The City of Burnaby is already making moves on the housing front, following the federal Liberals’ budget announced earlier this week.
The city is planning to put out two calls for proposals now that the Liberals have set aside more than $208 million for the affordable housing innovation fund – roughly double what provinces were previously receiving for housing.
Coun. Colleen Jordan hopes some of that money will help transform two city-owned sites into non-market, low-cost rental housing.
“This new program the feds are putting up looks to me like financing through Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, which hasn’t happened for 20 years,” Jordan said. “A group could say, we’d like to build a co-op, family housing, and we’re working on putting that out in the next couple of weeks. So hopefully, one of these projects will be shovel-ready as they say.”
Burnaby has two properties, one on Sixth Street and another on Hastings Street, and Jordan is hoping a non-profit will step forward to build non-market rental housing, possibly a co-op or some form of seniors’ housing.
“We’ll be keeping the land, but leasing it to them for nominal costs,” Jordan said. “The fact we’re putting forward the land makes the costs of rent really considerably low. We’ve done studies that show you could probably get a two-bedroom for $1,200 a month, something like that.”
Jordan also lauded the Liberals for bringing in a national housing strategy, something that’s been lacking for decades.
The budget includes $30 million over two years to continue rental subsidies for people in housing co-ops.
Burnaby South MP Kennedy Stewart was pleased to see $500,000 in the budget for Statistics Canada to gather data on foreign buyers in the country’s housing market, something he’s been calling for in Parliament.
The Liberals are also delivering on their plan to run a deficit, but at a projected $29.4 billion, it’s nearly three times larger than anticipated. They don’t expect to balance the books until 2019.
What local MPs said about the new federal budget:
- “It’s such a change to have a government spending a lot of money. … We’ve been in the desert forever, and then someone offers you a glass of water, and you think they are the most generous person in the world. … I think people are so happy to be rid of Stephen Harper, they’ll allow this leeway (on the deficit) in this budget, but he won’t be able to do this again.” – Burnaby South MP Kennedy Stewart, NDP
- “He promised to lift seniors out of poverty. What we see today is an increase in the guaranteed liveable incomes supplement that amounts to $2.59 cents a day to seniors who are struggling far below the poverty line. To me that’s so disrespectful.” – New Westminster-Burnaby MP Peter Julian, NDP
- “From a high level, a lot of things we talked about in this campaign, and the year and a half leading up to the campaign have been delivered in this budget.” – Burnaby North-Seymour MP Terry Beech, Liberal
