Q&A: Developer and philanthropist Michael Audain reflects on his many lives

The founder and chair of Polygon Homes talks about his new memoir, housing supply and B.C.’s bright future

To say that Michael Audain has lived a full life would be an understatement. The philanthropist, art collector, and founder and chair of Polygon Homes takes stock in his new memoir, One Man in His Time… Audain, who was born in England and immigrated to Vancouver as a young boy, chatted with BCBusiness about the book, which details his adventurous early years and his path from social activist to real estate developer.

This Q&A is a longer version of the Five Questions interview that appears in our January/February issue.

Some people have assumed that because you’re the great-great-grandson of B.C. coal baron Robert Dunsmuir, everything was handed to you. How far is that from the truth?

My parents were constantly in debt with financial problems until my father married his third wife, who was very comfortably off. She was a British woman. He met her on the Canadian Pacific liner; I think it was the Empress of Scotland coming from Liverpool to Montreal.

My father and my stepmother lived much beyond their means, but apparently there had been a trust fund left by my grandfather for my education. That’s what I found out when I was 21. The Royal Trust Co. asked me to sign a release, and I had no idea that my education, my private schools, had been paid for that way. I didn’t want to sign the release, but they dangled $500 in front of me. I got that, and that proved a useful amount back in those days.

So I was under the impression, actually, that my parents were working hard or going without in order to send me to school. But that wasn’t the case, as I found out. Because even my school uniforms and all sorts of things were bought from this trust fund.

And so that was the way it worked. It’s the old rags to riches in one generation, and then the other way in three. It works that way in families. It certainly did in the Dunsmuir family.

As a teenager, even though you weren’t proficient at other sports, you became a pretty good boxer. Why did you like boxing?

I’m afraid I wasn’t a good boxer. I think I lost two thirds, if not three quarters, of my fights. So I wasn’t a good boxer, but I think I had a hard head, a thick skull, and it was very hard to knock me out. I actually never got knocked out.

Sometimes I’d get what they call TKO’d; they’d stop the fight because they thought I was getting too much punishment. But if I got knocked down, I always got up very promptly. But I didn’t mind it that much. I kind of went along with it because it was a way to meet other boys outside of the private schools I went to, and it was not a difficult sport to engage in.

So I never thought I was particularly good at it. It depended who I was fighting. Usually I was fighting people much older than myself. They were the same weight, obviously, but they were older and stronger. Sometimes at school bouts and that sort of thing, I’d be fighting people with much less experience than myself, so that would be OK. 

In the book, it was eye-popping to discover who you’ve hung out with, whether it’s Tallulah Bankhead or Charlie Chaplin or Ian Fleming. Looking back, what do you make of that? Did it just feel like a normal thing for you to encounter those sorts of people?

You’ve told me your age, so those names would mean something to you. They wouldn’t mean very much to younger people. But I met Tallulah Bankhead when I was very young, and so she was part of the thing. Obviously, Charlie Chaplin was by far and away the most famous person, outside of the boxing champions. I met a lot of the boxing champions from the ’50s and ’60s.

But Charlie Chaplin, of course, I’d seen his films at a very early age. He was a legend by the time I met him, and I was surprised how well he got along with my mother. And I guess he knew my grandfather, who owned a restaurant in London, and so they talked about that.

I knew about your work in the civil rights movement, which saw you jailed in Mississippi, but I didn’t know that you had spent quite so much time in and around prisons. There’s section in the book where you go to jail a couple of times and end up working in a prison.

Well, just overnight, both in ’58. I got lodged in a couple of situations in Ireland and France, and that was very brief encounters. I didn’t actually in either case go to court or anything, so I wasn’t formally charged with anything. But I just ended up in different situations. One was probably my own fault, but the other, I just happened to be staying in the wrong house in Ireland. A lot of things happened in ’58. I was kind of footloose that year, I think.

You’ve travelled a lot, often in adventurous fashion. How important is having those kinds of experiences for people who want to understand the world and make their mark on it?

It’s very, very important to travel when you’re young. Think of Steve Jobs, who spent time in India at ashrams; think of Pierre Trudeau, who travelled very extensively when he was young. I’ve spent a lot of time in Asia more than anywhere else. I think I’ve been to every Asian country except Bhutan, and some of them I’ve been to many times.

I’ve had a number of other adventures in Asia which I’d forgotten about and hadn’t put them in the book. For instance, I had quite a time up in Kashmir. And then Vietnam while the war was on, I don’t think I wrote about that….So I did spend a lot of time doing strange things in Asia, none of which really led to anything except just having an experience.

In Hong Kong, I was trying to make some money in a sideline in Chinese antiques, and that led to a trip to Beijing at the end of the Cultural Revolution. You did meet a lot of people and see a lot of things. I found Asia really fascinating.

And strangely, that’s all outside of Japan. I hardly ever went to Japan, and then I ended up meeting a Japanese woman and marrying her in Vancouver. Since then, I’ve visited Japan on a number of occasions.

Why has art been such a major part of your life?

I don’t think you can explain that. People develop different interests. Some develop interests in woodwork, and others get interested in hockey or dance. It just happened for whatever reason, whether there was genetic source to it or not. I suspect there was something genetic, because apparently my grandfather and my mother were very interested in art. I didn’t really know that.

My mother, who I didn’t spend much time with after the age of four, had been interested in art and knew a lot of artists and that sort of thing. So it might be something genetic, but I’ve never really thought about it too much?

You’ve had five different career paths. Why was it what you describe as a natural progression to go from reform-minded social worker to large-scale residential property developer?

It’s partly a matter of Lady Luck, because often, it’s who you meet. I was working on housing policy for quite a while, living in Ottawa. Then Dave Barrett, who was premier in the early ’70s, asked me to come back to B.C. He wanted me to get a lot of housing built. 

There were only two people in the provincial government who had anything to do with housing. So I immediately phoned up Jack Poole, the CEO of Daon Development, and said, I’ve been asked to build a lot of housing; can you help me? I got to meet him and some other developers, and we came up with a scheme to use the development industry to build a lot of social housing in a short period.

I thought real estate developers were public enemies, and I’d even picketed one or two of them in Toronto. And I found that they were human beings, and they were concerned with their community and their family. And they turned out to be pretty straight shooters. I had a very different image of real estate developers. And so I found that interesting, but of course it took me a number of years and a number of ups and downs before I actually started in the industry myself. It took me probably another seven years, from ’73 to 1980, to establish Polygon.

You also said that during that time, there was this crucial thing that happened where you moved away from dealing with ideas to dealing with people.

I was very much interested in rather abstract ideas. I started out being a big fan of the French Revolution because I was very interested in French history. I actually went to university for a year in France, and liberty, equality, fraternity and all the rest of it.

But then I found that when you want to do things as a society, unless you’re a writer or do something on your own, if you want to really get things going, you’ve got to involve people, and you’ve got to develop relationships with people. That was a bit of a revelation to me.

So I became interested in people for the first time, and I understood the importance of building relationships, which I think is absolutely essential to being successful in business. I don’t like to use the word “successful,” but it means in a sense that you’re keeping your head above water; you’re glad you’re not going under.

Some of my friends from way back in the early days, they’d probably accuse me of selling out for money. But for the first 10 years I was in business, after I started Polygon Homes [in 1980], I didn’t really make any money. We had a terrible recession in the early 1980s, and it took a long time for the province and the housing market to climb out.

But I just really enjoyed the opportunity to build housing that people would want to rent or buy. I found it a very satisfying business in terms of supplying a basic need. And then you learn over time how to design and build it better, and all the intricacies of the business that we operate today. So I think it’s been a wonderful business, and I’m so pleased to have ended up in the business, a field I never dreamt of doing when I was younger. I never studied business in the slightest, so everything I’ve learned is by the seat of my pants—and making mistakes as I go along, too.

What are some of the things that you think Polygon did right to become a successful company?

Oh, boy, that’s a big question. The one thing is, we are very market-oriented. We’re very close to the market and what people want and need, and what they can pay. It’s very different if you’re going into a new city or a new country. I’ve done things in Thailand, for instance. I was a partner in business in Bangkok building housing. No way would I have ever said I was close to the market there.

First, we’ve built so much. And we spend a lot of time analyzing what we do, and the senior management of the company keeps very close to the design and to the marketing. So I think that’s at least partly why the company has prospered and done well.

The other thing is, we have a culture of continuity. Most of us have been together a great many years, and we just focus on the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. We build from Abbotsford to Squamish and pretty well everywhere in between. But we’re not flying around to different cities and just touching down for a few hours and then moving on. We’re very close to what we’re doing. For instance, today I was getting a report of what’s going on in Abbotsford, about how people who live in Abbotsford and in Chilliwack can’t get to work, because they can’t get to Abbotsford [due to the flooding in November 2021].

So we’re just very close to all of the people associated with our company, and we build and operate where we live, and we’re very committed to British Columbia. We love the province, and we believe very much in its future. Most of our people, they grew up here and went to university here, or BCIT or whatever. And so we’re very much a part of the local scene and have been for a great many years. So deep roots, I would say, in the province, and people with a great affection for it. Like many Vancouverites and B.C.-ites, we wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.

As you point out in the book, there aren’t any quick fixes to the housing crisis. But you’re firmly on the side of increasing density, right?

I am, and it’s interesting that finally, I think, the provincial government is coming around to recognizing that you can’t fix the very high housing costs that we have here just through demand-side programs. You have to expand land supply.

It’s difficult for the government because they don’t control the supply of land; it’s controlled by the municipalities. Often, we may have a building where we’d like to say, OK, you can go 16 floors. And I say to people, Well, why aren’t we going 30 or 40 floors on the same site? Why are we only going 16 floors? And of course, they bring out all the local zoning and everything. 

But then I say, We’re talking about a site which is right on the SkyTrain, and it’s not going to make a bigger footprint. It’s going to have the same amount of landscaping, green space, everything else. Why aren’t we building more housing on this site? And I don’t really get a good answer for that.

But the municipality will have an answer because they know that the development can be disruptive to local communities. And they are close to their constituents, their ratepayers. And so they make decisions which inhibit development and inhibit building the housing supply that we need for both our present population and the future growth of the Lower Mainland.

So that’s the difficulty: then people complain to the province, because the province doesn’t have the zoning power. In a number of jurisdictions such as Ontario, California and others, the higher level of government is taking more responsibility and approving developments where they think they will enhance housing supply, because they can’t just leave that to the local area government.

That’s certainly been the case in the U.K., for instance. The U.K. overrules local jurisdictions who are inhibiting growth in housing supply all the time, because you can appeal to Westminster for a decision. In Ontario, they have an appeal board also.

So I think that’s something the provincial government’s going to have to come to terms with. Because if I was the premier, I wouldn’t like always to have all these complaints about high rents and exorbitant prices for homes—and not be able to do anything about it.

Because it’s a question of land supply, which is controlled by the myriad of municipalities we have in the Lower Mainland. In Metro Vancouver, I think now they have something like 26 municipalities and jurisdictions, if you count some of the First Nations reserves. I mean, that’s just ridiculous. So either you go to a metropolitan government like Toronto did, or Winnipeg, or you have to have some higher authority, and it’s really part of urban policy. It’s got to be connected with transit. Transit and housing density should go together.

READ MORE: Pandemic helps push Metro Vancouver home sales to record high in 2021

Much of the book is about you as a young person. When you look at people today who are just starting out, do you have a message for them?

The big message I have is that they’re very lucky to be living in British Columbia. I really believe in the future of our province, and I think the future is just as bright as when I arrived here in 1947, just short of the age of 10. And I think there are big opportunities ahead.

One of the great resources we have is an abundance of water compared to other parts of the world. We don’t want it in the quantities we had it [during the recent floods], but it can be used for so many things. It can be used for industrial purposes; it can be used for agriculture; it will help grow trees; it can be used for aquaculture. 

And most importantly, it’s a great source of clean energy. I believe that we need to have a commission that studies the application of clean, reasonably priced electricity and how this can transform our society.

Believe me, they’re doing that in Quebec; there’s a great emphasis. It’s Quebec and British Columbia which are going to have the surplus of hydro-generated electrical energy in North America; these are the two places. And they are studying and developing industries now which can use that energy to improve the economy of their respective provinces.

And so I think that is going to be a huge advantage for us in the future. I’m sure forestry and mining will continue, but they will have lesser importance as the years go on. So I think we’re very lucky to live in this wonderful province.

And I’ve got a great-granddaughter. She’s just eight months old; she lives in Squamish. And I see a great future for her living in British Columbia.

And I think the changes in the population, particularly of Greater Vancouver, are very salutary for the future. Because we’ve become a mixed-race society in the Lower Mainland. And this is really the society of the future, where all the peoples come together and interact, both in their own communities and with each other. And hopefully we can shed any racial feeling we have about each other and learn and benefit. The interaction certainly makes it a diverse society. It’s a very interesting one, and we can be perhaps even a world leader in that regard.

Quick facts about Michael Audain