Record new home construction needed to meet surge of new immigrants in B.C.
To tackle a country-wide skilled worker shortage, the federal government is increasing immigration targets. That means more permanent residents will be settling in B.C. in the coming years, and there’s concern the province’s housing supply isn’t keeping up.
A new BC Real Estate Association report found a record 43,000 new homes need to be built in each of the next five years to meet demand from hundreds of thousands of newcomers. That’s a 25 per cent increase over historical norms.
“We are at around 40,000 currently, so we would have to go up even from levels we are seeing right now, which are pretty close to a record, and then sustain it through a period where the economy might be in a downturn,” said BCREA chief economist Brendon Ogmundson.
While he thinks the immigration increase is good policy, he doesn’t believe the issue of where to house the new arrivals has been addressed.
“We need to plan for it, and that’s the one thing we never do properly. We make policy that affects housing demand without ever really thinking about the supply side,” said Ogmundson.
The provincial government is also concerned the federal immigration strategy doesn’t include a plan for where new permanent residents are going to live.
“I have spoken to the federal minister multiple times urging them to consider tying their immigration numbers to both housing starts and also affordable housing. We know it’s going to be critically important to build that stock for the amount of people that are coming,” said Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon.
Jamie Howard, the CEO of Woodbridge Homes, says developers want to help meet the demand from new immigrants and existing residents, but they need municipalities to get on board with greater density and shorter construction times.
“You’ve got the federal government controlling immigration targets and then you have municipal governments who are adjudicating land rights and saying how much density can go where and how quickly it can be approved,” said Howard. ”What we really need is the three levels of government to be cooperating and coordinating and trying to find ways to reduce bureaucratic processes.”
He’d also like to see less pushback from the public on new multi-family developments in what have traditionally been single-family home neighborhoods.
“If we can have the broader community coming into the construction process more constructively and cooperatively, then that would be massively helpful,” said Howard, adding, “NIMBYism is a real thing, and it’s a big problem in development.”
Ogmundson says if the target of 43,000 new homes per year isn’t met, the price of existing real estate will continue go up.
“Keep in mind we need to build a record amount of housing in the next five years just to get affordability back to where it was like right now,” he said. “To improve affordability, we would need to build a lot more.”
CTVNews.ca Top Stories
LIVE AT 11 ET Trudeau to announce temporary GST relief on select items heading into holidays
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will announce a two-month GST relief on select items heading into holidays to address affordability issues, sources confirm to CTV News.
'Ding-dong-ditch' prank leads to kidnapping, assault charges for Que. couple
A Saint-Sauveur couple was back in court on Wednesday, accused of attacking a teenager over a prank.
Border agency detained dozens of 'forced labour' cargo shipments. Now it's being sued
Canada's border agency says it has detained about 50 shipments of cargo over suspicions they were products of forced labour under rules introduced in 2020 — but only one was eventually determined to be in breach of the ban.
DEVELOPING International Criminal Court issues arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Hamas officials
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants on Thursday for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defence minister and Hamas officials, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity over their 13-month war in Gaza and the October 2023 attack on Israel respectively.
Genetic evidence backs up COVID-19 origin theory that pandemic started in seafood market
A group of researchers say they have more evidence to suggest the COVID-19 pandemic started in a Chinese seafood market where it spread from infected animals to humans. The evidence is laid out in a recent study published in Cell, a scientific journal, nearly five years after the first known COVID-19 outbreak.
2 boys drowned and a deception that gripped the nation: Why the Susan Smith case is still intensely felt 30 years later
Inside Susan Smith’s car pulled from the bottom of a South Carolina lake in 1994 were the bodies of her two young boys, still strapped in their car seats, along with her wedding dress and photo album. Here's how the case unfolded.
REVIEW 'Gladiator II' review: Come see a man fight a monkey; stay for Denzel's devious villain
CTV film critic Richard Crouse says the follow-up to Best Picture Oscar winner 'Gladiator' is long on spectacle, but short on soul.
Donald Trump picks former U.S. congressman Pete Hoekstra as ambassador to Canada
U.S. president-elect Donald Trump has nominated former diplomat and U.S. congressman Pete Hoekstra to be the American ambassador to Canada.
Canada's space agency invites you to choose the name of its first lunar rover
The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) is inviting Canadians to choose the name of the first Canadian Lunar Rover.