Vancouver plan to build 72,000 new homes — and maybe restrict foreign owners — approved

Vancouver council has approved a plan to build 72,000 new homes in a bid to see the “right supply of housing” built around the city.

What’s more, the strategy approved on Wednesday night, could possibly restrict property ownership by “non-permanent residents.”

The strategy passed at council with only NPA Coun. Melissa De Genova and Hector Bremner voting against it.

Coverage of Vancouver housing affordability on Globalnews.ca:

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The plan, Housing Vancouver, is a 10-year strategy that carries a series of actions aimed at building affordable housing, cutting down on speculation and providing more options for renters.

It calls for over 47,000 of the 72,000 new homes to serve as rental housing.

Among those, the city wants 20,000 to serve as purpose-built market rentals, 11,900 of them to be condos that can be rented out, and 12,000 to serve as social and supportive housing.

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As part of the strategy, the city is looking to build denser forms of housing in traditionally affluent areas such as Kerrisdale, Dunbar and Arbutus Ridge, which currently have lots taken up by single-family homes.

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Areas such as these have seen their populations drop by as much as 6.9 per cent since 2011.

READ MORE: Vision Vancouver says it heard people ‘loud and clear’ on housing, but some are skeptical

But the strategy also contains various measures to “limit the commodification of housing and land for speculative investment.”

To do this, the city plans on investigating what Australia and New Zealand have done to limit new home sales and resales to local buyers.

The move represents a change in thinking for Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson who, in a 2015 interview with Metro News, said the issue in Vancouver was empty homes, and not foreign ownership.

“The city’s primary concern is around empty homes and market speculation skewing the prices,” he told the paper. “Foreign ownership is a separate issue, that’s not something that should be a big factor here.”

In that same year, Vancouver planner Andy Yan carried out a study looking at expensive homes on Vancouver’s west side. As part of that study, Yan looked at land titles searching for non-anglicized Chinese names in order to determine whether the properties were foreign-owned.

His study showed that affluent homes were being bought by people who listed their jobs as homemakers or students, and that a number of them had Chinese names attached to them.

At the time, Robertson said, “this is a public policy issue, not a race issue.”

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Last month, New Zealand banned non-residents from buying existing homes in an effort to calm housing prices.

Meanwhile, in Australia, non-resident foreign persons generally need to apply to the government before they can buy any residential property in the country.

They’re also not allowed to buy existing dwellings as homes to be used as holiday properties or to rent them out.