While the Affordability Index hasn’t moved much in the past year, that is cold comfort for Kate Stewart and her husband Glen, who have been looking since May for a single-family house to buy in North Vancouver. What has made it particularly frustrating for Stewart is the difficulty in finding something acceptable to buy with the financial resources of not one but two couples in their early 30s. She and Glen have joined up with another couple to buy a single-family house. “My husband and I have sold our condo and we are trying to purchase a home, but it is quite expensive to do so in this area,” said Stewart, who is on the communications staff at BlueShore Financial. “So we talked it over and decided to enter into a tenancy-in-common situation with a couple of our good friends.” After researching the ins and outs of such an unusual arrangement and getting financial and legal advice, they decided to go ahead with their friends, Austyn Bartel and Neil MacKinnon. Under the contract, Kate and Glen will take the larger main floor of any house they buy together while Austyn and Neil will take the lower floor. The problem is that even with four people with full-time incomes, they have only been able to put in an offer on a fixer-upper in Lynn Valley for $798,000 just this week. Their conditional offer and a five-per-cent down payment still leaves them with a giant-sized mortgage. Most young people don’t go to the same lengths as Kate and Glen to get into the housing market, but they all face their share of challenges in finding something affordable to buy in Metro Vancouver. • Housing experts offer a several solutions including becoming more creative in the way that home purchases are financed, allowing greater density, offering more diverse housing types and revamping what they consider an outdated municipal approval system. One veteran housing market adviser suggests that young people dramatically rethink their expectations in housing and even consider abandoning home ownership entirely. Vancity Credit Union — which has a long history of financial innovations including being the first financial institution in Canada to lend to women without a male co-signer, offer an open mortgage, and provide daily interest accounts — has been progressive in providing creative financing options for first-time buyers. Ryan McKinley, Vancity’s senior mortgage development manager, says first-time buyers face two major obstacles — coming up with the large down payments required and then making hefty monthly payments. Vancity has recently offered a mortgage where it kicks in half of the minimum down payment of five per cent. It has also developed a mortgage product that accommodates different housing partners by offering mixed terms, including arrangements that allow parents to invest in their children’s housing rather than just giving them a cash gift. But prudence dictates that all financial institutions in Canada operate within certain debt guidelines, he said. It does no one a favour to loan people money that can’t be paid back, as the subprime mortgage debacle in the United States amply demonstrated.

Unlike some other financial institutions, Vancity will consider ideas such as mortgage helpers (rental suites within single-family homes) or financing buyers moving into a basement suite of a house they’ve bought so they can rent the main level. “Our principal goal when qualifying someone for a mortgage is that they maintain affordability now and in the future. There is no point in putting people in a position that is not sustainable for them.” • For Tsur Somerville, associate professor at University of B.C.’s Centre for Urban Economics and Real Estate, the answer is simple: “My proposed solution to affordability is to chop down the mountains to fill in the water,” he says in jest. But he notes that the water and the mountains that make Vancouver a desirable place to live contribute to its unaffordable housing prices. “The fundamental problem is we don’t have a lot of land and a lot of people want to be here,” he said. “It’s not reasonable to expect the same type of house to be as affordable here as it is in places that are less attractive.” Somerville says that for the past eight or nine years, the population pressure has come almost entirely from international immigration rather than in-migration from other parts of Canada. Given that isn’t likely to change, Vancouverities are faced with creating greater density on an increasingly constrained supply of land. “You can’t have more affordable housing and keep things exactly the way they are. If we are talking about affordability overall, then we are talking more housing units per square metre of land. But density doesn’t have to mean we have 40-storey towers. If you turn everybody’s back yard into a new house, that doubles the density but it doesn’t double height.” Ultimately, said Somerville, Vancouverites partly hold the solution in their own hands. “When it comes to affordability, the enemy is us,” he said. “This will not solved until we are collectively willing to accept change in our neighbourhoods to allow people to have more affordable shelter options.” Meg Holden, a Simon Fraser University associate professor of urban studies and geography, says Vancouverites who want affordable housing have to make some choices. “There is this sense that healthy families need a single-family home in order to develop as a family and meet their needs for quality of life,” she said. “And this conflicts with wanting a high quality of life and a high level of infrastructure and amenities that we expect in our region but also wanting housing to be cheap. The two just don’t go together. “We could have cheap housing, but it would mean paving over the Agricultural Land, for example, or mean not being able to fund an effective public transportation system. It’s changing the calculation that we are making.” Holden is working on a study of approval processes for housing called Getting to Groundbreaking which she undertook in partnership with the Greater Vancouver Homebuilders Association. It is to be released next month. The study looks at the costs, the charge structures, the processes and policies that go into approving housing development applications in municipalities throughout Metro Vancouver.

Michael Geller, an architect, real estate consultant and developer, says there are a number of things we can do — and have done — to make housing more affordable. “One of the first things we are doing is reducing parking requirements, the cost of which can approach 25 per cent of each unit. While this may seem an unusual thing to talk about when you are dealing with multi-family housing, especially smaller, more-affordable units, the cost of a parking space can approach 20 to 25 per cent of the cost of the unit. If you can either not provide parking or provide significant parking reductions, that can go a long way toward making housing more affordable,” he said. If someone doesn’t own a car, they have more disposable income to put toward housing, he added. His advice to any young people who want to own a home: Buy in a location where you don’t need a car. Geller, whose career also includes working for the federal housing agency Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., says Vancouver would also benefit from better-designed smaller homes. While the focus has been on smaller apartments and “micro-suites,” he said, Vancouver also needs to be building smaller single-family houses and townhouses. “Many people of my generation grew up in three-bedroom houses that were 864 sq. ft with one bathroom. That type of house is not being built anywhere in Metro Vancouver. Why aren’t we building homes, smaller bungalows, smaller detached houses and smaller townhouses and stacked townhouses on smaller lots?” “There are many international precedents for this. When you speak to people from Hong Kong and other parts of Asia, they often will talk about the fact that their homes are much smaller because they eat in restaurants and they entertain in restaurants. They don’t entertain at home. That has not been the North American tradition, but that is changing.” Part of the problem is systemic, he said, pointing out that municipal development charges discourage developers from building smaller homes by charging on the basis of each housing unit basis rather than on square footage. “If you are going to pay $22,000 per unit, it’s a bit more palatable to average that out over a 2,200 square foot than over a 1,000-square-foot home. It may seem like a small thing, but similarly when you look at the hookup charges for sewer or water, all of these things cost the same whether you build a small home or a large home. “In the end, builders are not unlike consumers buying toothpaste. When the large tube is only 50 cents more than a tube half its size, you buy the large tube.” • Geller says Vancouver should also focus on “in-between” forms of housing. “Instead of putting that 2,400-sq.-ft house on a detached lot, why not divide it in half and have two duplex units? We can go one step further and add a coach house in the rear. But rather than simply making that coach house a rental unit, allow that coach house to be sold as well. “