Opinion: We were never building affordable homes in Vancouver | Daily Hive

Opinion: We were never building affordable homes in Vancouver, so why pretend we were?

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Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by David Fine, who is an award-winning local filmmaker, an outspoken housing policy critic, and a moderator of the VanPoli Facebook group. He is currently making a documentary film about urban planning in Vancouver.

“We can no longer build what people can afford,” said Anne McMullin of the Urban Development Institute.

Talk about revisionist history!

When were developers ever building housing people could afford? And now, thousands of units are sitting empty. Why are they not being snapped up at bargain prices? How did we get here? Let’s go back and remind ourselves how this came to be.

Remember when we were told that we badly needed all of this housing because, “We have a housing crisis?” That building for foreign buyers was great because it allowed developments to get built, and getting built is vital because, “We have a housing crisis!” That investors, both local and foreign, were the backbone of development because their investments created the housing we vitally need and which would provide much-needed rental housing for locals because… Well, you know. Remember?

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Fast forward to late 2025. We now have thousands of condominium units sitting unsold and empty across Metro Vancouver. The estimates are hovering at about 13,000 units, and yet we are still being told the exact same thing about the need for rental units now. Well, not the investor part, but that we are in a housing crisis and we need all these rentals in towers, and we need them desperately! Mostly small, expensive rentals, much like all those condominiums sitting empty. We need them badly because… (rinse and repeat). Sigh.

Watch as these towers start to come online with rents as high as the density bonuses allowed the height of the buildings to go. We are already seeing this play out with tiny studio units renting for over $2,100 and small one-bedroom units for over $2,600 per month.

Unsold condominium homes within Greater Vancouver Realtors’ jurisdiction. (Steve Saretsky/Altus)

Some floor plan and monthly rent examples found at the newly built The Raven rental housing building at 3709 West Broadway, Vancouver. (Westbank)

These rental units will sit empty, and rents will not moderate because the construction financing model demands that the developer achieve the planned returns or they will get their financing pulled (Or, as in the case of Senakw, the partner developer runs for the hills as Westbank recently did, selling their stake). So they wait, and they offer a couple of months of free rent or some other incentives (Like ice cream. One developer actually offered free ice cream for potential tenants).

It’s great that tenants are getting better deals, but is it really as simple as that? Of course not.

So many of those rezonings we have seen in the Broadway Plan, the ones threatening people with eviction and major disruption to their lives, will not even break ground.

The owners will look over at those buildings like at the corner of West Broadway and Granville Street and at Senakw, and they will shudder.

“If they can’t fill those units, how will we?” They will go to the bank to discuss financing, and the bank will say the same.

“How do you expect to achieve the returns in your business plan when these places have units sitting empty?” And so, developments just stop being built. Is that really what the Abundant Housing Vancouver crew want? I doubt it, but this is what we are seeing play out.

And worse than that, sometimes the older walk ups will see evictions and demolition, and nothing else. We will end up with the loss of the existing housing and an empty lot. Maybe it becomes a dog park or public garden to avoid tax, or it just sits empty for years.

This is what is happening in our city, and our present City Council is all in. For some reason, City Council does not see the writing on the wall. They are so headstrong on maintaining the “housing approved” count even though these approvals do not lead to actual housing construction. They don’t understand that addressing our housing needs requires a refreshed approach.

Planning used to mean true public input and true respect for neighbourhoods, something which is antithetical to the mass rezoning going on now. Of course, it is more efficient to make the same rules for the entire city, but most of us value the diversity and character of each neighbourhood. That does not mean that neighbourhoods should not grow and welcome new residents, quite the opposite. It just means that we strengthen the very values which make this city so attractive and desirable.

True urbanism means eyes on the street and planning for amenities like schools, parks, community centres, and the kind of amenities many of us take for granted in our communities.

We need to rethink the way this city is being developed to stop repeating the same mistakes we are seeing play out right before our eyes, and a group of some of the most experienced ex-city planners, architects, educators, and academics have been working on just that. They have penned an open letter asking for a rethink called “Housing Reset.” The main tenet of the letter is that Vancouver’s housing strategy must deliver affordability — not just more supply, and that the existing affordable housing should be protected, not demolished. In essence, it is really a simple and logical concept, but there is also a lot more to it than that. You can read the whole letter here.

I hope that the penny will drop with politicians and they might realize that doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results is… Well, you know.

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