One day ahead of his much-touted May 22 sold-out speech at the Urban Development Institute luncheon, Vancouver’s “condo king” Bob Rennie told REW.ca that if Vancouverites are upset about the city’s lack of housing affordability, they need to spend less time merely protesting and start getting much more involved in early rezoning and community consultation processes to help improve supply.
“Come out as a stakeholder, don’t just come out on stage,” said Rennie.
Referring to campaigns protesting the city’s unaffordability, such as the #DontHave1Million Twitter campaign, Rennie said, “I don’t know why we allow the conversation ‘I want a single-family home in Vancouver and I can’t get one.’
“I can understand the argument if it was ‘I can’t afford to buy a house until you start providing a lot of product so that supply and demand is stabilized.’ But when people say ‘I don’t have $1 million to buy a house’ and that’s all they say – such open-ended sentences only work in under 140 characters.
He added, “I’ve been doing this 40 years and I’ve taken it upon myself to be the grandpa in this situation and say, ‘Look kids, we’re not making any more single-family housing, we have a depleting stock, so let’s get involved with community groups and represent the diversity of the community, and have industry professionals advise families and first-time buyers.
“We can’t keep having this imaginary conversation ‘Why can’t I have a Ferrari?’ – let’s talk about why you can’t have a Ferrari and what you can have.
“What I worry about is that people aren’t getting involved in the process. Take the Independent on Main Street, it’s a great example – there was a three-year rezoning process, but none of the 2,375 people who showed up to buy the condos, showed up at the early rezoning process meetings. At those meetings we’re not getting the view of what the market wants, we’re only getting the view of what the existing neighbourhood homeowners want, and they want to hang on to yesterday.”
He added, “I am so sympathetic to communities and to neighbourhoods, that’s why I’m talking about laneway housing, townhouses – soft densification. And then let’s make sure we’ve got a lot of it. You can’t do it in baby steps, you have to do it to scale. If we don’t have enough, then we’re in trouble.”
Rennie dismissed concerns that offshore investors are dominating the condo market. Of the 2,307 new condos his company has sold in four recent projects in Burnaby and Vancouver, only 4 per cent of buyers came from overseas and just 2.2 per cent were from Asia, he said. About 60 per cent of the buyers, he said, lived within 10 kilometres of the sales office.
“A lot of the buyers may have been visible minorities, mostly Asian – and they’re being labelled as offshore buyers. But they’re locals. Let’s remember that 40 per cent of Vancouverites are of Asian origin, 29 per cent of Greater Vancouver.
“We need to ensure that we’re not trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist,” Rennie added.
He said that single-family home buyers in Vancouver are greatly made up of mainland Chinese buyers or those with mainland Chinese names, but pointed out that as a city over the decades, Vancouver has seen many waves of immigrant real estate buyers from various parts of the world.
When asked whether he advocated limits or additional taxation on foreign ownership of Vancouver housing, Rennie said that he would answer that question in his speech the following day.
