Mayor Kennedy Stewart’s 2019 State of the City Address

The following is the full text of Mayor Kennedy Stewart’s 2019 State of the City Address to the Vancouver Board of Trade. This is the first speech where the Mayor will be releasing the full text to the public prior to the start of the speech in an effort to increase transparency and reach as many residents as possible.
Check against delivery.
Hello everyone, thank you for having me.
Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge that we are gathered upon the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations.
I want to thank them for taking care of these lands for countless generations and I am so proud of how we are working in partnership to move this great city forward.
When I was elected a year ago, I told residents my goal was to build a Vancouver that works for everyone. It’s what I ran on. That’s what I believe we can do if we work together.
The people of Vancouver told me to focus on three things in last year’s election:
- Build the right supply of housing — especially at shelter rate and for our workforce.
- Tackle the overdose crisis — by reducing the number of our neighbours who are needlessly dying from poisoned drugs.
- And extend the Broadway SkyTrain project all the way to UBC — so that we can finally connect all of Broadway to the rest of our region.
Three things. It’s what I was working on on day one. That’s what I’m working on today.

So let’s start today by talking about housing.
I don’t need to remind people in this room, the amount of stress our city was, and continues to be, under because of the housing crisis.
When people are struggling to simply stay in the place they love, close to the people they care about, they can’t think about moving forward and building up their lives.
They aren’t thinking about going back to school. They aren’t thinking about opening a business. They aren’t thinking about starting a family.
And if you’re an employer in Vancouver, this stress looks like more and more people leaving town making it harder and harder to attract and retain talent.
In British Columbia, the average cost of processing the turnover of a single employee is $22,750.
That includes costs associated with job postings, interviews, training, on-boarding, and all the paperwork that comes with.
It’s more than just money though, this is a giant hit on productivity — wasted time managers and owners spend on recruiting and training instead of helping customers or developing new products.
When housing doesn’t work for everyone, Vancouver doesn’t work for everyone.
So this is what we’ve done on housing in the last 365 days.
We landed a landmark quarter-billion dollar housing partnership with the Federal Government that will help deliver 1,100 new homes targeting households who are low to middle income. These are homes for workers.
Without this commitment by the Trudeau government, we would not have been able to move forward with these projects. Instead in a few years we’ll be welcoming neighbours into these homes and dropping stress levels across the city.
We also wouldn’t have been able to meet our housing needs without the partnership we have with the Provincial Government and I’ll have more to announce in terms of provincial housing funding in the coming weeks.
But as I’ve said many times before, government funded housing is only a small part of the overall market, and we need to make sure we’re speeding up the delivery of market housing — especially rental — to help move people up the housing ladder and reduce strain on older, more affordable housing stock.
And speaking of internal changes, a lot of my efforts have been in shifting our focus within City Hall and having our incredible staff put as much attention as possible into driving up our workforce housing numbers, This starts with improved permitting times.
I know there’s still a long way to go, but we’ve made some tremendous progress:
- Adding 84 new staff over the past 2 years has helped speed up the end-to-end permit process.
- A nearly 50% reduction wait times in our Services Centre despite a 40% increase in customers.
- Dedicated Social Housing or Rental Tenure team that expedites below market social housing with DP decisions in 12 weeks — a 35% reduction in processing time.
- And accepting 95% of all Trades Permits electronically, with some simple gas and electrical permits now auto-issued so the customer can get them almost immediately
Next week the City will be releasing revised housing numbers and you’ll see an emphasis on this type of housing. These numbers will be updated quarterly so everyone can see how we’re doing and whether we’re moving in the right direction or not.
Next week the City will be releasing revised housing plan report numbers and you’ll see an emphasis on this type of housing.
These numbers will be updated quarterly so everyone can see how we’re doing.
Here’s a sneak peek.

This chart shows our approvals based on build type updated to include Q3 data.
The first set of bars shows how we are doing in terms of the overall plan 72,000 units over ten years. The little red markers show where we should be, and the grey bars show our current status.
We’re on track in terms of social and supportive approvals, condos, laneway houses. We’re behind on purpose-built rental and townhouses.
The second set of bars shows our performance this quarter. We have exceeded our targets on townhomes in Q3 which should help[ us hit our annual targets
But we’re still behind on purpose built rental and have to do better in this area.
What’s more important to me is income bands for which this housing is being built.
Not all purpose built rentals are affordable for all renters.

Frankly speaking, we’re behind on all our targets when it comes to workforce housing.
Looking at our data by household income band, we’re closer to hitting our targets for those households with shelter rate incomes. But well behind when it comes to approving housing for households led by with a single minimum wage worker, two minimum wage workers, or a single living wage worker.
We have to do better in securing more investments from senior governments to deliver rental for households making under $30,000 per year and with the private sector to deliver more rental for those making between $30,000-$80,000 per year.
Moving to overdoses, another issue on which I immediately moved after the election was my promise to launch an Emergency Task Force on Overdoses.
Unanimously supported by council, the task force brought together health experts, people with lived experience, and first responders to develop rapid response actions we could put in place quickly to help stabilize the situation.
Thanks to a lot of work from who I think are the heroes of the city, the death rate has stabilized — but it still hasn’t begun to drop.
That’s how severe of a problem we’re dealing with and it’s why I’ve been working non-stop with senior levels of government to push the envelope and put people at the centre of our decision making by bringing in safe supply.
We always have to remember these are our friends, family members, and neighbours we’re losing.
One person a day in Vancouver.
But the tireless advocate Karen Ward always reminds me:
“Just not dying is not good enough.”

That’s why I’m grateful for the brave innovation that’s happening right now in response to the crisis.
I am also hopeful that moves from council like expropriating derelict hotels like the Regent and Balmoral and projects like 58 West Hastings will aid in improving the lives of what I think is the heart and soul of our city.
In terms of innovation, just a few months ago, I was pleased to give an update on a new pilot project between Vancouver Coastal Health and Vancouver Fire Rescue.
First responders are getting burned out attending to the same people time after time, reviving them only to see them overdose again because we can’t connect them to recovery services.
In this pilot, Vancouver Firefighters follow up with patients a few days later to check in on them and ask if they would want to be connected to Coastal Health Outreach workers.
Once the connection is made, they stand a higher chance of connecting with basic health and housing services that can transition them away from addiction and towards rebuilding their lives.
This is a good news story and I’m so proud of the outreach workers, first responders, and peers who are out on our streets every day and every night fighting to save lives.
Turning to transit, another good news story is how much our region has embraced transit to get around our region.
Here you’ll see how quickly our bus system is growing in terms of boardings:

And here is how quickly SkyTrain is growing:

Collectively, our entire system experienced 18.4% growth between 2015 and 2018, continuing to break records and lead growth across Canada and the United States.
This is what happens when you make investments in high quality, fast and affordable public transit.
We are the envy of North America when it comes to transit ridership growth.
I’m grateful for the funding commitments to date that will see shovels in the ground starting in late 2020 on the first phase of the Broadway SkyTrain.
But folks, I take transit almost every day and I don’t understand for the life of me why this line isn’t going all the way to UBC!
Now I love Arbutus and I mean no offence when I say this but no one wants a SkyTrain to a massive bus depot at Arbutus. They want SkyTrain to UBC!
Students, faculty, workers, researchers, health care professionals — they aren’t heading to Arbutus they’re heading to and from UBC and VHG and on to the downtown, airport, or the rest of the region.
That’s why one of the first things I did as Mayor was go to the TransLink Mayor’s Council and win the votes needed to move up the UBC SkyTrain project timeline and start advocating — as a region — for the Translink Mayors Council Plan to be fully funded.
I am pleased to announce Translink has just asked me to lead the next round of funding negotiations with the federal and provincial governments.
I got off to a good start Monday with a warm call to the Prime Minister about securing federal funding for the Translink Mayor’s Council Plan.
Now, before I continue I want to quickly take a step back from the things that have been done to how they’ve been done.
Over the past year I’ve taken more than 500 meetings with stakeholders and community groups — from a person with a perpetual motion machine to multiple meetings with the Prime Minister.
And in case you don’t believe me, every month I release my calendar proactively to the public so you can see for yourself.
One of my first meetings was with Iain Black — and I wanted to take a moment to thank him for his dedication and service to our City as Chair of the Vancouver Board of Trade for more than 7 years.
And one of my first major speeches was to the VBOT in May and I’m back again less than six months later. I’ve given many similar addresses to rooms like these over the past year and I’ll be back again every year for as long as I am Mayor.
In addition, every two weeks give or take, I hold a media briefing and answer any and all questions reporters have.
I made an early commitment to transparency, even when things are hard. It’s something I believe in deeply is the responsibility of all elected people: to be accountable.
And nowhere is this more applicable than at Council.

I am proud to be working with a Council with no majority party, a record eight women elected, and a place where we can hash out ideas and motions and at the end of the day remain civil and committed to making Vancouver a City that works for everyone.
Sometimes our debates take a little longer and I know we catch flack for amendments and amendments to amendments, but we have had more unanimous votes in our first year than previous councils had in their whole term.
We respect one another even when we disagree.
So let’s talk about how we move forward.
The last time I was here in front of you all, I talked about different kinds of cities.
And I talked about how Vancouver cannot be a museum dedicated to single family homes, but unfortunately that’s what a lot of our policies still are pushing us to do.
We need to be something more dynamic, I’ve called it a Vancouver that works for everyone.
I was in Seattle a month ago, and found a City much like ours that has had to deal with incredible changes in a very short period of time.
Let’s look at what’s happened there.

On the good side, household incomes have gone up dramatically, from an inflation adjusted $69,338 in 2010 to $93,481 in 2018.
That’s a 35% jump in less than a decade, and in US dollars.
The downside to this growth is that a lot of people have been left behind.
Seattle has a homeless population that’s outpaced by only Los Angeles and New York City in the United States, jumping from 2,759 during the one night count in 2010 to 6,320 in 2018 — a whopping 129% increase.
The same growth could happen here, and frankly — in terms of our economy, I think it’s only a matter of time before it will.
And so when it does will we be ready?
We don’t get to pick when an Amazon or Microsoft or Netflix decides they want to provide opportunity but at the same time radically change our local economy.
We only get to decide two things: do we let them? And: will we let this change leave people behind?
Seattle is a city of incredibly bright people, but they just didn’t have the time to plan for what happened and now they’re furiously working to manage the impacts.
We still have time to get ready. I believe we can welcome change while making sure as many local people as possible benefit and not get left behind
So how do we do that? First, we need to continue to focus on workforce housing.
We have huge opportunities with the upcoming City Wide Plan, with the first public hearings on MIRHPP, and with the landmark Squamish Nation development of Sen̓áḵw at the foot of the Burrard Street Bridge.

Sen̓áḵw alone could bring online over 6,000 units of desperately needed housing for our City.
But we still have a long way to go. My goal is to see a lot more workforce housing in every part of our city.
This is part of what the MIRHPP program does for us.
It bends the market to deliver the workforce housing we need in neighbourhoods that have slowly hollowed out over the past few decades as the price of single family homes have skyrocketed out of the reach for most.
In every part of our city we need to have opportunities for young people to not only feel secure enough in their futures that they can raise their own families in the neighbourhoods they grew up in — but they can build businesses and create opportunities for others.
And right now this is an extreme challenge.
This also pressures local business. Skyrocketing property assessments lead to higher rents for businesses, pushing some to the breaking point.
One way to solve this is through split-assessments so that the City can tax the development potential differently than the current use and I’m confident that politicians in Victoria can work across party lines to make this happen quickly.
I’ll also be working with Victoria and Ottawa to advance both our response to overdoses and the plan to build Skytrain all the way to UBC.

On Overdoses we need the federal government to support safe supply.
It will allow us to finally tackle the poison drug supply that has set back years of progress in the Downtown Eastside and stabilize lives so that we can get people into permanent housing.
Vancouver is ready to take this step, just like we were ready 16 years ago with North America’s First supervised injection site.
We are an innovative, forward-thinking, and most importantly compassionate people and expect the Federal Health Minister to help us get there.
I also fully expect this new minority government in Ottawa to accelerate their infrastructure investments and commit to funding the SkyTrain all the way to UBC.
The entire region wants it.

It’s a no-brainer.
The CBC recently called me Vancouver’s lobbyist in chief.
I’d rather think of myself as fighting for our city.
We’re a long way from Ottawa, and there are some days when Victoria seems far away as well.
My job is to stand up for Vancouver and fight for the investments and policy changes we need.
I am one year into a four year mandate, my priorities have been clear from the beginning and they’ll continue to be.
Housing.
Overdoses.
SkyTrain to UBC.
But I’m not just lobbying Ottawa and Victoria: I’m lobbying all of you and the people of Vancouver.
As I said to you all back in May: if you want a museum of a city you elected the wrong guy.

When I think about the future of Vancouver I see a City where you can choose to stay in the neighbourhood you grew up in because we’ve build a range of housing options that everyone can afford.
A City where you don’t need to worry about whether your kids will come home alive after a night out with their friends.
A City where a UBC grad student can get on the Skytrain to a highspeed rail connection to Seattle, pitch the CEO of Microsoft the next billion dollar idea, and get home in time to have dinner with their family and dream about what amazing opportunities lie in store for their children in this beautiful city we call home.
That’s what a Vancouver that works for everyone looks like to me.
