VANCOUVER — Brandon Yan, a prospective city council candidate for the left-wing OneCity Vancouver party, has been retweeting a slogan lately: From Boundary to Belmont.

The slogan refers to all the places the party thinks apartment buildings should be allowed to be built.

“The history of zoning is racist and classist,” said the 31-year old Yan, who works for the non-profit Out in Schools and is seeking a OneCity nomination this June. “(Single family zoning) excludes lower income people — the price of admission can be $3 million.”

Scott de Lange Boom is fond of the Twitter essay. In one, he opines, “A Vancouver for everyone needs a more equitable development plan that doesn’t let wealthy neighbourhoods push all the housing into poor ones.”

The 28-year-old engineer is hoping to run for city council for the Non-Partisan Association, traditionally the centre-right party that derives much of its support from homeowners on the Westside and southeast of the city.

Both are arguing for a radical change to what kind of development is allowed in a wide swath of Vancouver. Currently, around 80 per cent of the city’s land base is reserved for single family homes. A change made in 2011 allows all single family homes to include a basement suite and a laneway house, but apartment buildings and townhouses are still not allowed in most single family zones.

While single family neighbourhoods include basement suites and laneway houses, Yan argued that purpose-built rental buildings provide much more security to renters because it’s not as easy for landlords to evict tenants from purpose-built rental units.

While academics have argued that single-family zoning is left over from a time when governments were concerned with excluding certain ethnic groups or low-income neighbourhoods, until just a few months ago it’s a position that would have been totally off-limits for politicians.

It’s a “dramatic call for a fundamental change to the scale and character of the traditional Vancouver community,” said Gordon Price, a former Vancouver city councillor with the NPA. “It is profound.”

Price traces the change to the October byelection, which the NPA’s Hector Bremner won after calling for more “missing middle” housing throughout Vancouver’s neighbourhoods. Independent Jean Swanson, who called for a progressive “mansion tax” and a rent freeze, came in second, while Vision Vancouver, the centre-left party that has held power for a decade, finished a distant fifth.

It’s no coincidence that the call for change is coming from younger people, who no longer see any chance that they could join the ranks of single family homeowners, Price said.

“It’s a generation now that realizes: that sense of expectation that we had, we’ve been dealt out of this. And it almost happened overnight,” Price said.

Turning points include a massive price spike starting in 2015 that pushed home prices into the multi-millions, and census data published in 2017 that showed that the city’s Westside neighbourhoods had lost population over the past 10 years.

OneCity has adopted the call for more density as part of its official platform, but wants to limit the development to rental buildings and non-profit housing.

Meanwhile, NPA hopeful de Lange Boom decided to run for office after getting involved with Abundant Housing, a group that advocates for more density. There’s a lot of excitement within the NPA about rezoning single family neighbourhoods, he said, but whether the party will adopt the density push as part of its platform is yet to be seen.

In Vancouver, homeowners have become accustomed to assuming that prices can go in only one direction. But that could change if a lot more land was freed up for apartment buildings, easing a current supply restriction that is driving development to the downtown core, where high-density building is allowed, said Price.

That could counter fears that rezoning would lead to a massive land value rise, but it could also be a rude awakening to homeowners who expect their asset to steadily increase in value.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“It will be disruptive and there will be unexpected consequences,” Price warned.

“Baby boomers especially expected to live in single family house. Now you have politicians coming in and saying in some fundamental way we want to change that.”

But de Lange Boom and Yan said they’re hearing the call for change from older generations as well, who are concerned their children can no longer live in Vancouver.

Jen St. Denis is a general assignment reporter based in Vancouver. Follow her on Twitter: @jenstden

Read more about: