Vancouver’s Rental 100 Program in Danger

Vancouver’s city council, its mayor, and virtually every public servant in the city spend most of their time either thinking about or getting flak about housing prices. One of the most impactful programs they’ve come up with to address the crisis is called Rental 100 – as in, 100% rentals. 

An outgrowth of the “Short Term Incentives for Rental”, or STIR, program that was created in June 2009, the Rental 100 program provides incentives to developers for building purpose-built rental projects, where every unit is guaranteed to be a rental for 60 years or the life of the building, whichever is longer.

Over the past ten years, 8,680 purpose-built rental units have been approved by the city. Half of those were approved under Rental 100 or STIR. These programs have created thousands of new rental homes that are much less expensive than renting privately-owned condos. 

The incentives are meant to help the city reach its goal of created 20,000 new units of market rental housing by 2027. Eligible incentives include waivers of development cost levies, or DCLs; parking requirement reductions; relaxation of unit size to 320 square feet; additional density beyond existing zoning requirements; and concurrent processing for projects requiring a rezoning. 

The city gets its right in its calculation that, even though the new units will be at market rate and thus unaffordable for the most vulnerable in the city, they will provide higher earning residents with more options, thus lowering the pressure on demand for lower priced units.

But some far-left city councilors are threatening to freeze or end the program altogether because the rents in the new buildings are way too high for median-income citizens to afford. 

It’s so easy to stoke outrage at developers and housing costs, and it’s made that much easier when the term ‘affordable’ is applied to the rents of these market-rate units. It’s certainly not affordable for median-income singles, making around $40,000, to pay $1,650 for a studio. 

But these units are not meant for median-income singles or families. These are meant mostly for well-established professionals who, even though they’re successful in their field, can still not afford to buy a home in Kits or the West End. They want to rent a unit in a well-managed, amenity-filled property with properly screened tenants in a desirable location. They’re prepared to pay market prices for that unit. And in a decade’s time, the rent on those long-term leases will be very competitive. 

To stop incentives for building these secure, stable, well-built purpose-built rental projects would be a grave mistake made by reactionary councilors who misuse the term ‘affordable’. To their credit, they recently approved a motion to change the terminology the city uses for “affordable housing”, which at least keeps their feet away from the fire. 

But as we’ve said repeatedly,the only way out of the housing crisis is to build more housing, especially more rentals. It really does drive prices down over the long run when you have the supply that meets the ever-increasing demand for rentals. Developers need the city’s assistance to meet this demand. This program is vital to that effort.