Payam Javan: Vancouver City Council has voted to reject a plan that would have established a new, city-owned for-profit development company dedicated to building rental housing. The ambitious proposal sought to utilize six city-owned sites to produce approximately 4,000 new homes, aiming to inject much-needed supply into Vancouver’s notoriously unaffordable housing market. This significant decision represents a setback for a novel approach to tackling the housing crisis and underscores deep ideological divisions within the municipal government regarding the role of public and private sectors in development.
Proponents of the plan argued that a city-controlled corporation could fast-track construction, bypass typical bureaucratic delays, and ensure that a portion of the profits would be reinvested back into community services or affordable housing initiatives. By operating on a for-profit basis, the entity was intended to be financially self-sustaining, generating income while simultaneously increasing housing supply—a strategy viewed by some as a pragmatic middle ground between fully public and fully private housing models.
From a free-market perspective, the Council’s rejection is a missed opportunity to leverage public assets in a dynamic, capital-generating manner. While direct government involvement in for-profit ventures is often inefficient, the central issue in Vancouver is the crippling slowness of the existing permitting and approval process. A dedicated, commercially-driven municipal entity, insulated from political maneuvering, could have served as a model to cut through red tape and demonstrate how quickly housing can be built when bureaucratic barriers are removed, effectively spurring the private sector to follow suit.
Opponents of the plan, however, expressed deep reservations, fearing that a city-run for-profit developer would compete unfairly with the private sector, or that the focus on profit would dilute the city’s core mission of building truly affordable and non-market housing. They successfully argued that public land should be reserved exclusively for deeply subsidized social and co-op housing, a strategy that often results in lower output but adheres to a stricter social mandate.
The outcome of this vote leaves Vancouver’s severe housing affordability crisis largely unaddressed by a new, large-scale, innovative initiative. The rejection of a self-financing, supply-boosting strategy means the city will continue to rely heavily on its existing slow and expensive system. If Vancouver is serious about increasing housing stock for the middle class, it must stop rejecting market-oriented solutions and instead focus its regulatory efforts on eliminating the excessive costs and delays that prevent private developers from bringing thousands of units to market efficiently.
