Somewhere between calls for a rent freeze and an invitation to “Feel the Bern,” Patrick Condon delivered salvo after salvo when assessing city council’s work on housing and affordability.
“Our current administration’s recent admissions of failure and weak attempts to reverse course have been as effective as a row of beanbags holding back a tsunami,” Condon said.
That critique, and many others, were central during the Monday morning news conference in which the former city planner and UBC professor announced his candidacy for the COPE mayoral nomination.
The June 11 news conference was held on a strip of the seawall just east of Granville Island to illustrate the key pillar in Condon’s platform: housing.
A co-op near Sitka Square is home to long-term tenants who have had their rents and mortgages largely immune from market forces, in some cases for three decades. Those costs are all below 30 per cent of tenant income.
“Our children, often between the ages of 20 and 35 or 40, know for sure that they can’t have a family in this city anymore — the city that they grew up in,” Condon said. “They’ll have to leave. They’ll be exiled because they don’t have the cash or the entry fee.”
Condon wants 50 per cent of the city’s housing to be non-market and if elected, would lobby for the purchase of city lands for those housing types.
He called for an immediate freeze on rents and wants the Residential Tenancy Branch to instill more legislative safeguards to protect against renovictions.
Condon also seized on Vancouver’s lack of an official city plan, suggesting zoning policies favour developers, while confusing residents. He wants to change the funding formula developers pay — community amenity contributions and development cost levies — in an effort to curb speculation.
“Waves of global cash are crashing over our city washing us, or more precisely, washing our children off the land,” Condon said.
At 68, Condon’s career in planning spans decades. He’s the founding chair of UBC’s urban design program and UBC’s Design Centre for Sustainability.
He panned the proposed subway plan along Broadway as the “half way Broadway subway” and called the project “ludicrously expensive.” His preference is light rail that emits no greenhouse gas emissions.
Condon was asked specifically what differentiates him from the other centre left candidates, including independents Shauna Sylvester and Kennedy Stewart, and with Vision candidate Ian Campbell.
Without naming names specifically, he suggested some on the left “use progressive terms without really deserving it.”
“I think there’s some justification for challenging that label,” he said. “My campaign is proudly left, in the Bernie Sanders mold of the left. And when the market fails, I’m very much in favour of having the people come together and do something about it.”
As of yet, no one else is seeking the mayoral nomination for COPE. The party will vote on its candidates Aug. 19.
Vancouver’s civic election is Oct. 20.
@JohnKurucz
