Part of the problem

Another way to cut costs would be for the real estate business to be re-structured.
There is no earthly reason why realtors should spend 70% of their efforts going door-knocking to solicit listings; the public hates to be bothered that way, and a supposedly professional should not be soliciting for clients!
Like with any other service a potential customer would walk in to a real estate office when and if he desires such services.
In that scenario the office could arrange for an independant appraiser to visit the house in question and establish a proper selling price (no inflated prices that way).
Next the property would be listed on a common service site, and every realtor can bring potential buyers and secure a deal.
The listing office will need a few trained sellers-representatives, who in turn gets a small portion of the commission.
In other words, no listing commission and enough paying work for the realtors employed.
This would also stop the practice where a realtor represents both buyer and seller!
The main advantage is that realtors will be working on actual cases instead of wasting time looking for clients.
No other industry have 80% of its employees basically wasting time and effort, just hoping and dreaming of an income.

The last thing Vancouver

The last thing Vancouver needs are buildings constructed with materials even cheaper than the ones that have been used thus far.

The quality of construction of existing apartment buildings in the downtown core is atrocious. Many of them are already rotting away, or saddled with huge repair bills.

Poor regulation combined with for-profit motivation has led to this. The last people we want leading this charge are people like Rennie who are the biggest part of the problem. They'll throw up even poorer quality crap than the garbage we already have, and call it "Ikea-level". Ikea should sue Rennie's ass for copyright violation, and for besmirching their brand.

"...it can turn air into market housing..." sounds like something someone who wants to sell the emperor a set of amazing threads would say.

Vancouver: we're built on hot air.

4 room bungalows

2 bedrooms,1 bathroom,kitchen,living room,plain simple,nothing fancy,I could build them for a 100.000.00$, and that is all people need, you could tweak them a little,add a extra bedroom for a bigger family.
And you know what,if people owned/bought these units,instead of every dollar going to mortgage,the money would flow into the economy.
It`s real simple,but the banks,the Rennies,the real estate agents don`t want that,despite what Rennie says,the man is a sponge,looking to soak up whatever fees he can get.
I know history,I know what can be done,the US army buily housing for 60.000thousand people in San Diego in 3 months for the workers for WWii
There is no will to build for those prices,where was Rennie`s compassion when there was line-ups to buy?

EXACTLY

By the way Rennie

High-rise construction will never be cheap,it`s the nature of the beast,regs/rules/codes, keep buildings to three story wood frame,or even no stories,anyways,great fictional novel Rennie.
Ain`t going to happen in BC,but if there was a will, the city provides land,bulk purchases of wood materials,cheap pine,or whatever,and no-profits,a few supervisors and some construction dudes,carpenters,plumbers etc etc etc--And everyone works for wages,and I mean everyone,and we wouldn`t need a Rennies to soak up fees/no real estates needed, people just put their name on a list,as long as their selling keep building them.

other than that,take a hike Rennie

horizontally challenged

it's undeniable that this part of the country needs to build upwards, just as places like hong kong and tokyo have had to do.
we're hemmed in by mountains, the sea, and a border and the population here is going to keep rising faster than in most other parts of the country.
three-story walk-ups are so 1950s. dinosaurs, even.

but we don't need rennnie-ized walmart-esque condos nearly so bad as we need affordable 1BR and 2BR rental suites.

where does mr.rennie stand on social housing with rents scaled in proportion to average household incomes? (that's if he's even heard of such a housing concept)
and how many rental units is he proposing there should be within each of his econo-towers? (if any)

profits and parking

Rennie advocating for profit caps after he's made his $$$s strikes me as a bit 'rich' but whatever. He's no worse a hypocrite than most of us in this regard.

What I find frustrating in Metro Vancouver are the acres of parking lots that sit unused much of the time. Why we aren't building homes or community rooftop gardens on top of this under-utilized space is beyond belief.

Use good materials!

Did we not learn anything from the leaky condo scare?!

Mr. Rennie's intentions are good, but his solutions need some work.

"Ikea quality"? No thanks, as nothing will last for long. Can we be a bit more creative than that?

Maybe stop exporting raw logs and have the flooring or some other furniture created using beetle kill pine?

But please, no IKEA quality" stuff. The Craigslist "free" section is full of it.

And so is the dump. Please don't put it in our neighborhoods.

throw the real estate bums out!

Rennie one of the real estate bubble cheer leaders here to tell us how affordable $300,000 condo's are. I can't believe that anyone seriously thinks those in the real estate cabal have any solutions for affordable housing to offer society. These bums deserve to go down, and should be run out of town on a rail.

"Today, the city's real estate guru is warning that his industry needs to build affordable housing in order to save itself."

"It's no longer just about, 'How can we find a place for people earning local incomes to live?' Rennie told The Tyee. "It's because affordability is the market now."

Wow this guy must be a prophet. He was not saying things like this while he was raking in huge commissions as the bubble expanded.

Real estate agents, banks, insurance companies, governments at every level= real estate cabal. Throw the bums out!

Wider rather than taller

I would prefer to see more emphasis on building seven or eight story concrete buildings with large floorplates. The Vancouverism doctrins have tended to restrict floorplates to less than 10,000 sf on the excuse that this will keep "sunlight on the street".

The real motive is to create a picture of density, but to do it in such as way as to drive up prices and to drive down livable space.

Now I am Furious

Ok, this real estate series has now lost all its credibility. Why is a real estate agent being asked for a solution to a problem that he helped cause - a giant real estate bubble and wildly inflated profits for useless real estate agents! Bob Rennie has contributed nothing to the city of Vancouver. Guys like him are simply parasites who have extracted a lot of money from the economy (for themselves) while offering nothing in return except permanent damage to the city. I would not trust this guy as far as I could throw him.

People with something to contribute have fled Vancouver while Bob has been furiously pumping up the real estate bubble. Small businesses, the creative class and everyone who needed industrial space to carry out their activities has been forced to leave Vancouver because of the conversion of commercial real estate for Bob's condos and the irrational inflation of residential real estate helped along by Bob's giant advertising budget. Vancouver is now a terrible place for business and a terrible place for jobs (other than condo construction jobs!). Vancouver has been converted to a holiday resort for wealthy real estate speculators who earn their money elsewhere.

More crappy CondoBob Towers are a solution for maintaining Bob's income in a declining market, not a solution for improving the quality of life for normal people who work in Vancouver.

No Thirty-Story Ripoff in Norquay!

The Neighbourhood Centres city planning process now underway for Norquay Village in East Vancouver is making it clear that our residents' vision for our neighborhood is anything but Metrotown Cloned or Kingsway Canyon.

That already-zoned-for 24 story skyscraper at Kingsway and Nanaimo (just ahead of what was supposed to be our neighborhood planning – funny thing) is not the human-scale architecture that the community wants. Density and affordability do not require drive-to vertical gated cocoons that kill street life and destroy community.

To Bob Rennie: So you and your developer buddies are having financial problems at Kingsway and Nanaimo because some scamster grabbed the rezoning lift, flipped the land, and vamoosed with the easy bucks. And then your profiteering bubble burst. Go hawk those ever-taller towers somewhere else.

P.S. We in Norquay are not about to forget the lie that our community would get a real grocery store out of that rezoning.

Habitat for Humanity

Rennie's mortgage idea is a riff on the structure Habitat for Humanity uses in its projects. See the last question in this FAQ:

http://www.torontohabitat.on.ca/web/faq.aspx

It is good to see a business man acknowledging that profit needs to be capped for affordable housing to be built. However, I still fail to see how for-profit developers will be able to construct QUALITY affordable housing. The business exists to make profit first and foremost. As a construction worker I would never work on a project structured this way as safety and training standards would be atrocious, not to mention construction quality.

Also, would the residents in these units be able to afford the maintenance fees? What happens when the buildings need to be repaired because they leak? Will the residents in the affordable units be able to afford the repair bills? Suddenly we have another swath of people financially ruined as they lose their house and savings because of another leaky condo blow up.

Referring to Monte's question above, I don't think there is any way to get for profit developers to build affordable quality housing short of the government paying them a direct subsidy. The developers want profit, there's no two ways about it.

I think the money would be better spent by funding non-profit housing societies and co-ops. It is more effecient and will provide for better outcomes. I think it would not be hard for the government to stimulate the construction of 3000 units in a few years with this method.

The notion that the for profit sector holds some magic bullet to solve this problem is horribly distracting. Its not in the interest of the for profit sector to build affordable housing en mass because it will erode their profit margins. We need to socially evolve past this inhibiting profit fetish and accept the role non-profit organizations must play in providing quality affordable housing for us.

Where on earth is Norquay?

Joseph Jones
P.S. We in Norquay are not about to forget the lie that our community would get a real grocery store out of that rezoning.

Where on earth is Norquay? I thought that was the name for a ski area near Banff. Now it seems to be a name for one of Vancouver City's many precincts of proud property owners.

I have a kind of an idea where Kitsilano or the West End is, though there are no precise boundaries. I was wondering where Norquay is. And I was also wondering how long that name has been in general usage. I don't recall ever hearing it prior to about two years ago.

The Norquay Fabrication

The City of Vancouver is out to "do up" what has been a quiet municipal backwater. They decided to call it Norquay Village because of Norquay Park on the south side of Kingsway and Norquay School on the north side of Kingsway. Planners have already discarded their own survey results that show residents strongly not in favor of a proposed mass rezoning.

One big question is why planners decided to plunk their first four "neighbourhood centres" on the east side of Vancouver. This area already has far more than proportional density. (Check out the Villagomez article in the Tyee and the City's own density map.)

My speculation about "Norquay" is that it was cynically targeted because of its immigrant and working class population and its lack of neighborhood citizen's organizations. We currently have about one-third low-income residents. This type of redevelopment will destroy affordable housing and push those people out.

Joseph Jones: Sounds like Realtors and Planners doing it again

Joseph, from what you say about the instant neigborhood name and the "village" appelation it sounds like the City Planners were once again working very, very closely with some combination of existing property owners who wanted big capital gains from redevelopment and real estate developers.

How far is the proposed centre of this "village" from the nearest Skytrain station? Those are the nodes that should be seeing the most redevelopment and the greatest increases in density.