Opinion: BC needs a government that does more on housing, not less

Opinion: BC deserves a government that does more on housing, not less

Burnaby Skyline (EB Adventure Photography/Shutterstock)

Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by Peter Waldkirch, who is a director with Abundant Housing Vancouver.

As BC voters go to the polls, housing will be at the front of many of their minds. We’re in a housing crisis. After decades of under-building housing, BC is short hundreds of thousands of homes. This leads to soaring prices, pushes people out of their communities, and threatens the promise of opportunity Canadian society is supposed to offer.

Getting BC building again is a critical priority, and voters should take a serious look at what the provincial parties are saying about housing. Over the last six years, I’ve spent a lot of time watching council meetings; I’ve seen how difficult it is to build housing. Municipalities have made it impossible to build housing at the scale we need, thanks to antiquated zoning and mountains of red tape.

It doesn’t need to be this way. We build much less housing today, per resident, than we did in the 1960s. Building enough housing is possible, but it will take leadership.

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Since he became premier, David Eby has made fixing our housing shortage a key part of his housing policy. This is a welcome change from previous governments. Eby’s housing minister, Ravi Kahlon, has looked at other jurisdictions to learn what works and what doesn’t. Kahlon has made BC a leader in pro-housing reforms.

Two major planks of the BC NDP’s reforms have been legalizing “missing middle” housing (like townhomes and multiplexes) and more housing around “Transit-Oriented Areas” (TOAs), particularly SkyTrain stations and major bus exchanges.

These are common sense reforms. Multiplexes give homeowners more options to stay in their communities while building the housing they need. Transit-oriented development is broadly recognized as key to addressing both our housing and climate goals.

Unfortunately, the leader of the BC Conservatives, John Rustad, has made it clear his main priority is moving backwards on housing.

Rustad, to his credit, voted for the TOA reforms. However, he has spoken against a key element: the elimination of unnecessary parking minimums in the TOAs, which he called part of an “anti-driving and anti-family agenda”. There’s nothing “conservative” about the government forcing families to buy more parking than they want or need. Reintroducing compulsory parking requirements in transit areas would be a blow to affordability.

Worse, Rustad voted against the missing middle reforms and stated that, if elected, he would repeal them. He has said it’s “crazy,” “authoritarian,” and “hardcore socialist” for the province to directly legalize more housing. This is odd to hear from a conservative since the multiplex reform increases individual property rights.

This rhetoric suggests he fundamentally misunderstands the causes of our housing shortage. Cities have prioritized endless consultation instead of building housing, and it’s time the province stepped in.

One of Rustad’s candidates, Gavin Dew, ought to know about this. Dew has spoken about his efforts to advance a $5 billion “Tech District” investment in Abbotsford. The project failed after four years of planning and negotiations with the city.

Dew called this bureaucratic runaround the “slow maybe,” where local politicians and planners are more concerned with process than results.

This perfectly describes how our cities treat housing. Almost nothing can be built in BC’s cities without site-specific rezonings. This adds cost, delay, and uncertainty to each project. It’s no wonder housing is scarce; everything is subject to a “slow maybe” and years of planning for each individual project.

The federal Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, has attacked municipal “gatekeepers” for blocking housing. Meanwhile, John Rustad is promising to re-empower local gatekeepers across BC.

We have a housing crisis, not a consultation crisis. Fixing this and returning to a “can build” attitude means reforming our broken municipal housing system. The provincial government needs to be a part of the solution. We’ve tried letting cities handle it themselves, and we’ve seen the result.

There’s still much to do. The importance of fixing our housing shortage cannot be overemphasized. Entire generations are feeling betrayed by a society that refuses to make room for them. This isn’t sustainable, in any sense of the word.

The Eby and Kahlon reforms are a step in the right direction, but they’re just a step. They don’t go far enough. In Vancouver, housing demand calls for apartments, not just multiplexes. Housing will continue to be unaffordable here until apartments are legalized on every street, and in every neighbourhood.

The province needs to do more on housing, not less. Our cities give a “slow maybe” or an outright “no” to housing; we need to turn that into an enthusiastic “yes.” So far, all John Rustad and the BC Conservatives have offered on housing is to roll back the clock on necessary reforms and return to the status quo that led to this mess in the first place.

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