One of the big issues facing all levels of government these days is clearly housing.
It’s also clear that there are several housing challenges. There’s housing the homeless, there is affordable housing for young couples wanting to purchase a first home. There is the issue of skyrocketing prices in our bigger cities.
There is no one solution. It would help if the federal government got back in the game. With the last Liberal government with Paul Martin as finance minister, balancing the budget became a big issue, and in trying to balance the federal budget Mr. Martin basically deserted the housing file and left it to provinces and cities to deal with.
Since then the issue has become more and more critical, with homelessness rising right across the country. Little market rental housing has been built, and owning a home has become more difficult even for middle class families with good incomes.
In cities like Vancouver and Victoria, people from around the world have been pushing up the price of housing, and in smaller places like Qualicum and Comox, people are moving in from places like North Vancouver and Coquitlam. They cash in on the booming real estate by selling homes that have dramatically increased in value and moving to the island, buying very nice homes for a fraction of the house they sold on the mainland and putting hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, in the bank tax free.
Vancouver is moving to free up city-owned land to build lower cost housing. The province has tried to help the homeless situation by buying up many single occupancy hotels and converting them into much more livable spaces. The province also provides thousands of homes for low-income people through BC Housing, but it never seems to be enough.
Rent supplements have been provided for low-income people, but that never seems enough either.
The last B.C. government moved at the last minute to tax offshore buyers, and while that may have cooled the red-hot market for a time, it didn’t really address affordability. It just made it harder to sell a two- or three-million-dollar house because it reduced the number of buyers for those high-end homes.
That didn’t make a three- or four-hundred-thousand-dollar home any more within reach of that first-time buyer. The government then moved to provide up to $37,500 interest free for first-time buyers on homes under $750,000. Critics say that will just increase the asking price for homes in that bracket.
Time will tell.
What we don’t need time for is knowing that unless the federal government decides to return to an issue it abandoned two decades ago, not much will happen to ease the burden on provincial and local governments or the burden on low- and middle-income families dreaming of a home they can afford.
The thought of home ownership or even reasonable rent seems more and more like a dream.
