further. Business investment spending is up from previous low levels, but is still recovering more slowly than anticipated. On balance, the Bank sees no reason to adjust its expectation of a gradual return to full production capacity around the end of 2015.
Meanwhile, inflation has moved further below the Bank’s 2 per cent target. Core inflation is being held down by significant excess supply and by the effects of heightened competition in the retail sector, which look to be more persistent than anticipated. In addition, total CPI inflation has been pushed down by lower gasoline prices.
The risks associated with elevated household imbalances have not materially changed, while the downside risks to inflation appear to be greater. Overall, the balance of risks remains within the zone articulated in October. Weighing these considerations, the Bank judges that the substantial monetary policy stimulus currently in place remains appropriate and therefore has decided to maintain the target for the overnight rate at 1 per cent.
Information note:
The next scheduled date for announcing the overnight rate target is 22 January 2014. The next full update of the Bank’s outlook for the economy and inflation, including risks to the projection, will be published in the Monetary Policy Report at the same time.
SOURCE Bank of Canada

TARA PERKINS
Other

Home sales continued to be strong in a number of major cities in November, with preliminary local data indicating that the country’s housing market is still rebounding.

The number of homes that changed hands by way of the MLS system in greater Toronto last month came in 13.9 per cent higher than a year earlier, the Toronto Real Estate Board said Wednesday.

Detached homes in the downtown 416 area code saw a 23.9 per cent jump in sales, while 12.7 per cent more existing downtown condos changed hands. There was a decline in sales of semi-detached homes downtown, while townhouses had softer sales growth.

The average selling price for all types of homes in Greater Toronto was $538,881, up 11.3 per cent from a year earlier. The MLS Home Price Index benchmark, which seeks to account for any change in the types of homes that are selling, rose 5.7 per cent.

Meanwhile, Calgary’s local real estate board said that sales in that city came in 19 per cent higher than last November. So far this year Calgary’s sales are 11 per cent higher than the long-term average.

The benchmark price of a single-family home in Calgary was $470,600 in November, 8.5 per cent higher than a year earlier.

Vancouver’s sales were up 37.7 per cent from a year earlier. But, with the city still recovering from a deep sales slump, last month’s sales were 1.2 per cent below the ten-year average. They were also 12.8 per cent below the prior month’s level.

“This year’s activity has resulted in gradual and modest increases in home prices of approximately 1 per cent over the last 12 months in the region,” stated Sandra Wyant, president of the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver.

Sales of existing homes nationwide in October were 8.3 per cent higher than a year earlier, slightly below economists’ expectations. The Canadian Real Estate Association will release November’s national data later this month.

Martha Perkins
Other

Magicians are known for being able to pull rabbits out of a hat so imagine what Rod Chow is going to be able to pull off at the world’s shallowest commercial building.

The six-foot-wide, 100-foot-long Jack Chow Building runs along Pender Street from Carrall towards Columbia. It’s now covered by what the Chow family imagines as a very, very large magician’s cape so a $1-million renovation project can take place under a cloak of expectation.

When the big Abracadabra! moment happens next spring and the cape disappears at the flick of a wand, they say that Vancouver is in for an “amazing revelation.”

Just as the building, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the “shallowest building”, Rod Chow might be the only insurance broker who doubles as a magician. (And no, he can’t make your premiums disappear.)

“When I was a kid my parents took us on family vacations to Las Vegas and Reno,” Rod says of his early exposure to magic shows. “Back home, my dad hosted office parties and he needed entertainment; he was a juggler and I was a magician.”

Today Rod will sometimes do a short magic trick for customers but he and his family — brother Reg and sisters Barbara and Deborah also work in the insurance business — say the real magic is in one of the “world’s nine most creative buildings.”

“The original building was built in 1913 on a bet,” Rod says. When the City of Vancouver expropriated the land to widen Pender Street, the owner was left with a six-foot wide parcel of property.

Chow says there was a bit of racism at the time and the owner, Chang Toy of the Sam Kee Company, wasn’t fairly compensated. Toy had the last laugh, however, when he accepted a business associate’s $10,000 bet and hired an architect to design the skinny, two-storey Sam Key Building that at one time housed up to 13 businesses, including a hot bath house in the tunnel that runs under the sidewalk. (Legend has it that the tunnel was an escape route from opium dens but Chow says that’s never been proven.)

Jack Chow bought the run-down, worn-out building in 1985 and is using his retirement funds — along with a $100,000 Heritage Facade Grant from the City of Vancouver — to restore it. (Although another building has been built behind it, that building could be torn down and the Jack Chow Building would happily stand on its own.)

“My dad has such a love of the building and we’re glad to be doing it as a family,” says Rod, who used to sleep under his parents’ desk at the office when he was a baby and is one of the believers in Chinatown’s economic future.

During the renovation, Jack Chow Insurance has moved kitty corner to another building the family owns at 1 East Pender. One East Pender is also now home to the other branch of the business that used to be on Main Street. The family has plans to renovate this second heritage building but that will wait until after the magic happens across the street.

©  2013  Copyright   Black Press, Inc

Mike Howell
Van. Courier

Do you get as excited about amendments to city bylaws as I do?

Didn’t think so.

But if you’re a renter, or looking for a place to rent, you might want to jump on the City of Vancouver’s website and check out what’s new on the rental front.

A staff report going before council this week follows up on a program city council adopted back in June 2009 that offered incentives for developers to encourage construction of “affordable market rental housing.”

Yes, I know, the descriptor “affordable” seems like an oxymoron in this city.

I’ll get to that in a sec.

First, some more background on the program, which was commonly referred to as STIR — Short Term Incentives for Rental program. STIR ended December 2011, with 1,330 units of “affordable” market rental housing built in 19 buildings.

Incentives to developers under the program included building fewer parking spots, bonus density through rezoning, waiving development cost fees and speeding up processing to get the housing built.

Now the program has essentially evolved as Rental 100, but with a major proposed amendment: Developers interested in the program will have to build 100 per cent rental housing instead of mixing in rental units with private units.

“[The change] is supported by the key learning from the review of the STIR program, that City incentives are more effective and provide better value when applied to 100 per cent rental projects versus mixed residential projects,” said the staff report authored by Chief Housing Officer Mukhtar Latif.

And here’s another reason city staff wants to go this way: “These amendments to the [development cost levy] bylaws would also address a legal petition filed in the B.C. Supreme Court by the West End Neighbours, which challenges the City’s current process for determining eligibility for [waiving development cost fees] for affordable rental housing.”

The petition challenges the city manager’s authority to select which developers are eligible for development cost fees to be waived. The petition also argues the present bylaws don’t adequately define the definition of “affordable.”

According to the staff report, the amendments will address these issues.

Now to what the city defines as affordable rents under the bylaw amendments…

Fees will be waived for developments where the agreed upon average rents for initial occupancy do not exceed the following specified rents by more than 10 per cent:

• $1,443 per month for a studio unit.
• $1,517 per month for a one-bedroom.
• $2,061 for a two-bedroom.
• $2,743 for a three-bedroom

The report points out lower rents at some of the STIR projects, including $770 for a studio unit at a soon-to-be-developed complex at 4320 Slocan St. A one-bedroom will go for $1,020 and a two-bedroom for $1,455.

Downtown is pricier. At 1401 Comox St., a studio will rent for $1,040, a one-bedroom for $1,340 and a two-bedroom for $1,890.

A three-bedroom will go for $2,520. A studio apartment at 1142 Granville St. rents for $1,250 per month.

So will developers still be enticed to build under the new program?

“There are currently 200 units approved and 460 units in the application process, and staff have had additional inquiries for about 15 projects with approximately 1,000 rental units,” the report said.

© Copyright 2013