Editor:
The heated public hearing and subsequent poor decision making at New Westminster City Council on Monday, Jan. 28 illustrates the poor governance, from all levels of government, on the housing file.
In my view, the housing crisis in the Vancouver area is simple economics - supply and demand. Demand is exceeding supply and thus the price of housing goes up. And if the demand outstrips the supply year after year, the price of housing just keeps going up.
So, why has the demand gone up? The primary reason is the immigration numbers. Under the federal Liberal government, international immigration has increased to 350,000 people per year. Every year. And where do those 350,000 immigrants settle? Primarily in the three major cities - Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. We add tens of thousands of people per year to our already overheated housing market.
For clarity, I am not taking a position against international immigration. There are lots of good reasons for immigration. I am simply pointing out that the federal government hasn’t matched those increasing numbers of immigrants with a national housing policy to ensure that an adequate amount of housing stock is being built for those 350,000 people per year.
Then, on the supply side, the provincial government used to build lots of non-market housing. The co-ops of the 1970s and 1980s are a prime example. But we effectively stopped building social housing in the late 1980s. At least stopping building them in significant numbers.
And to make things worse, our municipal governments have added to that lack of supply by making it increasingly difficult, and costly, to build new housing of all types.
So, as a result of those government policies, we have increased the demand on housing, and at the same time failed to provide adequate supply. Thus, cost of housing has gone up year after year, and has now reach levels that are beyond the ability of many people to pay.
Our municipal councils are caught in the middle. They are the most accessible, and accountable, level of government. Our councillors are hearing it from their citizens every day, and they are expected to respond. If they are not seen to respond, they are most likely to get voted out of office.
Social housing is not the mandate of the municipal government. Their job is to fix potholes, maintain parks, and staff fire halls. But the failure of the federal and provincial governments to coordinate and align the immigration and housing policies have put the municipal governments in an extremely difficult position. Their citizens are demanding that they take action.
So, what do they do? Just like the federal government downloads onto the provincial government, and the province downloads onto municipalities, the local government in turn downloads the problem onto the private sector. The developers. They now demand that the private sector build social housing.
This is dead wrong. It is not the private sector’s job to provide social housing. The private sector’s job is to build market housing, whether market rental, or strata titled or single family housing.
If, as a society, we deem it necessary to provide non-market housing for those people who can’t afford market housing (and I personally think we do), then it is up to us, as a society, to provide this housing. Let’s invest in social housing. Let’s look at this in a comprehensive manner. How can we balance demand and supply? How can be better align our policies? What is the most cost-effective method of building new social housing – and build tens of thousands of new units?
But to simply download the problem that our governments have created over the last three decades onto the private sector is unfair and continues the trend of poor governance.
If New Westminster City Council is serious about doing something positive and making a difference, it should stop putting more obstacles in the way of residential development. Instead, it should encourage the supply of market rental housing of all kinds. Let the supply exceed demand. Or, at least, let supply catch up. In my view, that is the only way to make a dent in this increasing difficult situation.
Bart Slotman
