Article content continued

But in Vancouver, he said, “the same conditions are not driving the housing affordability crisis.”

“In fact, we’ve actually been creating a large supply of housing as opposed to San Francisco, for the past decade or more, it’s just that supply has been targeted at the high-end and for investors, and leaving out many of the folks that live here in Vancouver and want to work and raise families,” said Kelley, who was appointed as Vancouver’s top planner in August 2016.

“In fact,” Kelley continued in a statement breaking from the real estate industry’s reigning orthodoxy, Vancouver has “produced more than our population growth would demand on its own.”

Adding housing supply alone won’t improve affordability, he said, in a city with a “very extreme level of speculative investment in real estate, primarily in high-end condominiums.”

The new housing strategy raises the idea of exploring demand-side solutions with senior governments, including restricting foreign ownership of property.

Vancouver, Kelley said, has been hit by “a perfect storm.”

Outside council chambers, Kelley told Postmedia that Vancouver’s housing market has been struck by a combination of low interest rates, favourable federal tax policies, and “the ease of moving capital around, whether that’s locally or internationally — and a lot of it is international in Vancouver’s case.”

“Those forces combined and have escalated to the point where we need a different set of controls on the demand side that we’ve never had,” Kelley said. “I think there has not been enough focus on the demand side. And I don’t blame that on Vancouver, I think in most cities that’s been the case.”