Richmond election 2022: Mayoral candidates duel over progress on housing

City should be far more active in seeking help to build more rental housing, says challenger to longtime incumbent mayor

Richmond’s mayor has come under fire for lack of action on housing from his opponent in the city’s mayoral race.

Mayor Malcolm Brodie told an all-candidates meeting this week that the city needs more resources to tackle housing and affordability issues, and that it needs to work with other levels of government and developers.

But his challenger in the race, RITE Richmond mayoral candidate John Roston, said city hall under Brodie has not been tough enough in the issue and writing letters is not enough.

“I think the mayor and the chairs of some of these committees have to get up and go to their target, meet with the ministers and really push strongly for action,” Roston said. “We really can do a lot more pushing than we have been doing.”

Richmond has joined other Metro cities in recent years is requiring a higher proportion of new residential units be dedicated to rentals, including below-market rentals, in developments that have more than 60 units.

Of the 81,080 households in the municipality, 74 per cent are owners and 26 per cent are renters. But 92 per cent of what Richmond has been building is for condo and homeowners, two per cent is for co-ops and social housing and only six per cent has been market rental, according to information compiled by affordable housing advocates at Housing Central.

Roston, a retired McGill University senior administrator who founded the Richmond Rental Housing Advocacy Group after running unsuccessfully for a council seat in the last election, said many voters wat stronger action on housing.

“Housing wasn’t an issue for me in 2018, but I started to see it as being the most important as students said to me, ‘I’m stuck in my parents’ basement. I’m going to be stuck here after I graduate, after I get married. That’s when the penny dropped.”

Ella Huang, executive director of the Richmond Centre for Disability, which co-hosted the all-candidates meeting, said people feel they are using a high percentage of their income to cover rent and there is less to spend elsewhere on things like transportation.

She said the meeting wasn’t intended to focus on housing, “but candidates chose to talk about making trade-offs to pay rent, trading off paying for clothing or transportation.”

There are 27 people vying for eight council seats. Among them are several younger voices.

They include 32-year-old Evan Dunfee, an Olympic athlete who won a bronze medal in the 50 km racewalk at the Tokyo 2021 Olympics, who wants a better approach to changing the cost of housing.

He proposes changing Richmond’s rules about minimum lot sizes so there can be more homes on less land, changing rules about required parking spots and changing zoning of older neighbourhoods with detached houses to allow more townhomes and co-ops.

“We are at a turning point where even the very comfortably housed, who before made up a huge chunk of the voting block and were happy with the status quo, are now even seeing the repercussions of the housing crisis, whether it be their children’s or their children’s children or where, someone like myself, was able to get significant financial help from grandparents’ passing away to get into the market. That’s even becoming untenable for that existing large block of voters,” Dunafee told Postmedia.

More families are concerned about housing the next generation.

Laura Gillanders, who is running for council for RITE Richmond, told the meeting she is raising four children in a 1,500-square-foot rental home and is now trying to help them get a start.

“In the last 30 years, according to the housing report card from the poverty reduction committee, six per cent of houses that have been built have been purpose-built rental and we have over 25 per cent of our population as renters, so we haven’t even been building rental supply for the renters that we have, let alone new workers,” she said.

Roston is the only mayoral candidate running as part of a slate, along with two sitting councillors, Carol Day and Michael Wolfe. Roston described both as having a record of speaking in council against big condo projects.

Brodie has been in the seat for 21 years and is considered a shoo-in for his sixth term. He won the last election in 2018 with about 65 per cent of the vote and the one in 2014 with nearly 70 per cent.

The third mayoral candidate, Wei Ping Chen, did not attend this week’s meeting.

jlee-young@postmedia.com

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