Does Gregor Robertson Agree With His Own Government’s Housing Policy?

Questions To Which The Answer’s Unclear

Does Gregor Robertson agree with his platform on the job he just accepted?

The Liberal platform commits the government to work to cut Development Charges by 50%. The new Housing Minister, on the CBC’s Power And Politics last night, defended his record as Mayor of Vancouver by saying “when market housing is selling at those rates, we may as well take some of that back into the public purse”.

Yesterday, Mark Carney you’d be “hard pressed” to believe that he wasn’t committed to lower housing prices. Today, Gregor Robertson answered the following on whether prices need to fall. "No, I think that we need to deliver more supply, make sure the market is stable, it's a huge part of our economy. We need to be delivering more affordable housing."

There is a way to thread the needle on Robertson’s answer, which is to so massively ramp up the construction of government owned housing and to flood the market with heavily incentivized privately-build purpose built rental such that it’s incredibly cheap to rent but basically no new supply of housing for purchase by a normal person or family comes to market, massively stratifying the line between owners and renters. But that isn’t what under 40s want.

If you hold prices of existing supply nominally flat, and basically let wage increases catch up to the price of housing, it’d take 20 years to achieve anything close to meaningful affordability in big cities. There is no way to increase affordability in market housing without lower prices. Mark Carney knows it, but his Housing Minister doesn’t.

Do we need to do more on supportive and transitional housing? Yes. Do we need to do more on co-op housing and publicly owned rentals that are intentionally set below market? Yes. But most people don’t want to live in that kind of housing. People want to be able to afford to live in their communities with the salaries they earn, and they want it not to require over $200k to afford the median home in a major metro area. Yes, that’s the major metro Gregor used to run.

So, Gregor disagrees with Carney on whether housing prices should fall, but let’s circle back to Development Charges. The Liberal platform commits us to deals with provinces and cities to cut DCs by 50% and replace that revenue with federal dollars. Great policy, right? Well, according to Robertson, Development Charges don’t actually raise prices. His argument on P&P was that prices are what they are, and the choice is either the Developer keeping the money or the public. Taken at his word, and certainly at his actions as Mayor, his argument is that Development Charges don’t increase costs on new housing, because the market will pay what the market will pay.

That he’s wrong isn’t the point - this is in direct contradiction to what the Liberal Party ran on. This isn’t a minor disagreement on the best way to handle some arcane matter, it’s a question that strikes at the heart of two very different philosophies to handle the Housing crisis and create affordability. Carney and other Liberals want market housing to become more affordable for more people. Gregor Robertson wants to give up the ghost on market housing and focus on affordability in other ways. They aren’t just not the same priorities, they’re actively contradictory goals.

We have a Housing Minister who believes, and reiterated it on national TV last night, something antithetical to the Housing platform he ran on and is now committed to enacting. He believes that prices do not need to come down, which is in direct contradiction to what Mark Carney said yesterday. So, what is Canada’s housing policy right now? Is it to lower costs for market housing and massively boost purpose built rentals and non-market housing, or is it to only massively boost purpose built rentals and non-market housing?

Are these the grumblings of someone who supports the guy who used to hold this job? Sure, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong, cause I’m not. We have a Minister of Housing who does not fundamentally agree with his PM, his Party, or any actually correct economists. This is what Mark Carney’s leaner, smarter, better Cabinet has delivered.

Gregor’s record as a Mayor is supposed to be his greatest asset, which means you can’t say that he needs to get his sea legs under him before he can be judged. If you want to dismiss the early musings of brand new Ministers as products of inexperience and not reflective of anything more, you can in some cases. Wayne Long’s “government will be run like a corporation” quote that’s going around isn’t great, but I’m far less likely to get pissed at that from Wayne than I am from Robertson's catastrophe because Wayne’s always been a loose talking backbencher. Robertson’s executive experience was his sales pitch, and now it has led us to where we are.

The honest truth, not that anybody will believe me, is that we need this Housing Minister to succeed. This Minister. Not the one I wish we had, not the one we used to have, not the one we might have at some point in the future, but this one, right here, right now. We don’t have time to fight some battle of purity about being right about Nate, because who gives a shit anymore. We’ll knife Bonnie and convince him to run to replace her, or he’ll be the Mayor of Toronto after Chow, or he’ll actually become the Left Wing Joe Rogan we keep dreaming will show up and dominate Canadian media for years all from his podcast studio. He’s such a talent it’s impossible he won’t make another substantial contribution, and my certainty in that fact means I don’t feel the need to make everything about him moving forward.

I want Minister Robertson to succeed, because this country needs success. We need the kind of investments in supportive and transitional housing that he didn’t get as Mayor. We need to achieve big things like ending homelessness and rough sleeping, we need to end encampments without clearing them and while ensuring people have places to go. The Liberal platform has plenty of great ideas around modular and pre-fab housing that can more cheaply and quickly deliver the kind of transitional and shelter housing supply to cities that will enable more humane care for those in need. The public builder is a great way of ensuring there will be reasonably priced rents in major cities over time, whatever is happening in privately built rentals. The incentives for purpose built rental will lower costs and enable students and new grads to move out of Mom and Dad’s basement and actually have a place of their own, with all the benefits of freedom associated.

We face untold actual or potential-to-be crises in this country whose roots are in the housing crisis. Why are young men finding community in right wing, online spaces? Because it’s harder and harder to meet people in real life, in part because of the cost of living. It’s harder to justify going out to a club or a bar on a Friday night if you live in the suburbs and couldn’t bring a girl home even if you did score than if you had a place closer to downtown. For those who do pay these outrageous prices, making it to the end of the month is so cost-prohibitive that there’s no money to have any fun or go do anything.

Is getting 22 year olds laid the job of the Housing Minister? Not in specific, no, but if we weren’t spending so much fucking money on housing we’d have much more to spend on other things, which would be great for an economy that’s struggling. We want to help revitalize downtowns and support restaurants and businesses? Forcing workers back won’t do the trick, turning our cities into places where young professionals with cash to spend and vices to indulge can do so will.

We need a coherent approach to housing that delivers outcomes. We need Gregor Robertson to be good at this. I would love to come to the next shuffle, whenever it is, and be so thrilled with the job Gregor has done that I am using this site to say that if we fire Gregor I will riot. I would love that because it means he’ll have been good at the job, and that’s what we need. I want to be able to say that Fraser, Erskine-Smith, and Robertson represented the triumvirate of Housing Ministers who saved this country from decades of incompetence, idiocy, and occasional straight malice towards the young. So, please, Gregor, let me do that. Make me wrong about you. I want nothing more in life than to be able to sing your praises.

Understand that progressive dogma is not enough to fix this alone. Work with the very smart people who work under you to understand that we need an All Of The Above housing strategy that works in significant federal investment into non-market housing and allows the non-rich young a hope of buying market housing themselves. Let your tenure become a success, I’m begging you. Because right now it's not going to be, and we need success more than we need my ego to be boosted.