You used to hear it often: “You can’t conserve your way out of a drought.”
A few farmers might still mutter it skyward with hope, but the supply-side phrase has fallen out of fashion, partly for its fatalism but just as much for its lack of imagination. Pilots understand that during a crisis, altitude equals options — and aggressive water conservation, it turns out, lowers baseline demand and buys everyone time until inevitably, it rains.
If we are in a housing drought, provincial regulators seem to have given up hope the rain will ever return on its own, and have taken square aim at the supply side of our housing affordability crisis. This week’s story on the increased scrutiny given to short-term accommodations on Salt Spring and other Gulf Islands includes statements from the B.C. Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs that attempt to tie 5,000 fewer short-term rentals in the province to “thousands” more long-term housing options.
That’s hard arithmetic to back up, even roughly. Last year on Bowen Island we saw that of six short-term rentals that had run immediately afoul of that municipality’s principal residency requirement, just one had converted into a long-term rental. Small sample size notwithstanding, we know it’s not going to be every vacation rental operator’s choice to become a full-time landlord — and if the vanishingly small uptake of the Rural Housing Program’s offer to trade $40,000 in fix-up dollars for five years of discounted rent at existing suites was any indication, it’s going to be almost none of them on Salt Spring.
Meanwhile, local Islands Trust staff recently reported they had been able to “re-initiate” work on our LTC’s languishing Housing Action Program by re-referring Bylaw 537 — the Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) map scheme to grow the rental pool — in January at the request of Tsawout First Nation, with the goal of bringing the bylaw back to trustees this summer, and possibly as early as next week’s meeting.
One might reasonably wonder whether more permissive regulation is sufficient to create more affordable housing stock, or whether it’s the lack of serious numbers in funding that’s the real roadblock. If there’s any hope of getting out of the housing drought, the province might have to literally make it rain.