What Ken Sim's for-profit housing says about his vision of Vancouver
In his quest for a city of swagger, Gabrielle Peters says Vancouver mayor Ken Sim is instead creating resort town
As the City of Vancouver invests in building housing, it is doing so with a motive beyond providing housing supply — and beyond what some say should be the scope of government.
In announcing its program to build market rental housing on city-owned land, the city said in a press release that it aims not only “to maximize the delivery of market rental housing,” but also to “generate financial returns and non-tax revenues to address the growing infrastructure deficit and council priorities.”
For Gabrielle Peters, a disabled writer and policy analyst who formerly sat on the city’s planning commission, the move is part of a wider trend that has seen the degradation of public space and public good in favour of an all-encompassing marketplace.
“Lanes is one way to think of it. Business has its lane in capitalism. Whether or not we forever need it, I don’t know, but it has its lane in capitalism. And then there’s government,” Peters said.
“And part of the role of government is to understand that the market doesn’t, in fact, meet all needs.”
When people suggest the government should operate like a business, Peters added, it’s fundamentally failing to recognize that role.
“I’m just not sure what they think they’re saying, but what in reality they're saying is that it should operate for profit. Because that is what operating a business is,” Peters said.
“If it doesn’t make a profit, the business shuts down, closes up. Or it leans into government loans and contracts, whatever. So should government be profitable? Well, then you have to ask yourself: should profitability supersede social needs and public good?”
The case for government involvement in housing
Peters notes the government used to be heavily involved in housing.
In the early- to mid-1970s, 45% of all new housing had some level of government involvement, whether it was built directly by governments or through loan programs.
By 1985 that had dropped by two-thirds to just 15%.
And in the 1990s, government-owned and -incentivized housing fell off a cliff.
When the federal government announced in the 2022 budget that it intended to build 16,300 affordable homes over half a decade, Community Housing Transformation Centre program director Brian Clifford told The Tyee that that amounted to the rate of affordable housing construction and acquisition by the federal government every year up till the 1990s.
After Jean Chretien’s Liberal Party gutted housing initiatives, direct involvement by the federal government in building or acquiring housing dropped from that rate of around 16,000 to just 1,500 per year, according to The Tyee.
“It made sense for government to be involved in housing, for the very fact that the market was not able to meet all the housing needs,” Peters said.
A conflict of interest
What mayor Ken Sim announced more recently, however, departs from the whole point of public housing, she noted.
“Ken Sim, as mayor of Vancouver, is using publicly collected tax dollars not to build housing for people for whom the market rent is beyond their means, not to address a social value that the market is unable to address, but in order to turn a profit for government,” Peters said.
“Think of the mindset of a mayor in a city with the staggering rates of homelessness and housing insecurity that Vancouver has, where people are literally fleeing the city to find somewhere they can actually afford to live, and he says: ‘You know what? People are making a lot of money on housing. The city could have a revenue stream coming off of housing.’
“That’s just gross. He’s basically taking advantage of the housing crisis. He’s not looking to solve the housing crisis.”
By taking a for-profit approach to building public housing, Peters said the city will be disincentivized to take seriously things like fire code violations — something that advocates say already isn’t adequately addressed by the city.
After a Vancouver rental property was devastated by a fire, displacing 70 renters, inspection reports obtained by CBC through freedom-of-information laws showed the owners were taken to court twice over 25 fire code violations in the building.
Former assistant fire chief Ray Bryant told the CBC it wasn’t the only building that faced a growing stack of violations, while resisting enforcement, taking advantage of a lack of adequate staffing in enforcement and a slow process that relies on property owners acting in good faith.
And adhering to fire codes or other regulations costs money, Peters noted. She questioned how interested the city will be, as a for-profit housing provider, in enforcing the fire code.
“Every cost is an incursion into your profit,” Peters said.
She drew a comparison to government reliance on revenue from gambling in BC, where money laundering proliferated in casinos with lax enforcement from the province.
“So it’s just outrageous. It’s absolutely outrageous for Ken Sim to be taking public land and using it … for the profit of the city, for revenue for the city,” Peters said.
Foregoing taxes for fees
Using rent collected from tenants to keep taxes lower for those who own property is also in line with a longer-term trend away from property taxes, which Peters described as a more “equitable distribution of burden and benefit,” towards a more fee-oriented model of service provision.
In the 2025 budget, for instance, the city reduced its proposed 5.6% tax increase down to a 3.9% increase in part by increasing service fees.
“I’m old enough to remember when a community centre was free. That was the point of a community centre: it was free. … It was just a space for community to get together and be community,” Peters said.
“We’ve moved to smaller and smaller living spaces, and then we’ve even monetized the community spaces.”
And by commodifying space — giving people less space to hold community in their homes, while charging an entrance fee to any public space — Peters said people are being forced to become “mini capitalists,” always a consumer or producer at all hours.
When everything costs money — from hosting your child’s birthday party to building a community of hobbyists in a club — that seeps into how people approach their community, Peters said.
“We absorb the market mentality. If you have to pay for a room at a community centre, which you do now, a pretty hefty price, actually, you’re all of a sudden going to be thinking about your group in a different way,” she said.
“You’ve got to market it. You’ve got to make sure you’re appealing to a large enough market. It changes how you think.”
This, she said, can also be seen in our approach to housing, wherein homeowners are taught to treat their homes as an investment — something that’s fairly new, she added.
“You had a working class culture back in the day, which was very different. Nobody pretended that they were building wealth. They were building a family, and they were trying to survive,” Peters said.
And that is embedded in the language we use in the discourse, Peters added. Homes become “housing units” and quantity is exalted over quality.
Who is government for?
Ultimately, she said, it comes down to Sim’s approach to governance.
The conclusion of Sim’s approach, according to Peters, is a Vancouver that looks less like a city and more like a resort, where poor people are priced or pushed out to create a safe space for the wealthy.
This is reflected in the income levels the city’s new housing venture is catering to. While branded as “middle-income” housing, it is geared towards those making $90,000 to $190,000.
The median household income in Vancouver was $83,500 in 2022, according to the latest Canadian Income Survey by Statistics Canada. But that figure nearly halved to $44,100 for people not in an economic family — that is, households comprised of single individuals.
And there’s similarly a disparity between renter and owner incomes. In the 2021 census, median incomes of owner and renter households in greater Vancouver was $108,000 and $67,000 respectively.
It’s also reflected in Sim’s other recent housing announcement.
At the Save Our Streets Coalition’s conference last month, he announced that the city would halt construction of new supportive housing in the city.
At the same time, Sim is announcing more funding for police in the Downtown Eastside, where the city has, since the 2022 election, stepped up street sweeps to push unhoused people out of sight, as well as unilaterally ending the CRAB Park encampment that a court had previously ruled the city could not close down.
This shift in policy towards displacement comes in response to a 32% increase in homelessness in greater Vancouver between 2020 and 2023. But Downtown Eastside advocates say this response does nothing to actually address the issue of increasing homelessness — an out-of-control housing market — and instead punishes those who are victimized by it.
But the expansion of policing is “the classic example,” Peters said, of how the “small government” neoliberal shift of the 1970s and ’80s never actually meant small government.
Peters agrees that there is a concern about safety — and she sees a role for policing in addressing public safety. But when the public good is being erased with a shrinking social safety net and declining public housing, an expansion of policing is telling of a government’s priorities.
“If you’re providing nothing in terms of public good, if you are saying that you have banned any more supportive housing, and the only thing that you are expanding is policing, then you have de facto declared that that is your response to poverty,” Peters said.
“Who is being prioritized?”
Sim’s pursuit of swagger
It all sums up to an approach that seeks to manufacture a city, rather than letting one form naturally through community.
“My honest feeling from day one, and certainly while I was commissioner and co-chair of the Vancouver city planning commission, is that Ken Sim doesn’t understand. He has no grasp of the role of government in society and what it means to govern,” she said.
“He wants to be seen as on the edge of what he calls swagger. … It’s all very superficial.”
And by moving towards a superficial vision of a city, Peters said what makes a city great gets lost — the arts and culture and those who drive it, who get priced out of the city alongside everyone else.
“Cities, organically throughout history, didn’t have Manhattan without Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx,” she said.
When people talk of great cities, they don’t talk about the great swagger. They talk about great arts and music scenes, of their cultural gravity that draws people in.
And those things, Peters said, come with having space for everyone — not just those who can afford the increasing price of admission.