BY ADAM OLSEN
MLA, Saanich North and the Islands
BC Green Party
During this fall legislative session the BC NDP government introduced dramatic changes to housing policy in British Columbia. At one point we had four active bills (35, 44, 46, 47) all related to the housing affordability crisis.
My response to Bill 44: Housing Statutes (Residential Development) Amendment Act, 2023, was a 12,000-word, 1.5-hour speech, a culmination of my 15-year journey in local and provincial governance.
The speech broadly reflects my concerns and critiques with the current trajectory of housing policy in British Columbia and I dig into the complexities of the housing affordability crisis. However, I also call for collective action that goes well beyond housing, urging genuine dialogue and comprehensive solutions. The following offers a summary of my comments.
For millennia, we worked together to deliver basic human needs — food and shelter — creating societal bonds and fostering creativity and innovation. Today, the real estate market impedes universal housing security, pitting wealth creation against basic human rights and general well-being.
The current housing market is designed to generate wealth for those that own property, but it widens the gap with those who don’t own property. Consequently, the system we created is generating wealth for some while impoverishing others financially and socially. Housing insecurity forces non-property owners into increasingly tenuous situations. They often must take on multiple jobs, reduce community engagement and limit educational pursuits. Public security weakens as desperation grows, contributing to addiction and fraying social safety nets.
We have clear examples of what happens when housing systems generate poverty. Canada deliberately experimented with housing poverty on Indian Reserves for over a century with devastating outcomes.
The housing affordability crisis in Canada has elicited a uniform response from politicians across the political spectrum — build more supply. Even the BC NDP government is in reckless pursuit of supply. Through Bill 44, they unilaterally eliminated single-family zoning, allowing the development of triplexes and fourplexes. This change will likely only create unimaginable real estate wealth for the property “haves,” while deepening the socio-economic gap with the “have-nots.” At the same time, they have heightened the infrastructural demands, burdened some local government administration’s ability to process applications, depleted local revenue to pay for infrastructure and undermined public engagement.
The BC NDP’s solutions to the housing affordability crisis are driven by a mistaken philosophy that the real estate market will magically start valuing human well-being instead of individual wealth creation. It ignores the reality that building more supply for the past century has not created more housing affordability. They entirely sidestep the reality that housing affordability requires substantive investments in non-market solutions including non-profit housing, cooperatives, co-housing and other models of housing that foster community development.
I have a hopeful vision for a connected world that prioritizes human well-being over profit, a world that considers housing and food fundamental human rights.
This is a snapshot of the criticisms I have for the systems we have created and maintained and the ideas I have proposed that the provincial government has ignored. I hope you will take the time to watch the speech, which can be viewed here, and let me know what you think at Adam.Olsen.MLA@leg.bc.ca.