Housing advocates call for density in wealthy neighbourhoods
Wanyee Li
Metro
September 7, 2017
Looking up at some of the city’s largest mansions in Point Grey, Vancouver resident Daniel Oleksiuk, can’t help but think of the potential for affordable housing in the neighbourhood – if only the city would re-zone the area for higher density.
He will lead a walking tour on the slopes up from Spanish Banks with Abundant Housing Vancouver on Sunday in an effort to highlight how zoning can create neighbourhoods only accessible to the very wealthy.
Mayor Robertson pitches backyard-home policy to increase low-cost housing
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But the new policy, aimed at giving owners incentives to preserve older houses and creating new housing by allowing additional rental or stratified units on their property, is one that many critics fear would not do much to provide real relief.
“This just doesn’t go far enough,” said Adrian Crook, a tech entrepreneur who is involved with a volunteer advocacy group called Abundant Housing Vancouver. It is pushing for more inexpensive housing.
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Renters group seeks abundance of housing options in Vancouver
Jessica Kerr
Vancouver Courier
July 6, 2017
Discussing the state of rental housing in the city has become a regular pastime for many Vancouverites, but one group has decided to take that discussion to the people who have the power to do something about it.
Abundant Housing Vancouver started a little more than a year ago. Founding member Brendan Dawe said it all began with several people, mostly renters, commiserating over the lack of affordable rental units in the city. They decided, however, that just talking amongst themselves wasn’t going to do much to change things.
Supply the answer to Vancouver's housing crisis
Frank O'Brien
Western Investor
April 24, 2017
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Based on Vancouver’s current assessed values, the 1% tax would average about $16,000 for a vacant detached house and $6,000 for a vacant condominium.
“I like the principal of it but I think owners will find a way around it,” said Brendan Dawe, a spokesman for Abundant Housing Vancouver, a year-old tenant advocacy group pushing for more rental housing to be built. Dawe believes the tax will be expensive to administer and difficult to enforce.
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Housing advocates push for 94-unit building on Vancouver's West Side
Liam Britten
CBC News
April 3, 2017
A Vancouver housing advocate is speaking up for a proposed six-floor building with 94 secured market rental units at the corner of Alma and Broadway.
Daniel Oleksiuk, a lawyer and advocate with Abundant Housing Vancouver, says the project could add some badly needed rental housing in Vancouver's west side.
"A lot of those neighbourhoods out there, Point Grey, Kerrisdale, Dunbar, are actually losing population and most of the housing out there is single family homes that cost anywhere from $3 million to $50 million," he told On The Coast guest host Gloria Macarenko.
American housing activist looks to shake up Vancouver audience
Kent Spencer
Vancouver Sun
March 27, 2017
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Trauss’ sentiments find a like-minded individual in Daniel Oleksiuk, a 32-year-old lawyer who co-founded Abundant Housing Vancouver last summer after grousing about rental shortages to friends. He believes it is important to speak to city hall.
“People can’t afford to own a house in Vancouver — West Side properties are priced at $3 million, and very little rental housing is available,” Oleksiuk said.
His solution is to open up single family neighbourhoods for high density development by permitting four-to-six storey apartment buildings.
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Heritage rules could drive up the price of Vancouver homes
Abundant Housing Vancouver is featured in a segment on the topic of the Character Home Zoning Review.
Kerrisdale church's condo tower plan draws cricitism, support
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Brendan Dawe of Abundant Housing says wealthier neighbourhoods have been more protected from densification than other parts of the city, citing the rapid densification in Chinatown versus a proposed character-home zoning plan for the city’s west side that would preserve the area’s single-family character homes, but limit development.
He said adding density in those neighbourhoods would make it more affordable for people who otherwise couldn’t afford to live in pricier parts of the city.
“The west side of Vancouver is not just valuable because it’s affluent,” said Dawe. “It has a lot of access to jobs, education and transit, and there’s a lot of value to be unlocked for many people in Vancouver as opposed to the more exclusionary single-family homes.”
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Vancouver Real Estate Today
The Dunbar Ryerson United Church development proposal in Kerrisdale is discussed.
'Feeling squeezed out': Will a move to save Vancouver's housing past compromise its future?
"Are up to 12,000 pre-1940 homes — an immense swath of the city's housing supply — worth preserving at the expense of a younger generation of people who feel they'll never be able to afford them?"
"There's a whole lot of land in this town, but most of it is zoned for low-density family homes," said Brendan Dawe of Abundant Housing Vancouver, a group of housing activists who've been coming to council meetings to push back against the dominance of single-family homes in Vancouver zoning rules."
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Evenings with Kirk Lapointe - Housing Panel
January 25, 2017
Abundant Housing Vancouver's open letter to the City of Vancouver regarding the Character Home Zoning Review is discussed.
Citizen activist groups blossom amidst Vancouver’s housing crisis
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Mr. Crook believes the activism of Abundant Housing has helped convince municipal councils to approve projects that were controversial. The group does walking tours around neighbourhoods, and speaks at city hall in support of projects.
“We try to raise awareness of issues that have got us here – mostly the zoning issue – and if we continue with this broad single-family zoning, and these spot rezoning hearings, we are going to constantly run into same battles,” says Mr. Crook.
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CBC Vancouver Evening News
Abundant Housing Vancouver's open letter to the City of Vancouver regarding the Character Home Zoning Review is discussed.
Efforts to protect old homes could worsen affordability crisis: activists
An open letter signed by 25 local academics and activists calls on Vancouver city council to rethink their overhaul of zoning bylaws.
The Character Home Zoning Review aims to keep homes built before 1940 from being demolished while ensuring new buildings fit in with their existing neighbourhoods.
But Abundant Housing Vancouver Daniel Oleksiuk, one of the letter’s signatories, argues the proposed rules would limit the amount of new living space available, and make housing in the city even harder to afford.
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Densifying Vancouver housing for the young generation
When 32-year-old Vancouverite Daniel Oleksiuk contemplates his future in the city, he sees a housing landscape that doesn’t bode well for his generation.
Oleksiuk, a lawyer, works downtown and currently rents a one-bedroom apartment in Mount Pleasant but sees no future in single-family houses. It’s a type of housing that is out of reach for most young people and yet 80 per cent of the city is zoned for exactly that.
“We’re either going to have to leave or we’re going to have to build housing of the type that makes sense for us,” said Oleksiuk, who also sits on the city’s Renters Advisory Committee...
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Advocates want developments instead of single-family houses in Vancouver
The trio of young men hanging out in the murkily lit lobby at Vancouver City Hall on this warm July evening seemed displaced at first from their natural habitat, a craft-beer pub or nouveau-ramen restaurant.
But the three have forsaken other activities for a couple of hours to participate in a show of support for new rental and condo projects.
“This building will give 109 households the same opportunities I’ve had,” 29-year-old Reilly Wood said when he got his chance to address city councillors, who were facing a series of public hearings about new projects that Tuesday...
The Pro-Growth YIMBY Movement Is Growing
In 2013, a couple of years after Sonja Trauss moved to the Bay Area (when, despite the recession, looking for an apartment often already meant fighting with 20 other people at open houses), she started showing up at planning commission hearings in San Francisco. Her message was simple: The city needs to build more housing. Whatever project was in front of the commission, it should be approved.
"I just started getting other people to come with me, and we would testify about anything," she says. "We'd just sit there all afternoon and be like, 'We like this one, too.' It was so novel, it was weird, to have strangers from around the city—or West Oakland—come and represent the future renters. I got a really good response right away."
Housing unaffordability and neighbourhood opposition drives Vancouver's YIMBYs to support more density
A new label is popping up in conversations about Vancouver real estate: YIMBY, or “yes in my back yard”.
“It’s a reaction to unaffordable housing prices,” Karen Sawatzky told the Straight. “It’s also in response to neighbourhood groups that are mostly made up of homeowners—that’s my perception—taking a stance against the development of rental buildings and multifamily buildings.”
Those groups would be NIMBYs in the dichotomous vocabulary that’s emerging from these debates. In contrast, YIMBYs support developments that add to the city’s housing supply...
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