Here Are the Next Big Steps to Fix the Housing Crisis
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.
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