B.C. has come to a strange moment in the housing crisis. After a huge flurry of policy measures, the provincial government is head and shoulders above any other province in its action on housing policy.
In the last year alone, B.C. has taken new measures including launching the BC Builds program, creating the Rental Protection Fund, regulating short-term rentals like Airbnb, instituting a flipping tax, commissioning standardized designs for multiplexes, reforming development charges and pushing municipalities to ease restrictive zoning policies and move towards more proactive planning policies.
Despite all this, we’re still not meeting the demands of the crisis, which remains severe.
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. estimates that B.C. needs to build 610,000 new homes — that is, 610,000 new homes above current trends — by 2030 to alleviate the housing shortage and meet demand. On the non-market side, our assessment is that B.C. needs to be building at least 25,000 new non-market homes each year.
As part of its ongoing efforts to tackle the crisis, B.C. needs to ramp up public and non-profit housing creation at a much larger scale. The provincial government can take three key steps to do this:
- remove the bottleneck of restrictive zoning;
- increase capital grants and loans; and
- take the initiative to develop more public-sector-driven housing projects in addition to non-profit-led projects.
As my colleague Marc Lee has shown, while public investment in housing has expanded considerably in B.C., the province has moved too slowly towards a housing creation target of 114,000 homes over 10 years (which was too low to begin with).
The recent announcement of funds for nearly 2,000 more social housing units through the Community Housing Fund is positive but not enough.
TOD (Transit Oriented Development) plans should include much more non market housing as a mandate. 20% floor space as “below market rent” is insufficient and that measure is based nowhere in the reality of living costs in Metrovan.
Every 9-plex of apartments needs a subway access built right into the concrete under the shared park/green space where it’ll flow through without conflicting with parking ramps also underneath that open common greenspace.
That just needs to be in the plans offered to City.
Any office tower with less than 50% occupancy should be converted to shops and housing. The first 2 floors should be shops and services and the remaing floors housing. INSTANT WALKABLE COMMUNITIES…
It’s very generally unworkable. They’re built very differently, and the refurb is prohibitively costly. They’ll say they’ve done it, and I say “show me the inspection.”
Build new mixed-use, for sure. It’s awesome.
Remove the bottleneck of restrictive zoning
Anti-NDP? Talking about restrictive regulation? I was going to comment that this paper’s bedfellows were showing.
Glad it makes sense again quickly ;-)
The B.C. government should legislate zoning changes to allow non-market housing to be built
