Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to today's episode of Red Eye. I'm Jane Williams. On the podcast today, I speak with Nathan Crompton about the end of temporary modular housing in Vancouver.
Speaker: Temporary modular housing currently provides over 750 units of shelter rate housing across Vancouver. One City Councillor, Christine Boyle, brought forward a motion in July to renew or extend the leases for all these sites. Mayor Sim and his ABC party majority unanimously voted against that motion and the dismantling or demolition of these units is now underway.
Speaker: Nathan Crompton is a member of the editorial collective for the Mainlander. He's also an organizer with Our Homes Can't Wait. And he joins me today to talk about where modular housing has gotten us since it was introduced in 2016 and where we're at today. Hello, Nathan. Hi, thanks for having me. What was the city's logic in building temporary modular housing in the first place for homeless people?
Speaker: I think it's a mix. When they started, they had convinced maybe themselves or at least some of us that it was only a temporary measure that they would have larger measures to solve a larger crisis. And so in the meantime, people would go into these temporary units. That has turned out to be a bit of fanciful thinking because
Speaker: Nothing has changed and actually things have gotten worse. So now the question before us is what to do with this modular housing. The city set a 10 year target of actually building 4 ,000 units of affordable housing. How are things going with that target?
Speaker: Yeah, so the target has not been met, and the five -year benchmark was a significant failure. There's not much of a secret why that happened. I mean, once they set the target, they didn't really follow up. The funding wasn't there. They kept the tax cutting full steam ahead. And now they've shifted a lot of that funding to the police.
Speaker: at the municipal level and at the provincial level, things are sort of similar actually, even despite some of the framing. The money's just not there, so the housing isn't getting built. Given the homelessness and the affordability crisis, it just seems crazy that we're now at the point of demolishing perfectly adequate housing. How did we get to that point?
Speaker: Yeah, that's the frustrating part. The housing itself has a 30 to 40 year, you know, life cycle. But as with a lot of things, I mean, the question, the problem isn't really about the buildings. It's largely an issue of land and, you know, looking back,
Speaker: was one of the funny parts about all this hype about modular and different exciting shipping containers. A lot of that was about pretending that the issue was about the built form, let's say, but actually it was an issue of land, of real estate companies owning all the land and having the monopoly over what goes there.
Speaker: The temporary modular housing units, are they on city land or are they privately owned land? Yeah, so some of them are on city land, like the larwhal, I believe. Some of them are leased private land. And it's interesting when Kerry Jang, one of the politicians, was first promoting this model
Speaker: he was promoting it on the Kingswood corridor, which was this strip of privately owned land that was on its way to condo revitalization, quote unquote. And he kind of framed it as this is just a stopgap thing. We will put these here until the developer wants to build. And like I said, I think the idea was
Speaker: pretending that they were solving the underlying problem. And then this was a short -term fix in the meantime. But of course, nothing has really been done. So that's the situation. I guess one of the things that will have happened is that over that period of time, the value of the land will have gone up though.
Speaker: That's right. Yeah. And often what you see more and more with this process of hypervaluation and speculative value is governments are increasingly framing their budgets around
Speaker: capturing some of that value through taxation, but the rates of taxation are incredibly low. But the thing that they do is they look at the value and they basically say, well, if we don't do condos, this is a huge cost. But what they mean by cost is actually opportunity cost, economics term, which means highest and best use.
Speaker: So, in a lot of cases, even if the city or the province owns the land and if they have the money, they try to convince us through an argument about costs, that the costs are too high, but it's actually opportunity cost. And at the end of the day, it's politicians siding with real estate valuation over people's housing.
Speaker: Now you mentioned Laurel Place and that's one of the two temporary modular housing sites that have already evicted their residents. Tell me about what happened there.
Speaker: So Laravel Place was one of these units, one of these projects that was meant to be temporary. It's the site of the future Vancouver Art Gallery, as well as commercial office towers. And when they built it there, they defended in these terms that there'd be a temporary fix for a temporary problem.
Speaker: And finally, the art gallery has been able to do their fundraising and get multi -million budget together for their projects. So through this partnership with the commercial retail and office development, they've decided that now is the time to develop the land. And despite a bit of advance warning, the city made no plans to relocate or
Speaker: find an alternative site for the units. And it later turned out that that was because they didn't want the units, not just the Larwell units. They wanted to get rid of the whole 750 temporary modular project. I want to ask you about the other one that's closed down. But first of all, I just want to go back to what you just said. What rationale did they give in council for not renewing the leases?
Speaker: Well, it was interesting to see them try to make their arguments. Some of them went great lengths to give a kind of noble gloss on their argument, and there were big speeches about how permanent is better than temporary housing, which of course no one disagrees with.
Speaker: But of course, at the end of those speeches, quite clearly, we all knew that it was a grand standing. And since then, it's been several months, there's been no plans for permanent, this much -vaunted permanent housing, and that the cat is kind of out of the bag. Their preference is just to have the modulars go away and not replace them. Not replace them with temporary nor permanent.
Speaker: Now, the city also shut down those 46 units of temporary modular housing at the Little Mountain site, and they were shut down like about two years ago. What's happened with those units? Yeah. Similarly, those have not been replaced. They've been put into storage. My understanding is that those perfectly good units are just sitting there. It's really interesting actually with Little Mountain itself, the social housing that was demolished there 10, 13 years ago,
Speaker: That was good quality housing too. There was nothing wrong with it. BC Housing had actually done a significant renovation a few years earlier. And then when Rich Coleman struck a deal with the developer, then suddenly they made the argument that the housing was at the end of its life, but of course it wasn't. And so the recurring theme here is perfectly good housing packaged up, demolished, or put in storage at the expense of people's homes.
Speaker: Now you've described the next stage of this kind of housing stopgap measures as developing work camp style housing. What is that?
Speaker: Yeah. So David Ebe and Kennedy Stewart and others have for a while said, we want to replace the SROs. We think the quality of this housing is decrepit and they're too small, which is correct. It's accurate to say that. And for a while that's been their position. So in theory, you would think that they want something a little better.
Speaker: But not only are they allowing the SROs to get demolished, they're replacing them with actually something far worse. The work camp housing is a great example. Those units are smaller than the Red Cross recommendation for a prison cell. Yeah, quite small. And they would be put on sites as temporary modular housing units are put on sites?
Speaker: Yeah, what they are basically is a much worse version of temporary modular housing.
Speaker: So you've got the SROs, which are quite bad, and then temporary modulars, which are in some ways the best quality in terms of livability, the amount of space on suite bathrooms, things like that. But instead of replacing the TMH, they've basically let them shut down and then they've added a few quite significantly smaller and much worse work camp units.
Speaker: In the last couple of weeks, there have been a number of housing announcements, both by the provincial government and the city of Vancouver. Are these announcements going to make any difference for the 3 ,000 people now living with homelessness?
Speaker: No, so the announcements are actually really similar to the work camp announcement. So the work camp announcement was made back in the spring of 2023. At the time they made, I think they said 330 units were on the way.
Speaker: journalists kind of dug into that and found out that most of them were not new units. Some were replacement and some were this temporary modular that's being closed. But like you said, there's been another cycle of announcements and press attention for a new project on Cordova.
Speaker: And again, it's very interesting. Ravel Callon, Minister of Housing, announced these as the creation of 100 and I believe 120 new units. And he used the word creation several times. And it turns out that the vast majority of those units, 80 of those units, are replacement for when those exact units were shut down in 2016.
Speaker: Certainly, they should have been shut down. They were in bad condition. The renovations are very welcome, but these are not new units. I mean, when you've got 3 ,000 homeless people and people want to see 3 ,000 units built, that's just not where we're at, not even close. What we're seeing is a one -for -one replacement at best, but actually the problem is
Speaker: A lot of these one -for -one replacements come with a caveat that you have to do a real estate deal with a developer. So in this case, West Bank. So West Bank is going to have luxury or upper market units and market units with pore doors on the other side, separate entrances. And the problem is that's just going to create the problem all over because you'll have the same gentrification pressures
Speaker: creating market pressures on the immediate affordable surrounding area. So like Woodward's, we'll probably see some losses and probably a net zero at best, but frankly, the trend has been worse than net zero. What would you need to see from the provincial government to persuade you that they were actually serious about lowering the homeless camp?
Speaker: Well, I would like to see supply in some respects, I agree with them that supply matters, but the supply would have to have targets around affordability. The supply would have to meet people's needs in terms of affordability. And the other thing is kind of related to what I just mentioned, it really matters where you put the supply. I mean, if you're putting the supply
Speaker: In areas of high density rental, you're not really addressing the overall issue. You're creating more net zero, like I said. And actually when EB announced this latest supply announcement, he pointed to Bernabe as the model.
Speaker: for transit oriented development. And I actually was there at the time when Metrotown was being redeveloped on this model. And it was quite striking to see dozens of rental apartment buildings getting demolished to make way for condos, I think 15 apartment buildings in one year.
Speaker: And then right next to that was the single family homes, which were untouched, not subject to this process of demolition. So for me, I think a spatial guarantee that the supply goes in the right places, that the supply goes where there's no affordable density. And that would mean protecting affordable neighborhoods, working class affordable neighborhoods across the Lower Mainland. Well, thanks so much for speaking with me today, Nathan.
Speaker: No problem. I appreciate it. I've been speaking with Nathan Crompton. He's a member of the editorial collective for the Mainlander and he's also an organizer with Our Homes Can't Wait. The Red Eye Collective is based in Vancouver. You can check us out at coopradio .org slash redeye.
