Any time the B.C. NDP government makes a housing announcement, there is one word repeated again and again and again for anyone who will listen: affordable.
Affordability is the frame for all the NDP’s housing policies, programs and billions of dollars of program spending. And yet, despite all that effort, the government’s success in actually achieving anything that a normal person might consider affordable, is questionable at best.
Take for example, 1807 Larch St., a five-storey rental building in Kitsilano that replaced a church near West 2nd Avenue.
BC Housing provided $31.8 million in low-interest financing to the developer in 2021, through its “HousingHub Provincial Rental Supply Program,” to lock 54 units (80 per cent of the building) at “at-or below-market level rents restricted to middle-income households within the provincial middle-income limits” for the next decade.
Yet, despite all that money, affordability is a questionable prospect for the first round of tenants.
The Globe and Mail’s real estate correspondent Kerry Gold highlighted that disconnect in an excellent column last week. Units at 1807 Larch St. range from 393-square-foot studios that rent at $2,750 a month, to 519-square-foot one bedrooms at $3,275 a month and 712-square-foot two bedrooms at $4,299 a month.
That’s the high end of B.C.’s current market rate, Gold reported, and relies partly on BC Housing calculations that the average annual gross income of the person without kids in the studio or one-bedroom units is $131,950, while the families in larger units are up to $191,910.
The numbers are wild.
But even more amazing are the comments Gold extracted from BC Housing’s vice-president Michael Pistrin, in defence of the project.
“The HousingHub program is a supply-based program,” he told Gold. “It’s not an affordability program.”
Not an affordability program?
Someone should have told the NDP politicians that. They’ve spent years saying exactly the opposite.
“New affordable rental homes on the way in Kitsilano,” was the title of the government press release on this exact HousingHub project in 2021.
“Our government is investing in more affordable housing for people who work and live in Vancouver, and throughout B.C.,” was the accompanying quote from then Attorney General David Eby, who is now the premier.
The word “affordable” appeared eight times in that press release.
The Kitsilano project funding was part of $2 billion in additional financing the government pumped into HousingHub in its spring 2021 budget with the promise it would build — and hold on to your hats here — more affordable middle-income housing.
“Two billion dollars in a rotating line of credit that builds affordable housing across this province will be transformative,” said Eby.
“Demand for specific projects from builders already exists for the full first round of funding. And because this money is repaid once construction is done, it will build thousands of units of affordable housing again, again and again.”
The word “affordable” appeared 11 times in that press release too.
And yet, according to BC Housing’s Pistrin in his chat with Gold, loaning developers billions of public tax dollars to help construct rental buildings was never actually about affordability.
“It’s not supposed to be below market at all,” said Pistrin.
“It’s supposed to be ‘at market’ for the most part. In some cases, we can leverage — through the low-cost financing that we’re able to provide during construction — we can leverage that to force the builder to reduce the rents to slightly below market in some cases, for a percentage of the units.
“But that’s on a case-by-case basis … for the most part it was just intended to put market supply out there.”
You don’t say.
So, what exactly did B.C. taxpayers achieve by loaning billions of dollars to developers at below-market rates then, if not an impact on the price of the resulting units?
“The only people getting ahead in this equation is the developer,” said BC Conservative MLA Elenore Sturko, who picked up the story on social media.
“Time and again this is a government that has promised to make housing affordable, but what that means is that you actually need to reduce the cost of it… and what we see here is that we haven’t reduced the cost.”
Earlier this year, Eby quietly shelved HousingHub, shifting the $2 billion in revolving financing into a new “BC Builds” program. The promise now is to leverage public land into (you guessed it) affordable rental housing projects.
It’s too early to tell whether it will actually work this time.
But the BC Builds income thresholds are the same as the ones used for HousingHub. And we’ve seen the ending of that story before. Even though, it would appear, there’s an active effort underway to rewrite the history of what all this public money was supposed to accomplish in the first place.
Rob Shaw has spent more than 16 years covering B.C. politics, now reporting for CHEK News and writing for Glacier Media. He is the co-author of the national bestselling book A Matter of Confidence, host of the weekly podcast Political Capital, and a regular guest on CBC Radio.
