Opinion: B.C.’s big cities must do better to fix the housing crisis

As municipal and provincial elections approach, B.C.’s largest, most-expensive cities should face scrutiny for their role in the housing crisis.

We have a severe shortage of homes, yet cities like Vancouver continue to block apartments across most residential areas, suppressing new housing and driving up the cost of market and non-market homes alike.

Recent improvements in vacancy rates and rents are welcome, but neither these gains nor a few thousand slow-to-sell condos mean our housing shortage has disappeared.

The housing shortage is reflected in high prices and rents, but also in people forced to live with parents, roommates or even ex-partners because they cannot afford to form an independent household. Researchers estimate there are 130,000 to 200,000 of these “suppressed households” in Metro Vancouver alone. That is an enormous unmet demand for more homes from existing residents.

Cities decide where housing is allowed, what can be built on a lot, whether land assemblies are required, what fees are imposed, and whether projects face years of costly discretionary approvals.

Unfortunately, cities too often use these powers to restrict housing or make it too expensive to build, while forcing much of the new housing that is allowed onto noisy, polluted main roads. Vancouver council’s rejection of its villages plan, which would have opened some new areas to low-rise apartments, shows how even modest reform is being blocked.

Provincial zoning reforms held promise, but the B.C. government has let cities end-run them, as Vancouver did with its deliberately restrictive rules for small apartment buildings. If Vancouver had adopted provincial guidelines, an estimated 30,000 more ground-oriented homes would have been built over a decade. Burnaby also backpedalled on its own policy for such housing.

When housing is scarce, higher-income households compete with everyone else for existing homes, bidding up prices and rents. This also strains non-market housing wait-lists as more people struggle to afford market rents. But when new market housing opens, higher-income households can move into it, reducing competition for older units.

Auckland, New Zealand, shows what meaningful city-level reform can accomplish. After substantially easing restrictions on new housing, homebuilding surged. One study estimated rents were 23 per cent lower than they would have been without reform, and another analysis found rents at the lower end eased more than in the middle.

But the market alone cannot solve the housing crisis. B.C. should also build far more non-market housing to ensure everyone’s needs are met. Yet the provincial government recently pulled back on its non-market housing commitments.

Cities can make room for more homes on quiet residential streets and close to schools, parks and jobs. Big cities such as Vancouver should allow at least six-storey apartments by right — without discretionary rezoning — anywhere detached houses are legal.