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The guilty and the greedy

At the risk of jumping the gun, I’d just like to take a moment to thank Mayor Kenny and all the councillors for the hard work they’ve been doing and the tough choices they’ve been making.

At the risk of jumping the gun, I’d just like to take a moment to thank Mayor Kenny and all the councillors for the hard work they’ve been doing and the tough choices they’ve been making. Now there’s something you don’t read every week on this page, eh? If you feel as though you need to read that sentence again, go right ahead; I’ll wait.

Seriously though, I want to thank mayor and council. I’d like to do it more often if only they’d let me. I mean, they are the people I would have, for the most part, voted for if I could have voted last time around. I want them to succeed. I want them to do good work. I want them to make my Wednesday mornings more difficult by being so right and innocuous I have nothing to fall back on but cute dog and cat stories.

What they’ve done to deserve such praise is to drive hard bargains and make good decisions on the athletes’ village and Lot 1/9. The details are still being hammered out in dark, secret meetings – meetings that are dark and secret at the insistence of the other parties it should be noted – so you’ll just have to wait for the official announcements to decide whether you agree with me or not. But I agree with me and that’s all I need to move forward with uncharacteristic praise.

That and a little resolve and backbone on your part, gentlemen, when it comes to dealing with the shameful, greedy whiners trying to convince you to let them weasel out of their commitments to the future of affordable housing, regardless of how tortured the meaning of that word has become.

Last week’s "information" meeting hosted by the Whistler Housing Authority was, by all reports, hijacked by a cabal of homeowners from Barnfield Estates. Their histrionic and very personal attacks simply gave credence to those who wish to characterize them as boorish, greedy opportunists.

They weren’t alone, of course. They were joined by homeowners from 19 Mile Creek who are concerned their unexpected and unplanned housing wealth is going to be threatened by WHA’s efforts to secure affordable housing for future owners of that project and others.

Lest the innocent be offended, now is probably a good time to point out that not all Barnfield owners are trying to overturn their conditions of ownership and not all 19 Mile owners are bitching about the proposed change to the appreciation cap rate formula. Unfortunately, those who aren’t are, as is usually the case, going about their lives and honouring their commitments in relative silence. There is no reasoning with a mob, after all.

So how did we get to this sorry state of affairs? Cut through the rhetoric and you’re left with a simple answer: greed. In the case of Barnfield, it’s the greed of entitlement. For 19 Mile, it’s the greed of illusory profits.

The villain, in the minds of the greedy, is the WHA. The WHA is guilty, of course. The people who run it and the people who have run it in the past are guilty of engaging in the worst kind of social engineering: trying to provide housing, in an artificially-inflated housing market, that people who couldn’t afford houses could afford. They’re guilty of making mistakes in trying to ensure that housing would be affordable to the next generation of fresh-faced suckers. They’re guilty of admitting their mistakes. And worst of all, they’re guilty of trying to correct their mistakes.

The Barnfield owners won the lottery… literally. They won the chance to purchase dirt at a dirt-cheap price. The muni, through WHA, provided a cheap building lot. The winners agreed to build a house. Both sides agreed to a convoluted process designed to fairly assess the baseline value of the house. The homeowners agreed to an appreciation cap and resale restrictions so the homes would be available to future worker bees.

The WHA’s biggest mistake was in agreeing to individual assessments. Instead of saying, "You build a house to these minimum specifications and it’ll be worth X dollars per square foot," they agreed to set the value of each home based on receipts, imputed labour value and a whack of other considerations. Dumb. Negotiations were heated, bogged down and few agreements were reached.

Now it’s before the courts. Not only do the owners want favourable assessments, they want to get rid of the appreciation cap. Having won the lottery once, why not go for the big prize?

19 Mile isn’t about assessing value; it’s about reining in the rate of increase in value. The first appreciation cap WHA came up with was a formula based off prime rate. When prime languished in the low, single-digits, the rate of increase on the early projects would actually have been negative if one applied the formula mechanistically. The WHA didn’t do that. It wanted the people who’d put up the money to earn some small return on it.

WHA decided to take a second stab at an appreciation formula. This one was tied to the GVRD housing market. Little did they know Vancouver’s housing was about to explode. It was a stupid, human mistake. It led to the homes using that formula, 19 Mile included, appreciating at an unsustainable rate. Of course, had the Vancouver market tanked – or when it tanks in the near future – those values might go down. Wait for the howls.

So the WHA tried again, this time with a formula tied to core consumer price index. The formula applies to new projects and applies to new purchasers of existing projects, regardless of the rate that applied to them previously. It’s an effort to fulfill the mandate to deliver housing that will be affordable not just to the first purchasers but to future purchasers. From the reaction of the most vocal, you’d think the WHA put on a mask, whipped out a gun and stole the family silver.

What’s at stake here is Whistler’s ability to be the kind of community we’ve collectively decided we’d like to be, a community capable of housing a large share of its vital, necessary population. It’s a tricky proposition, social engineering. It runs against the flow of market forces and it requires pluck and determination on the part of decision makers to find innovative ways of gaming those forces. It also requires determination on the part of those willing to invest in social infrastructure – the purchasers of "affordable" homes – to live up to their end of the bargain. That ain’t happening.

Next week, we’ll look at some of the consequences of this delicate dance breaking down.