A major build-out of affordable housing requires us to stop relying on the current private, for-profit approach in BC and Canada. Instead we need to expand the stock of non-market and co-op housing with public-led approaches and non-profit development.
This report does the math on how it can be done in pricey Vancouver. To address the housing affordability crisis, in previous research we called for 10,000 new, non-market, rental units per year to be built in the Metro Vancouver region. These numbers are necessary to keep up with population growth and to alleviate the imbalance in the rental housing market. This piece looks at the costs of building that housing and how it can be delivered at much lower rents than for newly built market rental housing. These break-even rents cover the upfront construction costs of building new housing and this housing thus pays for itself over time.
