NDP leader David Eby made a campaign stop in the Comox Valley recently to highlight his plan to promote the construction of 300,000 middle-class homes in the next decade.
Eby toured a home with a new secondary suite and said the NDP would reduce red tape to deliver new townhomes and triplexes.
Housing one of the key issues in the 2024 provincial election and Economist Alex Hemmingway of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives says BC needs 600,000 additional housing units above our current plans by 2030.
He says over the past several decades there has been chronic under-investment in non-market housing, which changed under the NDP but not at the scale needed.
Hemmingway says the solution involves two approaches: addressing the non-market housing shortage and the overall deficit in housing.
The NDP has unveiled a plan to build up to 25,000 new affordable homes for middle-class families over five years.
BC Builds is a housing program the party says will “harnesses the power, expertise and funding power of the private sector, municipalities, community organizations, non-profits and government.”
However, amid the overall shortage of housing in the province, 25 thousand units will not be enough.
Hemmingway says Bill 44 is one area where the NDP government was making progress toward reforming highly restrictive zoning in municipalities.
Bill 44 requires municipalities to change their bylaws to allow at least a secondary suite or up to four or six units per lot, depending on lot size and location.
He says it didn’t go far enough, but it did put the province at the forefront with BC Housing policy in all its dimensions being head and shoulders above other provinces.
Hemmingway say low density zoning in big expensive cities like Vancouver and Victoria means that most of the land is unavailable for apartment buildings.
He says when a particular housing need isn’t fulfilled, people are pushed out and it puts tremendous pressure on other municipalities.
“The most expensive cities,” according to Hemmingway, “have essentially been exporting their housing crisis to other areas of the province.”
The Conservatives want a more market-focused solution for housing with municipalities able to retain low-density neighbourhoods for single-detached houses if they choose.
Conservative leader John Rustad says the Conservatives have a comprehensive plan to tackle BC’s housing crisis and restore affordability.
The Get BC Building plan promises to end the housing shortage, streamline approval processes, and deliver the largest tax cut on housing in BC’s history, the Rustad Rebate.
The Rustad Rebate would launch as a $1,500-per-month exemption in 2026. It would then increase by $500 a year until 2029. The Conservative Party estimates the cost to provincial finances would be about $3.5 billion per year by 2029.
Hemmingway says the Rustad Rebate is a “tax cut dressed up as a housing policy,” and adds it’s not great policy to give a rebate on mortgage interest or rent because the supply side of the Conservative housing policy is weak.
He says renters and buyers will be competing with each other for the same scarce homes, and having more money from a rebate could bid up prices.
Hemmingway says the Conservative platform has no mention of funding for creating non-market housing and housing non-profits, and it “supports not in my backyard municipalities” when it comes to supportive non-market housing.
He says a real surprise is how much the platform “falls down in supporting construction of private market housing,” with talk of repealing some of the provincial zoning reforms that came in last year that would help increase that kind of housing.
Hemmingway says the Green Party housing plan offers a significant expansion of the public investment in non-market affordable housing that we’ve been seeing from the NDP government.
The Green plan calls for 26,000 units of affordable non-market housing in a year.
Another positive part of the Green Party’s platform is the expansion of the NDP’s rental protection fund for buying older private rental apartments to transfer them to non-profit ownership to protect the rents in those units and increase the capacity of that housing sector.
However, Hemmingway says where the Green’s housing platform falls down is that it has little emphasis on addressing market housing expansion to deal with an overall supply shortage.
The Green party opposed Bill 44 which was legislation to open single-family areas to small multiplex or multi-unit projects.
He says the Green Party is talking about zoning reform, but for non-market affordable housing which should be complimented by rezoning for both non-market and market housing.
When it comes to lowering costs, the promises of tax cuts, more from the conservative party but also from the NDP to a lesser extent.
Hemmingway warns, “the appeal tax cuts could come back to bite us” because to bring down the cost of living there are additional public investments needed to meet some of the big challenges faced in BC, such as childcare, housing, health care, the climate crisis, and poverty.
He says in the longer term we do need to raise additional revenues to sustain and increase those important public investments.
Hemmingway says substantial tax cuts can punch a hole in future revenues for public investments and to start bringing the deficit down.
“That’s one area where the Greens have done better,” Hemmingway says, with “revenue raising options in their platform in terms of taxing the rich and corporations.”
The NDP has done a little bit of that with a plan to expand the speculation and vacancy tax, but the scale of revenue increase is relatively modest.
On the subject of infrastructure to support new housing, Hemmingway says the province has an infrastructure deficit and it’s good to see all three parties are promising additional funding to municipalities.
However, he says it interacts closely with the housing question.
Some municipalities have raised concern about housing reform because they don’t have the infrastructure to keep up, something Hemmingway calls “half wrong and half right.”
He says that rolling back zoning reforms for higher density will make the infrastructure deficit more expensive to fix because providing infrastructure for apartment scale housing is much more affordable than providing infrastructure to support urban sprawl.
