Conservative Leader John Rustad is flanked by construction workers while speaking during a campaign stop at a condo under construction, in Surrey, B.C., on Sept. 27.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
The leaders of British Columbia’s two major parties each ended the first week of the election campaign outlining policies they say will dramatically speed up the construction of new homes to make housing more affordable on Canada’s pricey West Coast.
Conservative Leader John Rustad stopped Friday afternoon in Surrey, the massive Vancouver suburb that will be an important electoral battleground, to announce a raft of housing policies, including repealing the NDP government’s legalization of fourplexes in every city in favour of creating time limits for municipalities to approve projects.
Mr. Rustad told reporters that, if elected, his government will create time limits of six months for any municipality to approve or deny an application to rezone or develop land and three months to issue a building permit. He said his government would work with cities to meet these timelines, but if a clear decision isn’t made within that period the province would step in to issue permits and get shovels in the ground faster.
A BC Conservative government would not dictate housing targets for cities, he said, but instead craft a pro-active zoning process for communities to determine which neighbourhoods they want to densify so that “when people move into neighbourhoods they know what to expect.”
Mr. Rustad, a longtime MLA who was ejected two years ago from the caucus of the then-Opposition BC Liberals, now named the BC United party, over his skepticism of curbing emissions, also announced plans to repeal the B.C. Energy Step Code – one of the drivers of “hidden taxes” he says add major costs to new housing. That optional roadmap – which was brought in by the BC Liberals during their final months in government in 2017, when Mr. Rustad was a cabinet minister – calls for cities to go above and beyond the provincial building code to incentivize or require new buildings to be more energy-efficient.
Over the past seven years, the provincial NDP government has poured billions of dollars into new-home construction as part of its effort to make real estate more affordable, passing legislation to rein in short-term rentals and to prevent municipal governments from blocking densification in neighbourhoods.
Affordability and housing costs are top issues in the campaign for the Oct. 19 election, particularly in and around Vancouver, which is the country’s most expensive housing market for both owners and renters. The region’s real estate board puts the benchmark price for a detached home in the Vancouver area at about $2-million, while the average monthly lease on a one-bedroom apartment is about $2,700, according to the online listing agency Rentals.ca.
On Friday in Cumberland, on Vancouver Island, NDP Leader David Eby announced plans to boost factory-built home construction as he toured a new neighbourhood of compact home that is being mass-manufactured.
“This is the future of home-building,” he said as he toured the site.
B.C. has 10 companies that specialize in pre-manufactured homes, and the NDP, if re-elected, says it would introduce province-wide standards and pre-approved designs to speed up permitting and lower costs to help grow the industry.
“We need housing that people can actually afford, so we change those rules to get rid of the red tape, we can build that housing legally across the province,” Mr. Eby said. The homes being assembled around him use galvanized steel for framing, are assembled in a portable factory on site and then finished in place as homes just over 1,100 square feet in size.
“It’s like Lego,” Mr. Eby said. “In a controlled factory environment, you can build faster, you can build with less waste, and the homes are more consistent, more efficient, and it’s cheaper.”
He said the NDP’s efforts to reduce housing costs and boost construction are tackling the housing affordability crisis in a number of ways, from taxing home speculators and squeezing out short-term rentals, to boosting density in single-family neighbourhoods and to investments in home construction.
The NDP Leader said the Conservatives would scrap his party’s initiatives and “in that world, the speculators win, the investors win, but everyday families lose because they can’t find an affordable place to live.”
The development in the Comox Valley is half-complete, with just over 50 homes scheduled to be built by Orca Steel. The average real estate listing in the development is $435,000.
John-Paul Fraser, chair of the manufacturer Orca, said his company can scale up to build thousands of homes annually when there is demand.