Municipalities need funding, not targets, to build affordable housing

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The B.C. Ministry of Housing recently announced the names of an additional 20 priority municipalities that will be receiving housing targets this summer as part of the Housing Supply Act.

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Seven of these municipalities are in Metro Vancouver, including the city of Langley, Maple Ridge, New Westminster, the city of North Vancouver, Port Coquitlam, Surrey and White Rock.

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In the framework of the Housing Supply Act, priority municipalities are given a housing target order with a cumulative housing figure for a five-year period, for which cities must submit annual progress reports to the ministry.

If a municipality is deemed to be falling behind in meeting its prescribed targets, the province may also appoint an adviser to the city, or even intervene in a city’s bylaws or permitting decisions to ensure that housing targets are realized.

The structure of the Housing Supply Act is premised on the assumption that the primary bottleneck to building more housing in the province is the discretionary planning processes of local governments.

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But this is a questionable assumption: While it may be sensible to do things such as making permitting processes more efficient, increasing zoned capacity and quantifying housing needs, we delude ourselves if we think that these actions by themselves will make any meaningful progress toward resolving the housing crisis.

Instead, the primary barrier that many municipalities face for more affordable housing to be built is limited funding from senior levels of government.

Consider the case of New Westminster, one of the cities recently added to the province’s list of priority municipalities.

In 2021, the city of New Westminster produced a housing needs report estimating that 3,328 units of market housing and 2,083 units of below-market and non-market housing would need to be built by 2031 to meet housing needs in the community.

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City staff provided an update last year showing that development activity was exceeding projected targets for market housing; the city, however, is falling behind in realizing targets for much-needed below-market, non-market, and supportive housing units.

It was a fitting location for New Westminster Mayor Patrick Johnstone’s press conference critiquing the province’s announcement in front of a site where 52 units of supportive housing were approved by city council in 2021 but which still sits vacant as a temporary dog park while B.C. Housing has yet to start construction.

Targets without funding do not build the housing that we need to address the crisis, especially in cities like New Westminster that are already  regularly updating housing targets and building large volumes of market-rate housing.

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In recent comments to the media, Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon asserted that one of the reasons for adding New Westminster to the priority communities list was that the city was working with 2011 data in its projections; but a cursory reading of the methodology section of the city’s Housing Needs Report shows this to be false.

Metrics outlining housing needs, whether produced by the Ministry of Housing or municipal planning departments, are ultimately only of value if they are used by the province as a gauge to scale up its own investments in housing development programs involving greater depth and breadth of affordability.

The province should increase investments in various B.C. Housing programs, such as the Community Housing Fund and Supportive Housing Fund, to be proportionate to the demonstrated need for more deeply subsidized and supportive housing within communities.

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The province’s new B.C. Builds program, which aims to increase the supply of housing affordable to middle-income British Columbians through the provision of land, low-cost financing and grants to housing developers, should be primarily oriented to non-profit housing and should recalibrate its target rents to be more affordable.

The current program framework uses an affordability metric of 30 per cent of gross income for households between the 50th and 75th percentile in B.C. as a guideline: this yields monthly target rents that range from $2,120 to $3,299 for studio or one-bedroom units and $3,360 to $4,798 for units with two or more bedrooms.

To better meet the housing needs of middle-income British Columbians, the program should lower its target rents to be proportionate to what renter households within the 25th to 75th income percentiles in the province can afford and increase funding to make these projects viable.

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The middle quartiles of renter household income in B.C. range from $36,000 to $102,000 with a median of $62,200: accordingly, rents in B.C. Builds projects should span a range from $900 to $2,550 per month with a median rent of $1,555 per month.

In addition to increasing direct investments in housing development programs, the province should also provide funding to municipalities, such as New Westminster, to acquire land that they could use in partnership with the non-profit housing sector to help improve the viability of affordable housing projects.

It is ultimately these types of actions and not unnecessary metrics that would help cities fulfil housing needs, especially for housing that is genuinely affordable to low- and middle-income British Columbians.

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One may object that the framework of the Housing Supply Act provides a necessary corrective to the recalcitrance of some municipal governments to approve socially beneficial housing when faced with opposition from local property owners resistant to new development in their neighbourhoods.

I agree with the spirit of this concern, but from a democratic perspective, the only possible justification for centralizing greater power into the Ministry of Housing is if that power is subsequently diffused outward to groups that have been most harmed by housing systems and historically excluded from decision-making processes about development.

As the housing crisis disproportionately impacts Indigenous communities, diffusing power outward should involve committing to fully funding the implementation of the Aboriginal Housing Management Association’s Urban, Rural, and Northern Indigenous Housing Strategy released in 2022.

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The province should also support a greater democratization of housing by relying less on private development capital to address housing shortages and by investing more in community-led responses to the housing crisis, including greater support for community land trusts, co-operatives, and dignified affordable housing designed by and for those with disabilities.

The leadership that we need to address the housing crisis is not primarily a matter of management through metrics; rather, it is having the courage to transform housing systems to realize the right to adequate housing for all, which involves both building and protecting housing affordable to low- and middle-income households while also ceding power to those who have historically been excluded from shaping housing development in their communities.

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Dr. Elliot Rossiter is a faculty member in the department of Philosophy at Douglas College and director of Changing the Conversation, a multi-year project on housing justice supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 

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