Letter to the editor: Burnaby continues to ensure status quo of housing and affordability disaster

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Burnaby staff, in a "Housing Choices" report to Burnaby's planning and development committee on Wednesday, confirmed that there is almost zero urgency or even recognition of how much of a disaster Burnaby's rental housing and affordability crisis is.

They plan for the housing crisis to continue as an ever-worsening disaster for at least another half decade before anything that could possibly start to make a large impact could even start to be built.

A brief history:

A 2019 "Quick Starts" report from Burnaby's "Mayor's Task Force on Housing" included a recommendation to change zoning to allow multi-family homes across the city as one of the "quick starts" to solve the housing crisis, instead of limiting multi-family homes to a minority of residential land in Burnaby. This quick start was supposed to include a range of "missing middle" forms of housing from laneways to low-rise apartments, and was based on broad public support as found by the comprehensive public engagement work done by SFU's Centre for Dialogue.

However, later on, it was split into two phases and branded as "Housing Choices" with most forms of housing pushed into Phase 2. I remember listening to a meeting where this splitting into phases was being presented by staff, and there was a direct concern from at least one councillor about delaying the most needed and impactful forms of housing that would address the housing crisis. The staff response was that Phase 2 would have some overlap with Phase 1 and quickly follow.

Sometime later, Phase 1 was split into Phase 1a (laneways and secondary suites) and 1b (3-4 suites per lot), with the main portion of substance, Phase 2, being postponed even longer. Now, Burnaby staff is saying Phase 1a will be complete by the end of 2023, 4 years after all the combined phases were included as a "quick start". Additionally, staff mentioned that Phase 1b will only be started in earnest in 2024. However, all of Phase 1 (1a and 1b) will likely be rendered pointless and a waste of time/resources with the province's proposed changes to allow 4 suites on every lot.

The main impactful part of the "quick start" (Phase 2) has now been pushed to being included with updates to Burnaby's Official Community Plan (OCP), which is expected to take at least 2-3 years to complete, if we are lucky, and could easily be longer. This means it will be at least four years before changes from a new community plan will be implemented, and five years from today, at the very earliest before we could possibly see townhomes and low-rise apartments begin to be built in ~70% of residential areas that currently only allow single houses. This will be almost a decade after it was supposed to be a "Quick Start" to address the dire lack of rental housing and affordability in Burnaby.

Since the 2019 "Quick Starts" report, market rents for 1 bedroom suites in Burnaby have increased 40%, from $1700/mo to $2400/mo (according to Zumper data), while virtually nothing substantial has changed to address the dire rental crisis for tens of thousands of people living in Burnaby. All the while, Burnaby continues to approve the destruction of hundreds of homes in some of the few remaining older affordable rental buildings left in the city. This comes even as Jill Atkey, CEO of BC Non-Profit Housing Association, has stated that we need to protect existing affordable rental buildings until a healthy rental market exists again, which was supported by the province’s recently launched the Rental Protection Fund for this exact purpose.

That brings us back to the Housing Choices report presented by Burnaby staff on Wednesday. During the discussion around the report, there was a number of extremely concerning comments from the Director of Planning and other staff including that they would only consider allowing more homes near transit "if we were required to look at it earlier" by the province.

When talking about the Official Community Plan update, and allowing a broad range of low-rise housing throughout the city, it was also mentioned that there would be “boundaries where appropriate to allow low-rise apartments,” hinting that in large portions of Burnaby’s residential land the city would still prevent people from building more affordable rental housing with low-rise apartments, townhomes, and more.

It should be noted that previous reports from Burnaby staff have noted that the types of housing included in Phase 1a, like laneways, will have virtually zero impact on affordability and will need to be rented at market rates to make financial sense to build. During the presentation and discussion that followed, it was readily apparent that there has been well over a year spent looking at many of the small details around laneways and suites, which will have zero impact on the rental disaster.

Instead of focusing time and effort on policy changes that could actually provide more homes that are more affordable, Burnaby is still planning to waste many more years on small details, making the rental housing disaster increasingly dire in the process due to the complete refusal to make basic policy changes to allow more rental homes, which would go a long ways towards solving the disaster.

Beyond moving to Phase 2 of Housing Choices immediately to allow a range of low-rise forms of housing across Burnaby, one of the most impactful solutions that could be implemented immediately by the city is simply removing the restriction on number of rental homes in single/two-family zoned areas.

Councillor Sav Dhaliwal almost reached this point when he brought up the idea of someone building a 6,000 sq. ft. house, saying Burnaby should allow or encourage that to be a duplex. Instead of a duplex though, Burnaby could outright allow 8-10 rental homes to be built in a small apartment building in the same 6,000 sq. ft. footprint as a house or duplex. While changing nothing else about height or building form may not be ideal for efficiency or affordability, it would allow vastly more rental homes, and more affordable homes, to be built across the city. To find current examples of these types of buildings, you only need to look to the Marlborough area or other parts of Metrotown or Edmonds to find some of the 2-3 storey apartments with 6-15 homes on lots similarly sized to most single-family lots in Burnaby.

To date, Burnaby continues to ensure the status quo of an increasingly dire housing and affordability disaster, failing to implement anything that could quickly provide a large increase in affordability or the number of rental homes available. That could quickly change, but only if the city allows more rental homes to be built on the majority of (and cheapest) residential land in the city, where rental homes are currently excluded.

Joel Gibbs,
Burnaby resident

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