While the most pro-housing parties didn’t win big support from voters, they pulled the conversation toward a more housing-abundant policy future for the province.

The recent elections in and around Vancouver, British Columbia, created a stir among pro-housing advocates. In one of North America’s most expensive cities to rent or buy a home, numerous parties campaigned on statements that even just a few years ago pundits would have considered a third rail. They promised to address the region’s housing shortage by ending the ban on apartments citywide—including the leafy single-detached-house neighborhoods long kept off-limits to additional housing.

While ultimately these more stridently pro-housing parties didn’t win the majority of residents’ support, they did shift the regional conversation. Indeed, the party that won both a majority on city council and the mayor’s seat, the centre-right ABC Vancouver party, vowed to deliver on recently approved plans to build thousands more homes in selected parts of the city and to ease approval processes for new proposals. What’s more, a party that claimed there had been too much development in recent years failed to win much of Vancouverites’ support at all.

TEAM’S TOUGH TIME

The party TEAM for a Livable Vancouver was most vocal in its position that the city had gone too far in terms of welcoming new people and construction, its bounty of yard signs especially conspicuous in front of west-side single-detached homes. A TEAM win could have signaled broader resistance to the abundant housing agenda.

But the TEAM vote never matched the TEAM publicity. Instead, its mayoral candidate, first-term councillor Colleen Hardwick, won only about 10 percent of the vote. The rest went to parties and candidates that espoused pro-housing platforms ranging from extremely strong to mildly strong on both the left and right.

PRO-HOUSING PARTIES’ PROGRESS

Left-leaning OneCity Vancouver promised to allow everything from duplexes to small apartment buildings everywhere throughout the 60 percent of the city that is now reserved for only the most expensive form of housing, single-detached houses.

Highly centrist Progress Vancouver, said much the same, but added a new detail. It would push for denser housing around city schools that have been emptying out, and along transit lines.

Former mayor Kennedy Stewart, seen by most as left-wing, and his Forward Together party promised to get city approvals for 220,000 new homes in the next decade. He also continued to pitch his idea of allowing up to six homes on any residential lot in Vancouver.

The very right-wing Non-Partisan Association party, which might have chosen to appeal to the same disaffected single-detached home owners as TEAM, instead opted for a message that the city desperately needs more housing everywhere in the city. The party failed to win any seats.

Overall, candidates from the more left and progressive parties—OneCity, Forward Together, and Vision Vancouver—did not win broad support from voters. But area leaders watching the election assert that the housing discourse shifted importantly this year.

“The political consensus on housing policy in the election is that it generally was shifting to an aggressive build-out of new houses,”

said Khelsilem, the current chair of the Squamish Nation council, one of three Indigenous groups in the region who have become major housing builders in Vancouver.

“There were different scales and approaches, but they were different ways of achieving the same outcome.”

He said the public seems to have agreed that demand-side policies—mechanisms aimed at speculators or investors, like speculation taxes and empty-homes taxes—are not succeeding in making housing more affordable in Vancouver or in Canada more generally. He added,

“Governments that have tried to use just demand-side tools haven’t achieved anything.”

That opinion was widely shared by market-rate and nonprofit housing developers alike, as well as housing researche...