There’s a nagging persistence to the idea that the crisis of affordability in the Vancouver housing market cannot be adequately addressed through building more homes. The ‘supply skeptics’ claim that demand for housing is and will remain insatiable, and any attempt to flood the market with new homes will not make it easier for low-to-middle income families to afford to buy.
These skeptics influence our policies on things like land-use regulations, which restrict supply. They effect rezoning efforts to allow for more density, making it easier and more credible for NIMBYs to claim that their swath of single-family homes are just fine the way they are, despite being in some of the most constricted and valuable land masses in the country.
It may be true that the market alone cannot provide all the solutions we need. But it’s absurd to suggest that the housing crisis does not demand that we build as many new homes as we can. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of journal articles, research papers and economic analyses which prove over and over that adding new homes moderates price increases.
I believe that adding supply may be the most potent weapon in addressing the crisis, but we can never measure a problem by just one metric.
Too often with the housing crisis, we hear people say it’s all this fault, or that fault – it’s all the foreign investors, or it’s all a density problem. It’s always going to be a collective aggregate of several things. That includes the supply problem, it includes land-use restrictions like the ALR, it includes changes to the Step code which are going to send prices through the roof. We need to approach the problem from a holistic viewpoint.
One report suggests that our supply problem is more dire than we realize, claiming that by next year the Metro Vancouver market will be short by close to 50,000 homes. This assumes a population growth of 65,000 people a year and a market where 10% of new homes are purchased and left empty or used for short-term rentals. This report urges government intervention to assist developers with adding more units to existing projects.
It’s true that government intervention is required to ensure that supply is added both at the scale we need and at prices affordable to a range of incomes. We’ve seen commitments from municipal, provincial and federal governments to work with developers in kickstarting affordable housing projects, and we at ENM are also committed to be a part of that effort when called upon.
We’re always open to partnerships with governments or non-profits to take on affordable housing projects. We want to build, and we want to work with officials who are elected on the mandate to get these kinds of projects off the ground.
