Profiling Vancouver's political parties: Progress Vancouver, led by Mark Marissen

The main issue for Progress Vancouver is a pretty common one for many local residents: housing, housing, housing.

"A lot of people, a lot of young families, are making the hard choice between whether or not to have another child or living in the city," said Mark Marissen, Progress Vancouver's mayoral candidate. 

"And for them, I don't think that the city has been speaking to them."

A longtime political strategist — though he's emphasized his work with non-political groups during the campaign — Marissen is hoping to make the transition from backroom politics to the front. Running with him are six council candidates: May He, Mauro Francis, Morgane Oger, David Chin, Marie Noelle Rosa and Asha Hayer. 

Of the five Vancouver parties with a mayoral candidate, Progress is the only one without any elected officials at the moment.  

So what would progress in Vancouver look like under Progress Vancouver?

'We're not welcoming people'

Much of Progress's campaign revolves around the fact that Vancouver is growing more slowly than many other municipalities in the region, and therefore losing its momentum.

"Surrey is welcoming people. Burnaby is welcoming people," he said.

"We're not welcoming people at the rate that they are because of the fact that it takes so long to get things done."

To that end, Marissen wants to dramatically increase the amount of housing in the city. Progress supports the Vancouver Plan and Broadway Plan but also promises to allow six-storey rental and four-storey condos across the entire city — not just on busy roads, which Mairssen argues "reduces quality of life for renting families and displaces local small businesses." 

Progress also promises to create a Civic Housing Corporation that would directly build and manage mixed-income housing and have 50 per cent of all new homes in the city be rentals.

"I am enthusiastically pro supply," said Marissen. 

"We manage land use policies. The other factors [for affordability] that we have no control over are interest rates and the actual price of homes … but we do have control over land use."

At the same time, Progress also has housing promises on things it has no direct control over, including pushing the province to allow a change to the Vancouver Charter so a luxury homes surtax could be enacted on the top one per cent of properties and "secure senior government funding for deeply affordable housing."

Different from Kennedy Stewart?

While Progress has not released its full platform yet, the party has several promises on safety and drug issues, including establishing a citywide drug toxicity analysis service and expanding grants for rehab centres and detox beds.

The party also has an environment platform, which promises to build more separated bike lanes across the city, requiring cooling systems in buildings to have a maximum temperature for rooms and launching an air quality strategy. 

But even on these subjects, Progress' has a strong focus on building more housing: Marissen promises to build more social housing outside the Downtown Eastside and use more vacant land to operate temporary emergency outdoor shelters. 

The first point in its environmental platform is "reversing suburban sprawl by updating land use policies to build compact, walkable, transit-oriented communities throughout Vancouver."

These are general principles that have guided Vancouver's city hall in recent years, but Marissen argues he would be different from Stewart in a couple of key ways. 

First, he said he would be more strategic in lobbying higher levels of government, pointing to Stewart's focus on the safe supply of drugs as an example. 

"He spent so much of his political capital talking about decriminalization ... which I support," he said. 

"But he's only recently started talking about getting people on the path to healing into recovery, and that's the most important priority."

And second, he would be more efficient.  

"They are moving too slowly, and that's a pretty big deal," he said. 

"It's all fine and good to have some good policies, but if you're not making them happen, that doesn't mean much."

CBC News will be profiling all 10 political parties in Vancouver ahead of the municipal elections in October.