The Livable Blog

Right to the City: Rally for a National Housing Program

Come rally for a national housing program on Saturday, Feb 20th, Noon,
Vancouver Art Gallery.

Sponsored by the Impact on Community Coalition

http://iocc.ca/index.php

Bring a Homes Not Freeways or similar sign if you want to make the connection between the billions being spent on freeways and the lack of money available for affordable housing.

The Red Tent campaign is also holding a Friday night sleepover http://www.redtents.org/

The Olympic Tent Village also needs your ongoing support. Streams of Justice, the Downtown Eastside Women Centre Power of Women Group, and others successfully set up an
Olympic Homeless Tent Village at 58 West Hastings. 58 West Hastings is a lot owned by the condo developer Concord Pacific and was being used as a VANOC parking lot during the Olympics.

In case you were wondering why house prices are going up in Vancouver . . . you and I are now apparently the largest sub-prime lenders in the world. Now isn't that a nice reassuring thought!

Canada's sub-prime mortgage time bomb
By Murray Dobbin
October 22, 2009

What do the mid-recession housing boom and the Harper Conservatives’ rise in the polls have in common? Answer: the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s massive sub-prime mortgage scheme that is keeping up the appearance of an economic recovery.

Reading the newspapers these days you have to wonder whether Canada was on another planet when the global credit crisis hit. House prices have actually increased in some provinces and now there is a shortage of houses for sale in southern Ontario. Credit is flowing everywhere.

Ottawa: The biggest sub-prime lender in the world

But what few Canadians realize is that the housing market has avoided collapse (prices are down 32 per cent in the U.S.) because the Harper Conservatives directed the CMHC to change the mortgage rules to effectively make the Canadian government the biggest sub-prime lender in the world. What’s almost as alarming as this reckless policy is that no one in the financial media is talking about it, even though everyone knows the facts. I was alerted to the scandal by David Lepoidevin, a financial advisor with National Bank Financial, in a warning letter to his clients. (Blogger Jonathon Tonge has all the CMHC charts and graphs on his blog.)

The facts are that over 90 per cent of existing mortgages in Canada are “securitized” -- that’s the practice of pooling mortgages (or other assets) and then issuing new securities backed by the pool -- MBSs, or Mortgage Backed Securities. That’s what happened with the sub-prime mortgages in the U.S. which (because the whole pool was so diversified) received triple A ratings by the rating agencies. Losses around the world amounted to hundred of billions of dollars.

[snip]

If that sounds like sub-prime mortgages, it should. Sub prime is any loan below prime. If a bank refuses you a loan, and CMHC gives you one, the loan is sub-prime. As Lepoidevin says in his warning letter, “Every single U.S. lender specializing in sub-prime has gone bankrupt. The largest sub-prime lender in the world is now the Canadian government.”

[snip]

Full text at http://rabble.ca/news/2009/10/canadas-sub-prime-mortgage-time-bomb

A thought provoking article from the Vancouver Sun. It seems like some people have noticed that the Liberals demand that their TransLink appointees choose only Cadillac rapid transit technology, but fund it on a Hyundai budget.

(Note that a Cadillac is not necessarily better than a Hyundai for getting where you want to go, just much more expensive and polluting)

Photo - Canada Line Subway used huge amounts of steel and concrete resulting in high carbon emissions and costs

Transportation impacts affordable residency

Provincial and municipal government discord costs us all

By Bob Ransford, Special to The Sun September 22, 2009

One of the keys to making housing more affordable is transportation.

The cost of housing in communities with a robust range of transportation choices, especially with well-developed public transit systems, is generally lower.

You can concentrate more people in one area if they can move about efficiently without the need for roads and parking, which consume both land and the dollars to build them. Higher density means more efficient land use and a lower cost of housing on a per-home basis.

A second cost-saving comes from being able to avoid or decrease dependency on a car.

Owning and operating a car is an expensive undertaking.

Good transportation planning and good land-use planning go hand in hand. One can't be achieved without the other.

We are seeing the results of a clear disconnect between land-use planning and transportation planning in Metro Vancouver in the form of our high costs of housing.

In my last column, I talked about the less-than-impressive track record of the provincial government in walking the walk when it comes to all of its talk about wanting to lower the cost of housing and bringing home ownership within reach of our children. The government's failure to ensure that transportation planning and land-use planning are integrated in Metro Vancouver is another example of all talk and no action on the affordable housing front.

[snip]

Urban transportation planning has fared even worse under the Campbell Liberals.

They have washed their hands of playing a coordinating role in major public transit improvement projects. TransLink is on its own to both plan and fund transportation infrastructure in Metro Vancouver.

The Liberals created the Council of Mayors; its members are scared sleepless of the political ramifications of using their severely limited taxing power to raise adequate taxpayer dollars to fund the continued development and operation of an integrated urban transportation network in Metro Vancouver. As the local mayors bob and weave, avoiding the hard decisions, an unaccountable board made up of provincial appointees scrambles to keep the existing public transit system alive.

The premier wasn't afraid to grab headlines with an announcement a couple of years ago of an ambitious plan to expand public rapid transit when he was being roundly criticized for building expensive auto-dependent transportation infrastructure such as a new Port Mann Bridge, while at the same time portraying himself as the patron saint of sustainability.

That announcement, lacking most of the funding it required, now seems long forgotten while the premier and his colleagues continue to refuse to delegate a broader taxing authority to those on whom they have downloaded the responsibility for the expensive but necessary improvements to the public transit network.

Regional transportation commissioner Martin Crilley referred to this lack of provincial-regional coordination in his recent public report when he labelled the gulf that exists between provincial and regional transportation planning and financing "a hazard."

Meanwhile, the same provincial government that is one minute washing its hands of the problem and the next meddling in the issue up to its neck, continues to dictate the kind of technology that is deployed in building the transit network, pushing up the cost per kilometre of building much-needed rapid transit expansion projects.

Compare the cost of SkyTrain versus at-grade trams systems. The estimated costs of extending the Millennium SkyTrain line with a subway along Broadway toward the University of B.C. is about $233 million per kilometre. The costs for new at-grade tram technology chosen by cities such as Portland and Washington, D.C., is around $16 million per kilometre.

The Campbell Liberals chose the more costly SkyTrain technology for the development of the on-again, off-again planned Evergreen rapid transit line to serve Metro Vancouver's northeast sector. Going with this technology is a condition of securing the yet-to-be-committed provincial contribution to fund the project.

Commissioner Crilley pointed in his recent report to his concern about the lack of freedom on the part of TransLink to select "its own optimum rapid transit configuration."

It makes you wonder whether the provincial government even thinks about connecting the dots between the cost of housing and the disconnect between land use and transportation planning.

- - -

Bob Ransford is a public affairs consultant with CounterPoint Communications Inc. He is a former real estate developer who specializes in urban land use issues.
© Copyright (c)

http://www.calgaryherald.com/Transportation+impacts+affordable+residency/2020644/story.html

By Dan Ferguson - Surrey North Delta Leader

July 24, 2009

A small group of protesters managed to delay the start of work on a North Delta leg of the four-lane South Fraser Perimeter Road Thursday morning.

They interrupted the demolition of some houses to make way for the planned truck route that is part of the Gateway project that will speed the movement of containers to and from the Deltaport deep water terminal in Ladner.

The protesters said the highway will pave over 75 homes in North Delta's Sunbury neighbourhood alone.

Surrey resident Tom Jaugelis climbed up a backhoe to drape a sign that read "NO GATEWAY TO GLOBAL WARMING DON'T PAVE US."

He came down after Delta Police arrived.

Jaugelis said he was initially threatened with arrest, but the officers later told him there would be no further demolition work that day.

"So far, so good," Jaugelis said.

- with files from Evan Seal

dferguson@surreyleader.com

See Video at:
http://www.bclocalnews.com/surrey_area/surreyleader/news/51583097.html

Communities across Canada will benefit from better energy efficiency and improved environmental impact, thanks to a new initiative launched today by the Government of Canada. The new $4.2 million, EQuilibrium™ Communities Initiative will seek to improve community planning and develop healthy sustainable communities that are energy-efficient, economically viable and vibrant places to live.
http://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/en/corp/nero/nere/2009/2009-06-01-1200.cfm