City pitches 'major pivot' on co-ops, seeing disconnect between incomes and land values
Credit to Author: Dan Fumano| Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2020 02:31:18 +0000
As Vancouver tries to chart a course for more than 3,700 co-op homes on leased city-owned land, a city report proposes a new approach that recognizes the “growing disconnect between market land value and city incomes.”
With many of the co-op leases set to expire within a few years, city hall has been struggling to renew them.
While council approved negotiating extensions back in 2017, efforts stalled as the co-ops and city couldn’t agree on pricing and terms. A long-awaiteddiscussion paper, released Tuesday, outlines four scenarios: two different ways for co-ops to renew their leases and scenarios for ending leases or for redeveloping.
The paper proposes a new approach for calculating co-op lease rates for renewals. It would connect rents to moderate- and low-income benchmarks, instead of basing them on discounts from market rents, as the city previously did.
This new approach recognizes that since Vancouver’s co-ops started in the 1970s, “market land values” have become seriously disconnected from incomes, said Sandra Singh, Vancouver’s general manager of arts, culture and community services.
“Normally in the city, when we do a lease for a not-for-profit organization, we look at it as a discount from market rates,” Singh said. The approach proposed in Tuesday’s paper, she said, represents “a major pivot for us and a major departure for how we normally do these things.”
Each of the 57 co-ops on city land has a unique situation, Singh said. Co-ops with lower-income resident could get city grants, for example, Singh said, and would need to annually report anonymized income data to the city to ensure grants are going to low- to moderate-income households.
The report also details how the city can work with co-ops wanting to redevelop their buildings to increase the number of homes on city-owned land, and outlines, “as a last resort,” what would happen if a co-op opts not to renew its lease.
Thom Armstrong, executive director of the Co-operative Housing Federation of B.C., said he’s glad the paper is in the public realm, but it remains to be seen what the results will be when they start crunching numbers with real incomes and real housing charges of actual co-op households.
“That’s where the rubber really hits the road,” Armstrong said. “But I will say it is a material move, away from a methodology that never had a chance of working, toward one that might.”
Vancouverites often spend years on wait-lists trying to get into co-op homes, which make up almost a quarter of the city’s non-market housing stock. Co-ops provide affordable homes to mixed-income communities, where some members pay subsidized rents, depending on need. Unlike in social housing, co-op members are responsible for governance and management of the community.
The city is now seeking public feedback on the discussion paper, and more information is available at vancouver.ca/co-ops.
Frank Cosco, an ESL teacher who has lived in his Champlain Heights co-op for almost 40 years, said it makes sense for the city to recognize the disconnect between market land values and local incomes.
“The market in Vancouver is not a market,” Cosco said. “It’s a lottery.”