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promoting will actually lead to housing affordability.
In contrast, Vancouver presents a compelling case of a major city that up-zoned aggressively. They eliminated single-family zoning, allowing by right four units where a detached house had previously stood. Today, Vancouver is the densest city in Canada and one of the densest in North America. Vancouver’s urban density has even given rise to the term “Vancouverism” to designate “tall slim towers for density, widely separated by low-rise buildings.” It did not work. Housing has not become more affordable in Vancouver. With a median multiple -- the price of housing compared to incomes -- of 12, this Canadian city has the highest housing prices in the English-speaking world according to the 2020 Demographia report.
Former supply-side “Vancouverist” Professor Patrick Condon, who himself had in earlier years supported many of Vancouver’s policies of statutory up-zoning has revised his views in the face of what he calls “indisputable” evidence. Professor Condon speaks openly about the prevailing urbanist “addiction” to the notion that if we just “unleashed” the free market, we would somehow create housing affordability. The evidence is in and is hardly surprising to those who never have bought the Urban Growth Machine’s spiel: lot splits essentially double the price of the land.
Building more Porsches does not reduce the price of Priuses. What WIMBY policies do achieve is rather the further commodification of housing and the fueling of real estate speculation. Byproducts of these policies are gentrification, displacement, decreasing homeownership and the further denial of the opportunity to build intergenerational wealth and stability for historically disenfranchised families-- not the creation of affordable housing.
It is time to implement a bold, well-examined combination of anti-speculation policies which could, in fact, serve to de-commodify housing. Such policies should be oriented to urban humanism with the aim of creating housing affordability and offering people a wider variety of housing choices. Anti- speculation, urban humanist housing policies should include:
LIMITING FOREIGN AND CORPORATE OWNERSHIP OF HOUSING
All actual residents, regardless of immigration status, would be permitted to own homes. But just as many other countries and jurisdictions place limitations on foreign ownership of residential properties (including
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Vancouver because of the failed supply-side experiment), and several states within the U.S. place limitations on foreign ownership of agricultural land with policy considerations in mind, we should place limitations on both foreign and corporate ownership of residential real estate.
Global capital’s speculation in residential real estate fuels speculation and causes property values to inflate. What real-life human being, especially prospective first-time homebuyer, can compete with foreign corporations or Wall St. REIT’s (real estate investment trusts) or global oligarchs looking for a safe haven to “park” or, yes, launder money, as has been the case in Vancouver?
VACANCY TAXES
The staggering number of vacant housing units in California, contrasted with the estimated underage of housing units has been pointed about above: 1.2 million vacant units versus a pre-COVID shortage of 830,000 units. The simple math is fairly compelling.
Vancouver and other cities, including Oakland, have already instituted vacancy taxes. In this spirit, some cities have also created laws banning or restricting the use of residential housing for short-term vacation rentals. As with many housing-related measures, the devil is in the details, but it clearly is a lot more cost-effective and environmentally sustainable to use existing buildings for permanent housing than to have to build new ones. The aim, however, would be clear: to reduce or end the use of housing as a financial tool of speculators.
In a discussion on vacancy taxes, WIMBY supply- sider and University of California at Los Angeles Professor Michael Lens fails to differentiate between speculators and families who are hoping to build equity through their homes: “But, you know, in one case, we’ve got, say, a grandmother in Detroit, and the other case, you’ve got a foreign investor in Los Angeles. We want to treat those two people very differently, but they might be hoping for the same outcome in the end.”
Yet the differences between the grandmother in Detroit and the Russian oligarch are significant. The Detroit grandmother who has been living in her home for decades is fulfilling the function of “housing as a human right.” She is living in her home. Her hope to establish equity or intergenerational wealth is a byproduct of her living in her own home. This is a very different situation from the Russian oligarch who is using residential
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