When I went to speak at Vancouver Council in support of the rental apartments at Broadway and Commercial, I decided to do something a bit different: I sang a song!
I flubbed the performance a bit so I recorded it again at home the next day:
So why did I do this?
The main reason, of course, is that I strongly supported these homes. They’re exactly what Vancouver needs:
- We have a huge shortage of housing, especially rental housing. Vancouver’s vacancy rate has chronically hovered around 1%, but we need at least 3% for a healthy rental market. A low vacancy rate gives all the power to landlords and forces tenants to compete with each other. This proposal includes over 1000 rental homes in a city and neighbourhood that desperately needs them, and housing is good!!!
- These homes are highly transit-oriented. They’re right by the Broadway-Commercial Station, which is already a major transit station and (once the Skytrain extension is complete) will be one of the major transit hubs in the entire country. Building homes here is a no-brainer.
- This project has zero displacement of existing renters. Right now it’s mostly just a parking lot for the Safeway on the site.
So, yeah: a thousand rental homes, in a city with a severe housing shortage, by a Skytrain station, with zero displacement? FANTASTIC. I support medium density housing throughout the city, which would take a lot of the pressure off to build towers in the few sites where we do allow new housing. But there are some places where taller towers make sense, and this location is a perfect example. Heck, they’re building 60-80 (!) storey towers in Surrey and Burnaby. This proposal at Broadway and Commercial is incredibly central. It is just fundamentally irrational that we’re building taller in the suburbs than we are in the core of the city.
So why a song? Well, the well-organized opponents made the mistake of giving this proposal an awesome name: MEGATOWERS. I just had to have a little bit of fun with it.
But I also wanted to highlight the absurdity of the whole public hearing process. Public hearings are highly unrepresentative, and for decades, NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard–people opposed to change in their neighbourhoods) have dominated them. Now, thanks to the YIMBY movement, that’s changing, and more people are showing up to say yes to housing. That’s great, and I’m proud to be a part of that movement, but there’s still an asymmetry: people opposed to change have a strong incentive to participate and say NO, while the people who will one day live in the new homes don’t even know they’ll live there one day and so don’t have a strong incentive to show up and say YES.
It’s just fundamentally silly that we have a housing system that requires people to show up and say, “Yes, there should be enough housing for everyone.” So we end up with public hearings that are highly unrepresentative and incredibly wasteful–we assemble the mayor, council, senior planning staff, and a bunch of other people to approve individual apartment buildings. No wonder we have a housing shortage!
So, yeah. If council and planners want a song and dance just to get some homes built in Vancouver, I figured I’d give ’em a song.
That led to the Happy Megatowers Polka, which is sung to the tune of the Happy Wanderer. I’m glad the rental homes here got approved, but we need real change in this city. Housing is good and it shouldn’t take a song and dance to get them built.
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