As campaigning begins in earnest in advance of the October 15th election, I can't help but look back 14 years when I was a candidate for Vancouver City Council. I lost. But while undertaking an internet search to see how many votes I did get (it was 44,353 which made me the NPA's first loser!) I came across this Monte Paulson article, written for the Tyee. While much of it is personal, HOUSING AFFORDABILITY was a key issue in that election, and at the end of the interview I put forward ten affordable housing ideas that I would suggest are still particularly relevant. But judge for yourself.
Michael
Geller, New Blood for NPA
Monte Paulsen 28 Aug 2008TheTyee.ca
Vancouver’s reigning party stumbled, says developer who seeks one of its council slots.
“When I told people that I was thinking of running for Vancouver City Council, invariably their first question was, ‘With which party?’” boasted Non-Partisan Association candidate Michael Geller. “I want to flaunt that. Because I like to think that while I’m running with the NPA, the values that I bring could fit with all of the parties, including COPE.”
Geller, an architect and
developer, is one of just two political newcomers on the NPA’s slowly emerging
council slate. The other is former banker David Lee, who is expected to join
the race within days. Geller and Lee will be touted as new blood within
Vancouver’s oldest political party, and as proof-of-life for the city’s fractured
centre-right.
But in a wide-ranging interview
with The Tyee, Geller painted himself less as a saviour of the NPA than as a
lowercase non-partisan who doesn’t agree
with everything his party has done, and wants to help all sides figure out how
to fix the city’s affordable housing crisis.
“In hindsight, I think my
children probably would have been happier if I’d run with Vision Vancouver. My
wife even commented that I might have a better chance of winning if I was with
Vision,” he chuckled.
“But, just to show that I’m not a
complete idiot, I am a candidate for city
council under the NPA banner. I would ask you, if I were trying to get
nominated under the Vision banner -- given all those other candidates -- do you think I’d get
a slot?” Geller asked. “So maybe I wasn’t so stupid.”
‘I wanted to put up buildings’
Michael
Geller, now 60, is that rare individual who seems to have known what
he wanted to do since he was a boy growing up along Bathurst Street in North
Toronto.
“I wanted to put up buildings,”
he said. “When I was very little, I got something called Bayko. It was a children’s toy, sort of like Lego, and
you made little houses. I think it influenced my life.”
He studied architecture at the
University of Toronto, and went to work for housing innovator Irving Grossman.
“I was doing stacked townhouses at 21 years of age,” he said. “I’ve always had
an interest in multi-family housing.”
Geller joined the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation in 1972,
where he designed homes for seniors and people with disabilities. With the
CMHC, he moved to Vancouver in 1974.
“My first assignment was to do a
map of Granville Island.” He went on to manage the development of social
housing on the south shore of False Creek.
“It was a fabulous time,” he said,
“because that’s when CHMC had money. We had co-op housing programs. Non-profit
programs. There was more money, often, than there were projects to be funded.”
Geller joined The Narod Group in
1981, and later started his own development firm. He has served as president of
the Urban Development Institute, and has written extensively about architecture for The
Vancouver Sun, among other activities.
Asked to name the developments of
which he’s most proud, he named the creation of three seniors-oriented housing
projects on the west side (including one at Larch and 41st), the redevelopment
of the Westin Bayshore in Coal Harbour and UniverCity, Simon Fraser University’s planned community
on Burnaby Mountain.
‘Pangs of regret’ drive desire for
change
Noticeably absent from Geller’s
list of accomplishments is the development in which he and his family reside.
Deering Island is a private
refuge just south of the Southlands, on which Geller helped develop 32
waterfront homes.
“This isn’t on the list because
it didn’t turn out as well as it should have,” he said.
Geller had hoped to create a more
New Urbanist style community, with a narrow, tree-lined lane winding among a
mix of town homes and traditional white waterfront residences.
But he said the city nixed the
narrow road, the parks board killed the cherry trees, and Deering Island
devolved into yet another monotonous row of suburban mini-mansions. Geller is
particularly critical of the role played by former city councillor George Puil.
It was a bitter defeat for a man
reputed to be a tough negotiator, and one who drives his Toyota Prius home
every evening.
“Often, as I arrive, I feel
little pangs of regret for what this could have been,” he said.
Those pangs are part of why he is
running for council. For the past three decades, he’s watched how council
decisions have literally reshaped the city, and he thinks council can do
better. Specifically:
“The first thing is the Downtown
Eastside. I would like to be on council when the tide changes in terms of
things starting to get better rather than continuing to get worse,” he said.
“Affordable housing is the second
thing,” he said. “I live in a 3,600-square-foot home. I’m lucky, and I know it.
But my two adult children are also living here at the moment. I know from their
experience what you get for $800 a month -- and they can’t really afford $800 a
month.”
Third, he’s concerned about what
he sees as the city’s faltering social fabric.
“Having taken a year off and
travelled around the world... I came back and discovered that Vancouver wasn’t
quite as happy a place as it seemed to me when I left,” he said. “I saw so much
more life in European cities.”
Having stood before Vancouver
City Council so many times himself, Geller believes he could facilitate better
outcomes -- and maybe settle a few old scores.
“One irony is that George Puil is
now a development consultant, and one day may well come before me on council,”
he chuckled. “I intend to show him the same sense of fairness that he always showed
me.”
‘A new aura to the NPA’
Many of Geller’s long-time
friends were less surprised to learn that he is running for council than they
were to discover he is running within the Non-Partisan
Association.
“The simple answer is that the
NPA approached me,” Geller said. He credited Jost Bakker, a fellow architect
and former chair of the party’s nomination committee, for making the pitch.
“At that point, the party was
split between Sam and Peter, genuinely split. Some directors were for Sam, some
for Peter. And given my personal interests, it didn’t really matter to me
whether the next mayoral nominee would be Sam or Peter. I could see pros and
cons to both. I didn’t know either of them really well,” Geller said.
He’s since come to know NPA
mayoral nominee Peter Ladner and
his NPA running mates much better.
“I think Ladner is a remarkable
guy. And I can’t understand why he isn’t more popular, because he has all the
qualities I would love to have,” he said. “Suzanne Anton and Kim Capri both
strike me as reasonable, caring, thoughtful people. I am quite proud to be
running with them.”
Geller is advising his supporters
to make up their own minds.
NPA from a Jewish perspective
“I would like to see the best
people win,” he said. “I don’t know all the candidates yet. But I’ve already
gone on record as saying I will be voting for some people who are not in my
party if I think they are better. And I think everybody should do that. They
should vote for the best people.”
And he seems to enjoy confronting
people -- including some within his own family -- who would have preferred he
run within Vision.
“When a friend of mine who is
associated with Vision heard that I might be running with the NPA, she asked,
‘How can you run for the NPA? The party is not sympathetic to the Jews. The NPA
once had a major fundraiser on the holiest night of the year. They had their
annual general meeting on the first night of Passover,’” Geller recalled.
“I told her, ‘Yes, that’s true.
But if I’m elected, they’ll never do that again.’”
He believes that in the wake of
the Sullivan era, Vancouver’s oldest political party is changing.
“There’s potentially a new aura
to the NPA,” he said. “We really are quite a diverse lot. I am not an old
Vancouver, Anglo-Saxon protestant blue blood. I’m a Jewish guy from North
Toronto.”
He added, puckishly, “Besides,
I’m still more left than one of the Vision mayoralty candidates.”
NPA ‘wrong’ at Southeast False Creek
The Tyee asked how Geller, who
spent the first decade of his career developing social housing, could support a
party that cut social housing at
Southeast False Creek, and back-peddled from the city’s commitment to build
social housing in conjunction with the 2010 Winter Games.
“I can see certain policy issues
that I think were wrong. I think in Southeast False Creek, that’s one that I
would have done differently,” Geller said.
He added that the NPA-led council
acted on advice of staff, which, in hindsight, significantly underestimated how
much money the city land would fetch.
“I actually did feel that the
party needed some more fiscal strength, when I looked at the list of
candidates. But I feel we’ve now got that with the upcoming announcement of
David Lee,” he said.
“Southeast False Creek isn’t
finished,” he added. “More importantly, there are a lot of other potential
projects where more socially sustainable decisions can be made.”
Sullivan no ‘born leader’
Likewise, Geller was blunt when
asked why the NPA-led council appears to have abdicated the development of new
social housing to Housing Minister Rich Coleman.
“I think a lot of people did
criticize Sullivan because he was not a born leader. I think he’s a very clever
guy, but not a born leader,” Geller said.
“I think that the NPA, on some of
these issues, has not done as well as other parties might have done,” he added.
But, he added, “Many of the
things that the NPA has stood for over the years are policies that I would
basically support.”
And he said Vancouver continues
to be admired for its achievements toward social and environmental
sustainability.
“I think you might be a little
too harsh,” he said. “Have you seen what’s happening in Edmonton and Calgary
and Winnipeg?”
Things the city can do
Geller is hardly alone in naming
housing affordability as among Vancouver’s most pressing problems. NPA, Vision
and COPE candidates all cite the issue. And at some point, most candidates cite
the withdrawal of federal and provincial funds as primary causes of the
problem. Mayor Sullivan went so far as to make the lack of funding from senior
governments a central theme of his term in office.
As a social housing developer in
the 1970s, Geller has forgotten more details about former federal funding
programs than most of his competitors will ever know. But what distinguishes
Geller from the rest of the pack is that he is literally brimming with ideas he
believes would lead to the creation of more affordable housing, and nearly all
of his proposals could be implemented with or without new funding.
Ten of Geller’s ideas are
outlined below.
“The biggest thing has to do with
the spirit of cooperation... No developer, non-profit, or government can do
these things alone,” he said.
“I like collaboration. I
particularly like strange bedfellows. And I take pride in working with people
who you wouldn’t normally expect me to work with.”
Geller’s To Do List
During his Tyee interview,
Michael Geller tossed out 10 ideas he says would create more affordable housing
in Vancouver. They are:
- Reduce parking requirements. Overturn the existing
formula to make current minimum parking requirements the new maximums.
“How can you build a 450-square foot, one-bedroom
suite, and then have to pay $55,000 for the underground parking space?”
- Allow secondary suites in
apartments and townhouses.
“This could increase the stock of rental
accommodation. At UniverCity, second and third bedrooms have their own door to
the corridor, and provisions for small kitchens, so they can be rented out as
mortgage helpers.”
- Encourage back lane housing,
mews and other ‘infill units.’
“This won’t work everywhere, but needs to be
encouraged as an affordable solution. We also need to rethink what a laneway
can look like.”
- Fee-simple row houses.
“Why should young families and other homeowners who
can least afford it be forced by a condo association into paying someone else
to cut their tiny plot of grass?”
- Encourage alternative forms
of family housing. Semi-detached homes, triplexes and
four-plexes can be build alongside single-family houses.
“It would have been so easy on Deering Island to
allow some of the lots to have had semi-detached units. But the zoning blocked
it.”
- Facilitate light-weight
steel construction as an alternative to concrete for mid-rise buildings.
“An affordable alternative between wood-frame and
concrete construction.”
- Shrink the lot size. Allow corner lots to be
redeveloped into two single-family lots.
“You can do a very nice detached housed on a
25-foot lot. For those neighbourhoods stubbornly determined to fight
townhouses, at least let’s get smaller single-family houses.”
- Lease city land at graduated
payment rates to
organizations developing affordable housing.
“If you can reduce the land component by not paying
for it up front, you can begin to help reduce the cost of developing new
housing.”
- Encourage creative
partnerships
between the private, non-profit and public sectors.
“There are a lot of churches and other
organizations that have parking lots or other land on which they could build a
project that might provide both housing and space for community amenities.”
- Speed up the approval
process.
Zone for more flexible development.
“Buyers wind up paying the carrying costs of unused
land. Who do you think reimburses a developer who pays interest on a site for
two or more years before he can even begin construction?”
