Editor:
Re: “Havies-Not”
Pam Robin understandably laments the luxury housing proposed in The Havies and is concerned that homes are not built for locals anymore.
The truth is that any new housing - regardless of its style - makes existing houses more affordable as long as fewer people want to buy here than there are houses being built. And if more people want to come than there are new homes, the opposite is true.
When people change homes, they want something better than they currently have. Homes have to be relatively more luxurious to get someone to put their current, relatively more affordable home on the market.
As long as local governments and residents on the Coast are prioritizing single-family homes, luxury builds are the only way to meaningfully increase the housing stock and move people out of older homes; particularly because we are not creating more land.
If our community wishes to empower locals to create more affordable housing it can do it by letting homeowners make better use of the land they have. Give homeowners the right to densify their lots by creating duplexes from their existing homes without a zoning variance, reducing minimum setback requirements for lots, or reducing parking requirements in walkable areas.
This playbook, which has succeeded in many, many communities, will mean the building of more housing stock and is not limited to the most well-resourced developers from Vancouver but also the vibrant small-scale home builders on the Coast.
If we want to have housing for locals, we need to have housing regulation that empowers locals to help each other. In the meantime, we should think of luxury builds as symptoms of a problem, rather than being problems themselves.
Spencer Keys
Gibsons
