Dear Editor:
Re: Crisis? What crisis? June 11 editorial.
Your editorial makes some valid points but you make it sound like affordability is a North Shore problem. It’s also a problem in the rest of Metro Vancouver, southern Vancouver Island and even southern Ontario and Montreal.
We have a national crisis on our hands that essentially starts with our own greed. When did homes stop being a place to live and become an investment – in the case of many people, their only investment?
The best the federal government seems to want to do is tinker with mortgage qualification requirements, but that doesn’t tackle the supply problem, particularly in affordable rental housing.
Maybe the incentive to own a principal residence is too great. So take away all or most of the tax-free profit in ownership, particularly short-term ownership. Too much capital is being ploughed into non-productive assets like housing. We need that capital for infrastructure and for making our industries more competitive in global terms. And bring back the incentives to develop co-op housing abandoned by the feds in the 1990s.
If they haven’t done so already, the province, the feds and the municipal governments can all do land inventories to identify property that can be developed for more affordable rental housing and provide financing for that housing. My bet is there is enough property to provide thousands of affordable housing units in Metro Vancouver alone. Then municipal governments have to stop the foot dragging and NIMBYism.
Bill Richardson
West Vancouver
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