BC mayors unveil ideas to solve housing crunch
Posted February 1, 2018 12:03 pm.
Last Updated February 1, 2018 3:47 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – A province-wide foreign buyers tax, city control over affordable housing zones, and allowing landlords to increase rents at faster rates are just some of the recommendations BC mayors unveiled today as part of their housing affordability strategy.
The 32 recommendations made by the Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM) focus on three areas of building more rental units, curbing speculation, and addressing homelessness.
One of the recommendations sure to draw attention is allowing landlords to raise rents slightly higher than the annual cap if that money is used to maintain and rehabilitate of their building as part of a renewed Residential Rehabilitation program.
The idea stems from the recommendation that building new supply alone cannot solve the housing crisis, according to Port Coquitlam Mayor Greg Moore, and landlords should be encouraged to maintain current units.
“This should not result in anybody losing their home if a renovation occurs, and the landlord would have to prove to the local government before they got a building permit that if people needed to be displaced, that they had a solution to where they needed to move to,” Moore said, adding the report recommends enhanced tenant protections.
The provincial government has already committed to building 114,000 units of rental housing over the next decade, a move supported by the UBCM.
Moore would also like the province to create a new, lower tax class for rental housing.
“Why not have – like Ontario and other provinces – the ability to have a different property class for non-market housing? So, as cities, we can then participate in giving some property tax incentives for non-market housing to be built,” he said.
The recommendation is coupled with the desire for the province to give municipalities the power to create affordable housing zoning. Currently, only the province can zone land as affordable housing.
Interior mayors would like to see the foreign buyers’ tax expanded from Metro Vancouver to the whole province and adjusted to curb both foreign and domestic speculation.
“There’s certainly the foreign buyers in the Lower Mainland area but it’s foreign and domestic across BC,” Regional District of East Kootenay director Wendy Booth said. “We have quite an Alberta influence. We may consider that domestic, but it still has an impact on our housing crisis.”
Other long-discussed recommendations include regulating short-term rentals, reducing pathways to homelessness and enhancing services to get and keep people out of homelessness.
