The Green Party of Vancouver believes in a housing policy that puts the people who live here first.

We believe that “affordable housing” should be affordable to the average person living in Vancouver. Right now, what the City defines as “affordable” is often only truly affordable for people making well above average incomes.

In order to increase the supply of housing that Vancouverites can truly afford, we need a new, fairer deal for housing. We believe that the public should get a fair share of the benefits from new development. For this to happen, the City and the people of Vancouver need and deserve to know how developers are profiting from new developments so that we can grow the affordable housing stock in a fair, win-win partnership.

Your Green City Councillors will work to:

• Require new housing developments to include a larger number of units that are affordable to low-income people. Many other cities ask and receive more from real estate developers, and have more affordable housing as a result.

• Provide incentives such as tax breaks to those who build truly affordable rental housing, and protect our existing rental housing.

• Use City-owned land and the City’s potential to raise money at low interest to build public, affordable housing in cooperation with real estate developers.

• Make changes to our building codes and zoning bylaws to make it easier for developers to build “missing middle” forms of affordable housing, such as townhouses, perimeter housing, rowhouses, and low-rise apartments. Ensure that there is real consultation with communities as these changes are being made.

• Allow more than one secondary suite to be legally added to houses. This would encourage property owners to house more people more affordably, rather than tear down existing houses and replace them with much more expensive ones.

• Build more modular container housing and other forms of temporary housing to help the homeless off the streets and into safe, dignified housing.

• Work with the new Green-supported NDP provincial government and the federal government to tackle speculation by changing how land is valued, taxed, and how much global money is allowed to flow into Vancouver’s overheated property market. Also work with the provincial and federal governments to build more public, truly affordable housing for low-income Vancouverites.