A leading voice on generational inequality says North Shore residents feeling squeezed out of the community due to its overheated housing market should seek change by voicing concern to their provincial election candidates.
Paul Kershaw of Generation Squeeze made those comments at a forum on housing affordability held March 2 in North Vancouver.
“We can be influential – and no more than in the weeks in advance of an election. You don’t need to have deep pockets to affect electoral politics when there’s an election in place,” Kershaw said. “Use that influence now.”
Kershaw is a UBC public policy expert who founded the Generation Squeeze campaign in order to draw attention to the economic and social challenges facing Canadians primarily in their 20s, 30s and 40s.
Generation Squeeze, North Shore Community Resources and Economic Partnership North Vancouver hosted the forum for residents to discuss their frustrations on housing and other challenges.
During Kershaw’s opening remarks, he said that exorbitant housing prices, whether in owning or renting property, have changed the notion of what it means for people to be able to make a home for themselves.
“Hard work doesn’t pay like it used to,” Kershaw said.
According to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, in February of this year the benchmark price for a detached home in Metro Vancouver was approximately $1.4 million.
“The prices are particularly high in North Vancouver and West Vancouver,” Kershaw said.
“If you were audacious enough to think that you might get in to an average home in our region, let alone here, you would have to start saving (while you were still) in child care.”
Thursday’s event wasn’t just attended by adults in their 20s and 30s hoping to get into the housing market.
Many attendees were teenagers and seniors who similarly had a stake in the housing market and ensuring their own families had equal opportunities in the future.
While Kershaw sympathized with the struggles people are going through, he suggested that building a home has always been a difficult thing to do.
“I don’t want anyone to think that because we’re starting the conversation by saying it’s challenging to build a home for oneself today, to have in any way, shape or form the sense that building a home is supposed to be easy or that it ever was easy,” he said.
Kershaw argued that instead of over-lamenting the difficulties of housing on the North Shore and elsewhere, a conscious effort should be made for different generations to acknowledge each other’s challenges and come up with positive solutions.
He said the reality is that older generations have counted on their home equity to fund financially secure retirements. But he added it should be acknowledged that ensuring the older generation has a stable, fruitful retirement also means putting a burden on a younger generation of Canadians.
“In part because we want to protect an older demographic – people we love – then we need to get that group on board to say ‘Hey, we recognize that means we’re asking our kids and grandchildren and the children after them to pay much more for homes than we did, and are there not some ways we could meet them part way?’” Kershaw said.
Following Kershaw’s remarks, attendees got into smaller groups of about 10 people each and had a conversation on housing led by a Generation Squeeze facilitator.
In one group, North Vancouver resident Brad Martin attempted to reach a consensus with his tablemates regarding a solution to the housing crisis.
One thing they agreed on was that solving issues of housing affordability and generational inequality would require a greater investment from provincial and federal governments, even after the B.C. Liberals put in a 15 per cent tax on foreign buyers last year.
“Any solution has to recognize that maybe there (are) those multiple levels (of government) and it has to be tackled at all of those levels,” Martin said.
B.C. NDP candidate for North Vancouver-Lonsdale Bowinn Ma, who attended last Thursday’s event, also said it was up to higher levels of government to help with the squeeze that a younger generation is experiencing.
But she said that ultimately housing inequality is part of a larger system of inequality that needs to be addressed, including such challenges as funding adequate transportation and affordable child care.
“When we’re talking about housing affordability, we’re really talking about affordability in general. It’s not just housing costs, housing prices or rental prices – it’s everything,” Ma said.
