Kevin Falcon's BC United housing platform includes rent-to-own program

Kevin Falcon (BC United)

With a provincial general election to be held at some point in 2024, BC United party leader Kevin Falcon has released his party’s housing platform outlining what his party would do on the housing front if they were to form government.

The “United to Fix Housing” strategy, featuring four platform promises, is intended to be the “first plank” in Falcon’s housing platform ahead of the election campaign.

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Falcon says his BC United provincial government will create a new rent-to-own program to provide renters with the ability to direct their monthly rent payments towards the home price. This particular program would require developers to set aside up to 15% of homes in participating projects for first-time homebuyers, who would take possession of the home after a three-year period of paying market rents that 100% go towards the downpayment.

For example, a $900,000 home price with a market rent of $3,000 per month over three years would lead to a 12% downpayment of $108,000. Today, market rents in Vancouver are approaching monthly interest payments, given the current marketplace of high interest rates.

Another platform promise would eliminate the provincial government’s property transfer tax to the first $1 million on the home purchase through an expansion of the first-time homebuyers’ incentive. This would save new homebuyers up to $18,000.

Falcon has also included the platform of using empty public land to build affordable housing, with non-profit and market homebuilders provided with a 99-year lease at $1.00 per year. In exchange for the highly nominal long-term lease that retains public ownership of the land, the builders will construct below-market rental housing for families and seniors.

Finally, BC United is vowing to eliminate the provincial sales tax (PST) on residential construction costs to catalyze new additional housing supply. Within Vancouver, for instance, this could save over $2 million on the cost of building a high-rise tower with 350 units and over $150,000 for a six-storey, wood-frame building.

“Under David Eby and the NDP, BC has the highest cost of living in Canada, and more British Columbians than ever have been shut out of the housing market,” said Falcon in a statement today.

“To make housing more affordable, we need to make it less expensive — it’s that simple. Our plan, United to Fix Housing, outlines the initial bold and comprehensive measures we will take to fix the housing crisis and bring the dream of homeownership back within reach. Fixing the housing crisis requires bold ideas and outside-the-box thinking. That’s what BC United is bringing to the table with this plan to help restore the dream of homeownership in our province.”

Ravi Kahlon, the BC Minister of Housing, responded to BC United’s housing platform announcement this afternoon following a discussion on housing with an Urban Development Institute audience in Vancouver, calling Falcon’s plan “underwhelming” and suggested some ideas are already a work in progress by the BC NDP provincial government.

“I was hoping for something substantial that we could have a debate on, but there’s nothing here,” said Kahlon during a media scrum, noting that the rent-to-own concept will be included in the BC Builds program announced by Premier David Eby earlier this week.

Kahlon suggested the long-term nominal lease idea “sounds a lot like Little Mountain [with] the suggestion that they are going to lease it away to someone else and hope that housing is going to get built.” This is a reference to the controversial sale of BC Housing’s Little Mountain site on Main Street just east of Queen Elizabeth Park in Vancouver to Holborn Group in the late 2000s. After the 2021 revelation of the contract terms, the sale was highly favourable to the developer, which has yet to produce any affordable homes a decade and a half after the demolition of the site’s social housing buildings and in exchange for the municipal approval for market housing.

“We’re still dealing with those failed policies from before, and the last thing we need is to go backwards on the wrong direction when it comes to housing,” continued Kahlon, who also suggested BC United’s platform lacks direct public investments into affordable housing.

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