 Great. Thank you for that. I'd like to introduce our topic today, rentable housing. It's a topic I'm sure that's interesting to everybody on the call today, obviously, or on the call, but it's also important to all of British Kongans, and in particular, there's 30% of our households, which are renter households in the province. And in urban communities, this is even higher. We see Vancouver with 52% of people renting, and in Victoria, 60%. And it's kind of a common trend across the province, urban areas, higher rental than the rural areas. In 2012, we see non-profit housing associations conducted a study, and I think their findings were quite interesting. They found that they predict the rental demand over the next 25 years to increase quite a bit by between 27 and 36%, depending on the variables there. But what was really interesting about the study was where they see the rental demand increasing, and that's with our aging society. They see really a lot of seniors moving out of single-family dwellings and into the rental housing market. And I think that raises a number of interesting issues for us. There's probably two seconds to get right away, and that what do we do with this large existing rental housing stock that we have, and how do we make that stock more accessible for people that are going to be needing it over the next 25 years? And the second question is more of a design question and build question for developers and communities that are encouraging new rental housing supply, and what needs to be done to that supply to make it really work for a new demographic of renters that are coming online. Obviously, you're on here because you care about rental housing, and many communities do as well. I think it's fair to say that in the housing policy branch, we have the opportunity to look at a lot of reports, plans, studies that are done by different municipalities, local governments, and other folks. And I would say probably the top three issues always focus on rental housing in every one of these studies or reports. And that's over the last decade. And I'd say probably in the last year or two, the studies that we've seen have really focused on rental housing as being the number one issue. And if I look at the kind of issues that really come up, once again, it's what do we do with this existing rental housing stock? A lot of people are looking at how to preserve that, but at the same time, how to invest new money and see that stock redeveloped. But also with the issue of how to keep those rents affordable to not displace people or long-term tenants that were in that housing and still provided at an affordable rate. I think the other issue really is how to build in this different rental housing market. We haven't seen a lot of construction in 20, 30 years of new, purpose-built rental housing. I think we're starting to see a little bit of that come back online. But the market really changed about 20, 30 years ago. And so now local governments are coming up with some really interesting, innovative solutions. The development community is really repeating the business models and how to make it work. So I'm really happy today that we have two different speakers that can provide their own unique perspectives on that. The first speaker will be providing a local government perspective. And I think we're talking about a whole range of tools and how they've worked and not worked in their community. And the second speaker is a developer who's going to talk about their real on-the-ground experience of doing both restoration of existing and the construction of new. So with that, I'd like to introduce our first speaker. She is the current Director of Development Services for the City of New Westminster. She oversees planning, building and business license and enforcement. And she has a long-standing interest in growth management, housing policy and sustainable development. Those who have been following Beth's career will know that she was also a senior planner at Metro Vancouver and the housing planner with the City of Burnaby. She also teaches a course in housing and community sustainability at the Simon Fraser University. And I'm sure for the planners in the room, many of you have had the opportunity to take this course if you've been to Simon Fraser University. And I know that Greg Steeves was talking about the course he took many years ago with Bev who encouraged him to get into planning and also into the field of housing. She holds a master's degree in urban planning from the University of British Columbia. So with that, I'd like to pass it over to Bev Greaves who's going to talk about New Westminster's secured market rental housing policy. Thank you so much. Can you hear me? Great. Hi everybody. And first I'd like to say that Greg was an excellent student and back in the day and with him was Leanne Gornette who very well might be with us today. So my two star students were doing great, great work. Thank you so much and I'm really pleased to present the local government perspective on this important issue. I think it's not just a girl where my slides are. I see them. Okay, just for a technical thing to find my one goes up, one goes down. I'll be familiar with the City of New Westminster because I know our audience might be across Canada today which is fantastic. It's located in the geographic centre of Metro Vancouver people. I think what's really interesting about the City of New Westminster is that it's the oldest municipality this side of the Great Lakes. I think some days some of us wish we still were the capital of the province of BC. But it's an interesting place. It's a small area but it has all the opportunities and challenges of the large city. Westminster has always been a supply of a secure and robust stock of rental housing. It's important for the social diversity of the city but also the economic health. I think as planners we all know how important it is to have a diverse housing stock in terms of tenure and type to meet the needs of people. But increasingly we're finding that a housing stock that meets the needs of employees, of a range of employees, is important to attract employers. We're at the point in our development where attracting really interesting employers and business opportunities is really at the top of our agenda. Why is rental housing important? I'm going to throw a few stats that you've got hopefully to give a picture of what we're like. Currently renter households represent 44% of the households in New Westminster and actually that's a bit of a decrease. It actually was closer to 50% not that long ago. Like all places in Metro Vancouver we have a persistently low vacancy rate. Right now it's 1.6% and it really, really has been in that range between 1 to 2% for the last 20 years. It hasn't changed much. As we all know renter households have a much lower income than owner households. Usually ranges about half. To meet the needs of renter households we have to actually take into account affordability. And through this I will give you some examples of how we are addressing the issue of affordability in the rental housing stock. Who is it serving? I think Roger about how rental housing is serving the needs of our aging population that not only do seniors find that they move into rental housing to be in locations that are more suitable for their own needs but sometimes they move into rental housing to release some equity in their households to pay for their healthcare costs as they get older. In the City of New Westminster we're increasingly finding that families are in need of rental housing particularly New Canadians. As a companion piece of work we're doing a family friendly housing policy and we did actually quite an extensive survey of the housing needs of families and rental housing came up as number one. It's quite amazing and that may be another webinar in the future. Another group and I think John's going to talk to this is the Millennials or the Young People. Millennials increasingly are looking to locations that are close to transit. Often they do not drive cars so they don't even have driver's licenses and they want to live in affordable housing or rental housing so that they can spend their money on things such as building their careers, accessing education. In the case of these three young men they chose to live in a shared accommodation and their challenge has been to find a secure three bedroom apartment that's close to transit. For those of you in the City of Burnaby they found that the right area is where they have ended up in three different apartments over there, their career and now their career as in their new business as young filmmakers into the City of New Westminster. I think this is probably true of all cities in the Metro Vancouver region but our rental housing inventory is aging. As you can see in the graph there's very few units that were built after 1970 and as I think John Malacca points out is after the 1970s there's been very few government programs or incentives to build rental housing. So the latest interest in rental housing is meant to help replace the stock as it ages and also I think some of this is through an economic climate that finally is setting the table for new rental housing stock can be built. I know that replacing the rental housing stock is important but what about the secondary rental housing market isn't that really filling the needs of the rental housing market and you know there's truth to that that there is a real role for rented condominiums and secondary suites which really comprise the secondary rental markets and that is acknowledged but we also know that these forms of housing have their challenges. We all know people that have been in rented condominiums where they find the owner is coming back in and they lose their housing and rental condominiums have an often an extra set of costs that are passed on to the renters that arise from things such as strategies so in many ways they're not as secure as what we call purpose built rental housing. The same with secondary suites. Secondary suites are an essential part of the rental housing market and particularly for people that want that ground orientation but again it likely does not provide the level of security that purpose built rental housing has. Looking at the issue of the pressures on our secured rental housing stock certainly it was considered one of the probably two most important policy issues in the city. And truck traffic by the way if you're wondering what the other one was. What the city did is it did quite a bit of research on the issue of market rental housing and developed a new strategy so the intent of this policy is to increase the supply of market rental housing and ensure the security of tenure over time so the key point is increasing the supply. Secondly the city looked at incentives to encourage the development of the rental housing stock and it was meant to encourage development by the private sector without senior government subsidy. So really what this policy tried to do is reduce the gap between what rental projects can pay for land and what strata projects can pay for land. Certainly since the 1970s there's good evidence that condominium projects were able to outbid land as compared to rental housing which made the development of rental housing very very difficult. So really the goal of this policy is to add to the inventory of rental housing in the long term. So our policy was adopted in May 2013 they were implemented. The first tool that we have is the use of density bonus things for rental housing. In our zoning bylaw we have under various multi-family zones we have two levels of density. One is the base density and second is the bonus density or the extra density and there's essentially two ways that one can get the extra density. One is to pay for it or second way to build secured market rental housing with no payment. So the goal of this policy is to give that extra benefit, that extra density for rental housing. The second is to reduce parking requirements and finally we provide what we call the half price building permit fees which is a small incentive but you know in our mind all of these things do add up to make a rental housing viable. Some of the other incentives are to improve the process of the development process for a rental housing. The city covers the cost of the legal document preparation, city servicing requirements, where it makes sense. With regards to the rental housing to the legal document preparation we worked really closely with our solicitor at Young Anderson and there's a solicitor named Jay Lancaster who has really seized this file and helped us develop I think now 10 housing agreements so that has been fantastic. So the three strategic directions in our policy are, first the retention of the existing rental housing stock, secondly the renewal of the rental housing stock and finally enhancements to the stock and I will go through all three of these and show real-life examples. The results today have actually been remarkable. The simple objective was to increase the supply of new rental housing stock and through construction and renovation to the existing stock to increase its life. There's been incredible interest and as of now we have over a thousand new units under construction in the last phases of the development approval process. Rental housing stock speaks to the affordability. What this council said is that we want to ensure that we hang on to that really important older rental housing stock as long as we can. So what this council has said to the development community is that generally if there is an existing rental housing building on the site that's not the area that redevelopment or rezoning is encouraged, that there's plenty of other sites in the city that can be developed without resulting in the demolition of an apartment building. So what we do is we steer developers to other sites that do not involve the demolition of rental housing. However in some cases due to the condition of the building that there may be demolition and in this case we look for an enhanced tenant relocation and replacement housing option. This may include actions beyond what's required in the rental tenancy or it may be replacing some of those units in the development. Luckily we've had very few examples of this. We have one right now that isn't related to the expansion of a school. Given the number of sites that we have to redevelop that do not involve the demolition of the rental housing stock, this policy has actually done quite well. The rationale behind this policy is that the most affordable housing is the stock that is already there. That's a quote from David Holchansky who is certainly my professor back in planning school. What council has strongly told the community is that we believe that the housing stock, the rental housing stock that they are now is the most affordable stock and it's up to the city to ensure that it stays available as long as possible. Quick direction is to renew that rental housing stock. What we want to do is increase investment in those existing buildings to increase the lifespan of that stock. We want to improve the operating cost of that housing wherever we can. Housing and local government often find situations where there's an old apartment building and maybe the basement, maybe the old lockers were converted illegally into a suite. Under this policy using our density bonus provision and what we're saying to the owners is rather than take that suite out, we're saying let's consider legalizing that suite. It has to be brought up to the building code standards and we do deal with the utility issues but we want to make sure that the density is available that that suite can be legalized and this actually has been used now quite a few times. The building code allows us to use alternative standards and in the situation I will show you the building inspector, the chief building inspector required that the new unit be sprinkled but he viewed that the improvement that the rest of the building could be as it was. Under this we eliminate any parking requirements for the new suite and we also give the lower price building permit. Through our community energy efficiency program we're also looking at these buildings as being amongst the first to receive benefit in terms of upgrades to the energy efficiency of the buildings so when the city does have a few grants and a few tools these are the buildings we want to focus on. The promise to real life example is an apartment building that's owned by Metro Vancouver Housing Corporation and they found themselves with half the basement being empty. It was essentially a storage room that had never been used so they approached the city and said look it we would like to put a suite, we'd like to put a family oriented suite in that spot. Now they did not have the density nor did they and they were actually under parked in this building. Through this policy we worked with Metro Vancouver and in this corner here in this site plan in the very corner you'll see a hatched area and in that hatch area they have provided or they have built a two bedroom suite and through the various tools it is a legal suite providing affordable housing for a family. There's two parts of this which I think are important and one of these tools can be used for non-profit housing as well as market housing and you know excuse me and secondly it is a small increase to the housing stock you know it's one unit but looking down the road we know there's many, there's hundreds of buildings in the city where this kind of action could be taken. There we are. Another example generously is the heritage revitalization agreement and one of the buildings is the Talford block which is just located outside the downtown and it was actually an old rooming house. So in this case we used the heritage revitalization agreement to allow 11 market rental units and they're all bachelor units and a two bedroom unit. Through the HRA the heritage revitalization agreement we actually can do variances to just about everything to the parking. So this project is now under construction and there's some drawings of what it looks like. There we are and there was a relaxation to parking as in no parking but it's located quite close to SkyTrain. So finally the third strategic direction is the enhancement to the secured rental housing stock and there's three categories that we developed. One is short term housing and the theory or the philosophy behind this is that the greater lengths of security the larger the number of incentives. So for buildings where they're guaranteed for minimum of 10 years and that are stratified they have to be held and managed by one entity and there's only a few incentives we use in this case and that's speeding up the processing of the rezoning and building permit application and we paid the legal fees for the housing agreement. We have one of these and it was done by Aragon in the Fort Royal area. The second example is the medium term rental housing stock. So in these cases the buildings are guaranteed for rental between 30 and 59 years. There's some flexibility on stratification meaning that the buildings may be stratified with covenants put on and again the units are managed by one entity. So in addition to the incentives we saw before in this case we consider a reduction for the required parking. Especially for those projects that are located on the frequent transit network are close to a SkyTrain station and I have an example of that. In the Fort Royal area the project you see here one of the buildings is a condominium building and the building on the left is a rental building and what was nice about this project which is guaranteed rental for 40 years is that the units are actually quite large so they're helping to meet the needs for our family friendly housing. Finally and this is a category where we're getting the most interest and the most traction. It's a long term rental housing stock. In this case the buildings are guaranteed rental for 60 years or the life of the building. There is restrictions on stratification and I'm going to go back to that point very shortly. It's really one of the lessons we've learned. It should be owned and managed by one entity. So in addition to the incentives that you saw previously in this case is where we offer the increase in density offered through a density bonus or if there is need for rezoning. There is a reduction to the building permit fees and there is an automatic reduction in required parking and payment in lieu of the payment in lieu policy. So in these cases the zoning bylaw itself has a reduction in the parking which means that the developer can come in and they know exactly what the reduction will be. It makes it actually quite simple and painless and that amendment to rezoning bylaw to reduce the parking was actually adopted a few months ago. And in this case we are more we give greater consideration to reducing the servicing requirements. Life examples. One is at 508 Agnes Street in or downtown and it's the Old Nates' Hall. This again is a heritage revitalization agreement. There is 151 units. They are not strata-titled and they are guaranteed rental for 60 years of the life of the building. There is reduced parking, reduced building permit fees and of course we pay for the housing agreement. This is what it looks like. The Will's Perkins architectural building This work is the building that I'm showing you here is the Old Nates' Hall. It's considered a very, very important heritage building in the city. And in this development they actually retained a fair chunk of that building. It wasn't just the facade, it was quite a bit more. And on the site they built the new rental housing. And this one is actually going for approval next Monday. So we're quite excited by it. It was quite well received in our downtown area. Another project is 900 Canarman Street. Some of you may know the Plaza 88 developments by the New West Sky train station. There's three towers there and them all. This is the fourth tower. This has actually been an interesting project and certainly without controversy. I have to say that. It's 396 units. Most of the units are quite small. 25% of the units, or sorry 50% of the units are 350 square feet. In this case they received benefits in terms of extra density, reduced parking requirements, reduced servicing requirements, the package. The debate on this was about the number of small units. And there we go. There's a picture of it. And I think John, when you look at this compared to the building you're actually, you gave me some ideas. Hey, next one. And this is the one that is developed along much better than the rest of the project. It's on 6th Street again in our downtown. And it's quite close to a Sky train station. 282 units. We provided reduced parking requirements, extra density, again city legal agreements. And it's not stratified and guaranteed for 60 years. And there's a picture of the building. As you can see that there are, there's actually townhouse development on the base and the tower above. So that's right on 6th Street, which is part of our shopping area in the downtown. This one also is going for final approval on Monday as well and the developer is quite keen to begin construction. So value of those incentives. So we've been playing around with that. And what I can tell you is in the City of New Westminster, we value the extra density in our downtown about $20 for square foot buildable. So building not unlike the one that I just showed you, that's about $2 million in density that would be provided at no cost. The building permit fee reduction is about $120,000. And the savings in parking is the most significant part of this. If we as a ballpark figure, if we figure that it costs about $25,000 per parking stall, in a case of 100 stalls, it's $2.5 million. So really the parking cost is one of the most significant benefits of this. Some of our lessons learned. That's some legal documents. In zoning, and many of them do because they do want to go higher. They want to break through that height requirement. This is what a typical process looks like. After going through lots and lots of consultation because after all it's New Westminster, zoning bylaws finally introduced. And as part of that introduction, we present for Council what we call principles for the housing agreement. And what these are are the basic principles that both the city and the developer have agreed to. A public hearing is held. After that, a housing agreement is considered by Council. And then after that is some housing agreement and the covenants are registered and the zoning is approved. Now, there's two kinds of covenants that tend to go with these. In the case of buildings that are stratified, they put on a no separate sales covenant. Meaning that the building is stratified and at some point there may be an interest in year 41 or year 51 to sell them individually. And at that point the covenant would come off that a no separate sales covenant essentially prevents the units from being sold separately. And this is actually one of our lessons which I'll come back to. By the way, is the no stratification covenant and in the cases of our long term rental housing what they say is that the building cannot be stratified. That it has to stay as a purpose built market rental housing development. And the good news we found is that most developers that want to do rental housing really want to do rental housing that they're willing to not stratify it and they move forward. And I have to say there's some simplicity to that. One of the lessons that we've learned from this and working with our friends at the land title office is the covenants are important tools but they're not strong tools and the concern is for example with the building that's rather titled with the no separate sales covenant that it really is up to the land title office to ensure that the building the units are not sold separately. And that's a lot of pressure, a lot of influence to give to the land title office. And with our discussions with the city of Vancouver I think many of us are not comfortable that that authority is passed on to really an agency where this really isn't their business. And because of that increasingly we're saying to developers we do want these buildings to not be stratified and we do want them to be secured for 60 years. And you know given the value of the incentives being offered it's been a reasonable request and the developers who want to do rental housing are quite happy to work with that. Certainly that was one of our lessons. We've had strong pressure to create small units and this actually has resulted in the creation of our family friendly housing policy. Now this is not to say that it's a great project comes in and it's in a location close to transit or sky train that we're not going to look at micro suite or that kind of project. We absolutely are and we welcome them especially because we're excited about those that are well designed. In this there has been some pressure to loosen some of our urban design criteria and you know we've made it very clear that the urban design is important, the public realm treatment is important. In some cases the rental housing was seen as a way to get support for marginal projects. And again when it comes to things such as the public realm you know the urban design these are still incredibly important. As I mentioned the increased density and the parking relaxations are the most important incentives and we also recognize that senior government involvement will be needed to enhance affordability of the new stock. And you know we know that in some cases that the residents are able to access some rent supplements through VC housing. The way the city looks at this is we're creating a rental housing stock for the next hundred years that yes it may not be as affordable as the existing stock on year 1 or year 5 but on year 10 or year 15 it will be. So we are taking a long term view in terms of affordability. Advice to anyone looking at this is to focus on buildings that are not strata titled. The incentives are generous, the units and one of the lessons we did learn working actually with people at the province is that it's really difficult to create a building where there's a mix of strata title and rental units. Especially if the rental units are held in one strata lot because it creates really awkward voting arrangements where a block of say 20 rental units has one vote where five strata title units have five votes. So you can see the dynamic there it's really challenging. And again I noted there's risk within those separate sales covenants for strata title projects. We're almost there. We received recognition from our peers and we were thrilled that we received the Silver Award from PIBC for this policy last year. That was a wonderful event. Please feel free to contact me if you want more information about our policy and some of the tools that we've been using. Thank you very much for that presentation Bev. And our rental market fits a little bit of city beginning and I know we're not going to be able to really talk a lot about this particular webinar but I think it's a good topic for a future webinar series. And I'm really grateful actually that you went into quite a bit of detail. I think the planning community out there really appreciates kind of more of a detailed analysis of how the tools are used and how they come together. At this point we'll just take a question or two. I have one from the city of Gibson here. Bev, this is about the budget process in your community. When you're dressing up the budget for the municipality, do you actually include the money required to discount fees and legal costs that you provide? Okay. In terms of the legal costs included in our budget under the legal costs which in our case is one group. The good news about the legal costs is that if you develop precedence, it's actually quite low. And my guess right now is the cost of doing the housing agreements is probably under $1000. It's really, really come down. So that's the good news. In terms of the other benefits is that the density bone at the increase in density is not in our minds for a gone revenue. That we don't put that part into our budget. So the only other cost that we have is the reduction in the building permit fees and we do take that into account in budgeting the revenue. You know, year ahead we have a pretty darn good gas foot projects are coming in and what the fees would look like. So our revenue projections save for our building permits would reflect that. Well thanks for that. I've got another couple of questions here from Victoria and Kamloops. But in the interest of time we're just going to go to John's presentation and we'll bring those questions back at the end of his presentation. So with that I'd like to introduce our second speaker today, John Stovel. He has been in the real estate investment for over 25 years. He's worked in all areas including acquisition, finance, civic approval, construction and marketing. For the past 25 or 20 years he served as a general manager and he's now the president of Reliance Properties Limited which is located in the Gastown area of Vancouver. Reliance is a privately owned Vancouver based company. It's been active in the development, ownership and management of a wide variety of commercial and residential real estate for over 50 years. He has developed a broad based expertise in portfolio management with an emphasis on urban renewal through restoration and renovation of heritage buildings together with new strata and rental residential and specialty office and retail projects. He has earned several awards for his contribution to the retention of heritage buildings, high rise excellence and affordable housing in the downtown Gastown and downtown Eastside areas. He has completed or is currently managing the development of over a billion dollars of new development, construction and renovation projects in addition to managing an investment portfolio in excess of 600 million dollars. In 2013 the BC Business Magazine recognized Reliance for its innovative work on the Burns Block Micro Loss project and so with that I'd just like to hand it over to John to talk about Reliance and their rental housing development. Thank you. You left with some of the challenges that are available in Vancouver. I think in Vancouver, which is where our primary focus is, we have everything is very similar to other municipalities in terms of the issues but everything is just kind of more intense and more in terms of costs and approval process and so on. This is our developed and first-built rental. I've got a title there but we have a whole 500 rents weekends and we built 250 of those for the build new in the last 10 years. It was invented by older stock, typical stock in the west and in other areas of the city. We're inspired by construction and innovation. We've won numerous CGI awards for housing innovation and we were particularly proud to receive the most innovative company BC Award for our Micro Loss project in the downtown East Side and that's going to be a lot of what I'm going to be talking about today and that has indicated that that is an emerging trend and even in New Westminster. This statistic was 52% of the population, our renters, we so well over 50% anyway, our renters. This is a very, very large market in Vancouver and it also was referred to by BEV. Typically in quite aging stock, in stock that has rising operating costs, is energy inefficient and does not necessarily meet the current needs of the tenants. And they're living in them because they're in modern and modern sweet conveniences, even if that comes at the cost of less space, people are definitely willing to trade space for place if they can have more modern conveniences and better locations. And this has got a lot to do with the fact that all the things we have is about smaller. When you think about televisions and telephones and stereo systems and computers, they're all much, much smaller things now and it's had a very interesting effect on the need for space. The other thing that's affecting trading space for places, we're very fortunate to live in some really great cities in Canada and a good climate. And so the outside is meaningful to a lot of people in terms of amenities, cafes, restaurants, parks, sea walls, bike paths, these kind of things that are outside the four walls of your apartment as the cities that continue to evolve and become better urban places, they offer you more and you don't need so much food in your four walls to have a healthy and happy lifestyle. The rentals we built and we'll start to see the pattern. This is the renovation of the Old City Factory Building in Gafftown on Water Street, 110,000 square foot heritage buildings that we converted to rental lip-work studios in 2002. Very popular, very successful, but to put it in context, these suites are in the range of 850 square feet. In Gafftown they're probably renting over $2.50 a square foot so they do represent a significant cost for a tenant 17 to $1,800 a month for a lost style studio with the entitlement to work. But again, very popular type of building that's never had any vacancy. But after we built this building and the next one I'm going to show you, what we noticed, this is 33 Water which is a purpose built lip-work building right next door to Water Street where the average suite size was about 700 square feet. Rents are probably even a little bit higher, you know, 260 or 270 square foot. What we've noticed with these two buildings is that they've always done very well over the years. They were both finished by 2004. This constant web-based inquiries through our marketing system for people who can say, are saying I don't really mind where it is, if it's long distance in downtown and I don't really mind how big it is but I can only pay, and you know for every tenant that moved into these buildings, we saw 10 of those emails from people who were looking for a fundamentally different price point. Before getting to some more responses we do have challenges just in general to the creation of market housing, market rental housing, high land cost, based on ownership value. So we have a strong culture in our society of home ownership and built into home ownership is the expectation of increases in value over time. So home owners, condominium owners, they're just paying more for what they get because ownership comes with the prospect of future appreciation. So that always puts a lot of pressure on land that could otherwise be used for mental high construction costs. There's not much we can do about that except to try to use efficient design and modularity and typicality of suite to cut down costs. Of course urban design requirements imposed by cities particularly in Vancouver increase costs. I'm not saying they're a bad thing but the high design standards of municipalities now also create costs in terms of the quality materials and so on that you need to use. High municipal costs to finance both. So in Vancouver you've got development cost levies which can be as high as $18, $19 square foot. You have built-in permit fees and in these buildings you have community amenity contributions which are voluntary contributions that are offered to the municipality when you re-zone property to increase the density and as an example we just did a strata project in Vancouver where the community amenity contribution equated to and the total city fees equated to $50,000 per suite for prototypes of housing because the time at which you need to hold the land and wait for your permits puts pressure on the financial performance. You are not committed without a count whole variation of the by-law to build a data apartment below 390 square feet and I think your NSC is like continue on here but you know why that's an issue for us. Prescriptive requirements regarding units next i.e. the number of two and three bedroom units that are required to be built into a new project. These large units are very difficult particularly in towers where they take up such because you have to have bedrooms on the outside walls they take up a lot of space on the floor plate and it's hard to get them to be the right size and the proportion on the floor plate that's why you see a dearth of large units in the tower format. Really the same issue if you want to build a three bedroom suite in a condominium you could make one of the bedrooms a borrowed light bedroom quite easily and have a better and more compact unit, a three bedroom unit but municipal guidelines around for example angle daylight and having direct sunlight into bedrooms can make that very difficult. Parking requirements and it is the case that many municipalities are seeing now that they can significantly reduce parking requirements for rental housing. We find that even ten years ago in Vancouver the market demand for parking in a rental housing is about a half a stall for units and we now see in Vancouver particularly with the changing demographics and the millennial pool work on even lower demand than that so I think municipalities should continue to be very aggressive to try and reduce their parking requirements for rental. Pair City is the only land for efficient transit oriented rental projects. You know neighborhood concerns sort of maybe issues and a sense of entitlement to low density around high density transit arterials has been a real problem in Vancouver. You can still stand around at numerous Sky Trans stations in Vancouver and get out and look around at the station and you'll see single family dwellings on all four corners. That's been a certain situation for us to be in after having invested so much money in these charming systems. And so municipalities should be working harder to build a land around transit with some inclusionary requirements for rental housing. In Vancouver we have something called the rate of change bylaw some of which was hanging out similar policies in the U.S. minister where a well intended policy to prevent the loss of existing rental housing when creating new rental housing and so in Vancouver they have what they call a one to one replacement but this where if you if you build a new building a new condominium or makes you building you have to replace at least as many rentals as you took away in the old building and that sounds fine at first blush. Unfortunately it's a policy that gets used politically to resist replacement rental and to maintain lower quality aging stock out of the concern that it won't be affordable. And I think this is a really key point when you're looking at municipal incentives to create rental stock. In Vancouver there's been a lot of criticism of programs that have created rental stock because the particular new buildings that are created for rental may not be cheap. It's kind of like cars. New cars are always more expensive than old cars but if you flood the market with new cars the cost of old cars is going to go down. What happens with new rental buildings is they come on they're brand new, they've got all the modern conveniences dishwasher, washer, dryers, amenities, spaces, gyms in the building on great locations and they are more expensive in the existing stock but they add to the supply and they're often criticized politically because people look at the particular building that's come on, they look it's not affordable and they overlook the fact that the real purpose of these programs is to increase supply and I'd like to see what David says about that and maybe we'll only get to the end. The Residential Tent Act is again well intended legislation to protect tenant obstacles to creating rental housing because rent control increases which are legislated by the Residential Tent Act can radically make a difference than the broader base inflationary impacts on you might say the situation where you're authorizing by six or seven percent but because of the Residential Tent Act you can't raise the rent beyond a certain published percentage each year so there's elements of rent control which I'm afraid discourages investors from rental stock to some degree because they see more financial flexibility and less risk in other types of development particularly strata ownership and the creation of rental housing federal capital gains not being able to be reinvested and deferred when rolled into an investment there used to be an hour years ago that if you sold an investment property you could provide a digital within I believe one year you could reinvest in another rental property as long as you had reinvested at least that amount and not trigger your capital gain so now there's people who are sitting on older apartment buildings are loaded to sell them and trigger the gains because they don't have an opportunity to shelter that capital gain by investing in a newer larger apartment building to increase rental stock provincial basis the property purchase tax which is a transactional tax that the government doesn't really add any value to the given transaction 2% of the property value is a further discouragement and an increase in cost and pushes people towards higher yield models of real estate utilization because they have to pay those costs to acquire the land rentals are also not a GST exam so built into the rental cost of all rental housing are all the GST keepers on the underlying supplies and maintenance and so on so the one thing the federal government could consider would be exempting rental stock from GST and with the requirements that landlords pass that saving on to the tenants and this is our current interest is micro housing from before about what we saw with that continuous unsatiated demand for people who could be in around $1,000 for their apartment and this was a vacated condemned former single-room occupancy hotel in the downtown east side at Hastings and Carroll right across from Vision Park as referenced we were able to use heritage incentives which was a grant to facade grants of $50,000 a property tax holiday for 10 years and a heritage identity transfer to move development rights outside to rehabilitate this building and create 30 rental micro loss the average size of these micro suites is 265 square feet they range in size from 219 square feet to 291 square feet on breakfast in one week with a zero dollar marketing budget each suite has a full kitchen a flat screen TV, a workspace a dining table came fresh, the wall bed included a mattress and the rent included a table vision and internet. The only additional charge the tenant is their electrical consumption there's no parking in the building there's ample bike storage and a shared laundry room and a rooftop deck and a rooftop social room these are actual pictures of the unit so that in this one the completed unit sees a very large heritage window looking out onto maple tree square kitchen cabinets a workspace, a flat screen TV included and looking back the other way you see the wall bed in the opposition with the dining table also in the opposition folded up against the bed and then surrounding storage and the left is a washroom with a glass wall so what is a very small washroom feels more spacious because the light comes wood flooring throughout the suite all the efficient design opens in and becomes the shower door when you're using the shower so it's a dual purpose door creates the sense of spaciousness and even the foot space doing more micro law projects to work through in the meantime this demand is going on we did a strata that was a very soft market in Victoria and our micro law project we sold 120 units in about 10 days so this is a very interesting area of housing that we feel needs to be gotten into more so I'm just going to go back up there for a second is making it difficult for us to do more micro law projects we still see micro law this is kind of a niche portion of the market it's not for everybody, it's for young people, millennials early in their working career and also we see a lot of older people who are looking for a more simple lifestyle downsizing selling their principal bull residences maybe putting cash in the bank and traveling more having interest in this category as well so that was a big regulatory barrier for us more free zone land suitable for higher density rental projects our removal of rent controls and federal incentives so those are all big out statement things that have been talked about for many years and the appetite for them comes and goes this is another micro law concept we have designed by Bing Tom which we've been proposing for the East Side of Vancouver on East Asing Street again this would be purpose-built rental housing we have no problem as best indicated signing a rental-only non-strategic government for the greater of 60 years for the life of the building in this particular design here the idea is that the balconies by not being stacked and being kind of vertical face of the building create this kind of vertical community where you can come out on your balcony and sort of be talking to people in an adjacent unit or a unit above an interesting idea to increase social engagement within the building now we currently have to City of Vancouver to build a micro law tower and this would be part of our our gateway project which we're doing which empowers the development and this building would be I think micro law on a whole new scale is designed from the ground up to be predominantly micro law we have ranges we have about 25% compact two bedroom units and two different sizes of micro-laws in sort of high 300 square foot and low 300 square foot range we are also proposing a component within the building what we call a nano-law a nano-law is between 200 and 250 square feet again with all the references componentry in them including dishwasher and washer dryer full black screen TV wall bed dining table wood floors full bathroom going beyond the suite itself we're looking to create significant amounts of amenity space in these buildings for use by the tenants who live in the micro-laws probably well 100% increase over the typical amount of public amenity space with redundancy so one of the most important things there is bookable dining rooms that link to outdoor spaces so that if you have let's say a family Christmas dinner you can book one of these rooms bring a catering or have a fallout dinner and use this room and then when you're done with the party you clean up and you go back to your studio study hall areas child play areas social rooms music practice rooms so that if you want to do something noisy like play guitar or practice your trumpet you can go into an acoustically isolated music practice room so in this particular building concept which is run by a very famous law center architect Nils Neri all those kind of notches and roof decks and openings in the building every one of those things is some sort of a public space for all the tenants in the building including the rooftop so this is micro-laws on a grand scale 375 units in a tower and we see this as a an aggressive response to what we believe is this incredible demand for millennials to live down to trade space for a place to take advantage of the common amenities of the building as well as the incredible public realm that Vancouver has in terms of public amenities and cultural and retail life and this is what people want and we're finding that it's a real challenge for planners and municipalities and they've been concerned with last speculation concerns that this may sort of drive of condominium ownership to an even smaller unitized level that's in an inflate cost so we've offered to do this building with 100% rental roof and municipality off the town specific angst about moving in this direction how that it has openings and notches in it to create a public space for the tenants there's a to make sure that there's lots of sun and light coming in grocery store on the main floor so that tenants can buy food right in the base of the building there are some good programs in Vancouver that are promoting rental housing they're rental programs here at rental housing we have something in Vancouver it's called STR which is short term incentives for rental it's now called rental 100 and what it does is it provides additional density in order to build purpose built rental buildings with a 60 year covenant essentially the city will allow you to rezone and increase the size of your building until it works for rental until the rental performance works and the lab will advance the covenant interestingly this has been a very successful program in Vancouver I think there's been several hundred units already created and there's well over a thousand in the approval pipeline but it's one of these policies that's being criticized because people are looking at the relatively higher cost of the brand new highly amenity rich rental buildings that are being built and criticizing them for being not at the mid or bottom level of the rental price spectrum but that's where I think there's this understanding that the intent of the program is to add supplies so yes there are people who can afford to move up into less space and higher quality space a vacancy in the older the people who can't get afford a brand new rental apartment can move into that vacancy lifetime we also have as I was referencing for our very spot project heritage incentives which often are able to be used to repurpose the heritage building for rental use which we call sort of playing a rental tune on a heritage fiddle it's really using heritage incentives to make a rental building work and existing building where those incentives aren't available for new construction and I think the rental projects that we've done in Vancouver have been heritage building conversions and even one of the ones that have showed if not two of the ones that have showed we're doing that exact same thing using existing incentives for a different reason to be able to make the rental performance work 50% of it is intended for rental use but in every case we're going to continue to need to rely on these various municipal programs municipal barriers to creating rental and in our particular emphasis the moment is on allowing a larger entitlement for well-designed well-conceived compact units below 390 square feet thank you Thank you for that great presentation I really appreciate the bit of a philosophical conversation that I hear happening here which is really about the culture change that we're experiencing now in our urban centers and a lot of urbanism commented on this over the last maybe decade but really in the last few years about really challenging the notion of how much private space do we need when we have access to great public space and I think, you know, John you're definitely showing that you're out there building and challenging or putting that philosophical question into practice so appreciate the presentation we've got a couple of questions right now left on the table but I also want to give opportunities for any specific questions that anybody has for John right away and maybe while we're waiting for that maybe we'll take the question that John raised during his presentation for Bev and maybe give Bev an opportunity to respond to that and if I recall correctly it was really a question about you know, is providing supply enough or do we need to provide affordable housing supply and interested to hear Bev's thoughts on that Sure, thank you for that question it's a really interesting question when we went to develop the secured market rental housing policy we were actually quite clear up front that this policy was about increasing supply it's about taking the long view and in that we need to replace the stuff that we're going to lose the question of affordability you know, came up a few times but we have a companion document which is our affordable housing strategy which has a whole host of initiatives to address affordability more directly so I think quite unabashedly we see our secured market rental housing policy as about increasing supply we know that if there are other tools that came along we could drill down to the affordability part you know, with certain partners with nonprofit groups but really this policy is about supply so I would agree strongly with what John said Great, okay so I guess the question that we had this is from Bev's presentation it was from the City of Victoria and really they're asking the servicing requirements what servicing requirements have you relaxed or do you see as being options to relax? Sure and that actually has been a challenging part of this there's a lot of servicing requirements are incredibly basic you know, you have to provide water and sewer there goes without question you know, for us, you know things such as replacing sidewalks are really important especially with regards to an aging population and accessibility so in many cases it came down to things such as underground wiring you know, we have our own utility here we might have a bit more flexibility but certainly in one case the decision was made not to require that the wiring go underground so that's a real example I guess we have a question it's probably similar to what we've just talked about for John do you ever get criticism that your rental units are not affordable and I know you've talked a bit about this but how do you respond to that comments? It's not there it is that the new buildings be the cheapest thing you can find you know, you may find a car but when you buy a new car there's a used car out there for somebody else so yeah, people might say they're not affordable for them but they're looking even more kind of formulatively for it's been published and acknowledged by a municipal government is a reason to choose your housing cost the statistic now 30% would allow you $1,150 per month to pay and that would get you into a a typical micro suite 30% affordability matrix for many people and the problem with this whole thing of affordability is kind of you know it's a reactionary response that something's not affordable but even if you look at the same HD what are housing it's called the Hills Rate which are housing income levels which are what same HD determines to be the kind of healthy financial life for people across different spectrums in the housing market a lot of these rates are not too different than what we're talking about here so I think when we talk about affordability we have to be quite specific about what we mean we also talk about housing attainability $350,000, $60,000, $150,000 a year there's an amount by which you should be not exceeding a share of your income for housing and so a family who's making $80,000 or $90,000 a year on a combined basis or $120,000 still has our market in terms of rental and town ownership and this one thing I didn't mention before is their houses are really significant improvements and Nick who was there in the lane way housing where small families can live on lane way housing brown oriented in an area close to the schools and more suitable for children and you could probably be renting a lane way house for a very high quality lane way house on the west side of Vancouver for $18,000 to $2,000 $1,800 to $2,000 maybe $2,200 a month so affordability is not the same thing for all people and yes the criticism is there and if you see the problem but with the real issue being not wanting change or new development in the neighborhood maybe I'll just take one more question here in the interest of time and it's really for both of our presenters it's about the you know when you look at New West and the type of housing policies it has in place they're quite complex and complimentary for a larger urban center and I know John's spoken about the policies that Vancouver has in place and you know Vancouver is also very large and complex and has a very well designed and put in place but I think what is the advice that both of you would provide to smaller local governments looking to put in place policies or tools to encourage mental housing Okay, should I start first? Sure and New West Minister is a really small department in terms of the housing planning expertise that would be me on my spare time literally one thing we did have and I have to say that it was so important is we have political support and a strong political will to move forward with this initiative and in fact one of our council members was doing work on rental housing and his educational studies and it went a long way and getting the support to move forward so that's important secondly is we we'd like to do our research and base our policy on good information and even though we're a small municipality we look how to do lessons from others in this case particularly Vancouver was extremely helpful our friends at Metro Vancouver were extremely helpful so they you know we learned a lot from them there's a lot of shared experiences so you know for for us that was important and thirdly consultation is we involved people in the community interested in affordable housing and interested in rental housing we involved UDI in the development of this policy and they gave us some fantastic feedback about where the greatest benefits could be made so there's my advice on the core of the region is the land cost becomes a smaller smaller part of the equation in Vancouver can be 33% to 40% of the total cost of the project even more sometimes up to 50% in New West it's probably 18% look into the valley it's probably an even lower proportion so I would expect that since the rivet municipalities are looking to create rental housing they should be focusing on those areas that affect the cost of the developer such as servicing cost road cost repair and setbacks landscaping cost things that would have a disproportionate effect on construction costs and frankly it's just not that big a part of it of course as well as it could be granted or gifted or at least at a low cost that would help but again it's a pretty small part of the total cost spectrum of development in a written market Thank you for that and so first of all I'd like to thank again our presenters today John and Beth great presentations great questions and answers I'd also like to thank our audience for their questions and for joining us today on this call much appreciated I'd like to remind you this webinar is eligible for 1.5 PIBC organized and structured learning credits so if you're a planner make sure you fill in your online forms the final fall webinar this year is going to be on November 27th and we're going to be focusing on community resistance to infill and densification so a whole talk on NIMBY and once again your feedback is valued and I think Josh is going to tell you a little bit more about how to fill out the survey Yeah, thanks again everyone on behalf of the Economic Development Division we're so pleased that you were able to join us today and talk about housing which is fundamentally such an important part of our region's economic development in terms of a survey you'll be receiving one if you haven't already already received it you should be getting one it only takes about two to five minutes and it really does help us figure out where the best value is in these webinars how well they're received and how we can make them better so that you can learn even more for future webinars as Roger said the next webinar is on November 27th and everyone who attended this webinar you'll be receiving an invitation for that probably in the next week or two along with all the rest of our stakeholders so if there's no other questions or comments I think we'll sign off for today and thank you very much for joining us