The problem is the government got out of housing. That's why the government is deregulating housing

David Eby is willing to point the finger at 2000s BC Liberals for causing the housing crisis by divesting from housing. So why isn't actively building housing his top priority?

“The bottom line is that governments made the decision — in the ’90s at the federal level and in the early 2000s in British Columbia — that they would get out of the business of building housing. That was a huge mistake.”

That was part of how premier David Eby opened a town hall event on housing recently. The event, which seemingly was marketed entirely through robocalls and unsolicited text messages, comes as the BC NDP forges ahead with a series of new housing bills, apparently in an effort to drum up support for the moves.

Early on in the event, just a few minutes after Eby and housing minister Ravi Kahlon’s opening remarks, the government polled attendees: which NDP housing policy do we agree with? We had five options, and given Eby’s line at the start of this event, I’m sure we all knew what was coming: the Socialist Comrades would lean heavily into public housing.

…Right?

What were those five options, again?

1. Speculation and vacancy tax

2. Restricting short-term rentals

3. Adding density in single-family detached neighbours

4. All of the above

5. None of the above

Oh. Right. So it turns out not one of the options for people to support were public housing — no effort to justify its current public housing efforts, nor to gain support for a future push.

For anyone who has been paying attention to recent housing announcements from the provincial and federal governments, this likely won’t come as a surprise.

For a party whose roots are deeply embedded in social democratic principles, the NDP has been hyperfocused on electability politics, particularly with a highly centrist market approach to a number of issues, but especially in housing. To be fair, the provincial and federal governments have ramped up social housing investment in recent years, but to nowhere near the levels required to catch up to the need created by our multi-decade abandonment of government-built housing. According to one paper, government was, at one point, involved in 45% of new housing, a figure that dropped to 15% by the 1980s.

The latest series of housing bills, announced in October and November, double down on a market approach, despite Eby himself saying that’s part of what caused the housing crisis.

What were the bills?

Bill 35 effectively restricts short-term rentals, like AirBnB or VRBO, to primary residences. Bill 44 removes public hearings on zoning amendments where the proposed zone matches what’s in the official community plan, and it overrides exclusionary single-family housing zones, allowing up to four units in most areas and up to six units near transit. Bill 46 forces municipalities to create consistent community amenity charges for developers, rather than negotiating them in the rezoning process. And Bill 47 allows the housing minister to set minimum density allowances in areas within 800m of train stations or 400m of bus exchanges, where multiple routes meet. A government news release states the allowable density in the former is up to 20 storeys within 200m of a train station, 12 storeys within 400m and eight storeys within 800m.

As Ian Bushfield joked in a recent PolitiCoast podcast episode, the NDP premier out-flanked seven sitting conservative premiers and one Liberal premier in deregulating housing.

The issue with these bills isn’t really with what’s in them. It’s fine, in a vacuum, to increase density, particularly near transit. And it shouldn’t be difficult to get that kind of development passed. I’m particularly interested in densifying single-family housing neighbourhoods, though I think this bill doesn’t go far enough. Ideally, we’d allow small apartment buildings and row housing in those neighbourhoods as well. I’m not particularly convinced market forces are going to build housing to an extent to which the high housing costs their profits rely on will come down — but it seems likely increasing density allowances would help contain future increases, particularly in the long-run.

The issue is what’s missing from the legislation — tenant protections and public housing. (Disclaimer: I volunteer with the New Westminster Tenants Union. I don’t speak for the union; this is simply to say that this perspective does inform my approach to issues around housing and particularly tenant protections.)

Gentrification by another name

I’ve written here before about the need for any housing plan to include massive investments in public housing. Today, I’m more interested in the issue of tenant protections.

While densifying may help contain rising housing costs, there’s the issue of what, exactly, they’re densifying. When you’re building a new tower, you’re generally not doing it on vacant land. Any savings from densifying is entirely in the future, while the immediate effect is to raise the cost of housing.

Metrotown in Burnaby is a perfect example. What was once a neighbourhood defined by 1970s low-rises is now a growing forest of luxury towers. Former Mayor Derek Corrigan and the Burnaby Citizens Association let development allowed this neighbourhood to flourish effectively unchecked for years — the result was what tenants’ union ACORN, in 2016, called an “attack on a community,” with 1,400 tenants facing demovictions. That is bad news if you’ve been living in a relatively affordable, rent-controlled rental for several years, as you face a stark market.

“Every day my blood pressure is up and I don’t know what to do,” one tenant told the Burnaby Now at the time.

Those 50-year-old buildings — and ones like it around Metro Vancouver — are the last vestiges of affordable market housing in the region (though their rents are quickly coming to match those in new builds, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s rental market report).

The cost of demovictions

That was in 2016, what now seems like a quaint time. Housing, indeed, was a growing crisis in the province. That’s a big part of what led to the BC Liberals’ ouster the following year. But today’s housing market is so far beyond what we’d considered crisis levels at that time.

In 2016, asking rents for vacant units were only slightly above rents paid in occupied units. Last year, vacant units were going for 43% higher than occupied units, according to the CMHC.

The point being: giving developers a blank cheque to develop within large areas of the city very likely will displace lower income renters. I’d begun writing this more than a week ago, but I, of course, wasn’t the only one thinking about this.

While at the Housing Central conference, I ran into Simon Fraser University urban planner Andy Yan who mentioned he’d done an analysis that raised serious issues: using 2021 census data, he found half of those living within 800m of a SkyTrain station were renters. That’s a big problem, particularly in cities without adequate protections for renters facing demoviction.

And according to researchers presenting at Housing Central on a project with Hogan’s Alley Society on housing, financial landlords (whose misdeeds are well-documented) own vast swaths of rental properties near transit hubs. (The final report they presented on is expected soon, but some of what they talked about can be found here.)

All of this is to say: the blanket rezoning near transit hubs is bad news for renters already living in those areas. (Disclaimer: I’m one of them — according to Google Maps, I’m within 600m of a train station.)

If you’re living in Burnaby, this likely isn’t a huge deal — that city has some of the strongest tenant protections in Canada, brought in at the recommendation of a housing task force after mayor Mike Hurley swept former mayor Derek Corrigan out of office. Renters displaced by demovictions there are to be housed at the same rent (with any allowable rent increases under provincial rent controls) by the developer — first, after the demolition, in a temporary spot, then in the new building that replaced the old one. (The city preserves some level of affordability in a portion of the units in new builds.)

A shrug from the province

Few cities have tenant displacement protections like Burnaby’s. But it’s a model the provincial government could — and should — replicate.

In fact, the BC United, of all parties, raised the issue of demovictions in legislature as well. They didn’t offer solutions outside of keeping taxes low, but they at least raised the issue.

The province seems uninterested in talking about demovictions and unwilling to get between landlords and tenants. This was true with issues that arose around landlords blocking renters from accepting air conditioners provided by BC Housing.

In that case, Kahlon effectively shrugged and said he hopes they work it out. (They didn’t.)

And that’s more or less his response to this issue as well. As reported by the Vancouver Sun, Kahlon dismissed Yan’s concerns.

“Transit-oriented development legislation ensures that projects can’t be denied because of density, but still gives local governments the ability to put in policies that they want to protect the folks that are already living there,” the Sun quotes him as saying, adding he encouraged cities to bring in those policies.

Surely he realizes he could just do the policy. Surely the housing minister can regulate the housing.

For decades, right-wing “think tanks” and landlord advocacy groups have raised fears about “unintended consequences” around policies like rent control. The fact is that these fears are vastly overstated, if not unfounded. In the case of permissive upzoning without protections for renters, the consequences — whether unintended or simply ignored — are very real.

BC already leads the country in no-fault evictions, with one-in-10 renters experiencing eviction between 2016 and 2021 (an issue that could be, in large part, resolved by tying rent control to the unit rather than to the renter). Without province-wide tenant protections, this new legislation could end in, as Yan put it, Metrotown 2.0.

And just as importantly, if we want to actually make housing more affordable, the government needs to take on its own housing projects to a degree not seen in half a century.