Housing

I am a property agent at a provincial Crown corporation. My job is to find land and turn it into affordable homes, running the feasibility work, the due diligence and the agreements that sit between a good intention and a set of keys.

That work has given me an unglamorous and specific education. I know why a non-profit housing society walks away from a site. I know what a two-year rezoning does to a pro forma when rates move underneath it. I know which parcels of public land have been sitting unused for a decade because no one had the mandate to assemble a deal.

Most housing platforms are written by people describing a system from the outside. I want to fix the parts of it I have had my hands in.

West Vancouver, Squamish, Whistler and Pemberton have four different housing crises that get discussed as one.

West Vancouver has an ageing population in large houses, a near-total absence of the middle: the duplexes, townhouses and small apartment buildings that let someone downsize without leaving the community, or let a young family in at all.

Squamish has grown faster than almost anywhere in the province, and the homes arriving are frequently priced for people commuting to Vancouver rather than for the people already working in Squamish.

Whistler has a resort economy that cannot function without staff it cannot house. Employee housing there is not a social program; it is critical business infrastructure, and it is short.

Pemberton and the smaller communities face the sharpest version: almost no rental supply, a workforce driving in from further and further out, and servicing costs that make small projects uneconomic.

Two things drive the cost of a home that almost nobody campaigns on, because neither fits on a sign.

The first is how we pay for the infrastructure that new housing needs: the roads, water, sewers, parks and emergency services that have to exist before anyone can live somewhere. British Columbia largely runs on a "growth pays for growth" model, which sounds fair and lands as a charge on the price of every new home. In a corridor where servicing costs are already high and projects are already marginal, that model is part of why small buildings in Pemberton do not pencil. It needs a fairer approach, one that still funds the infrastructure without loading the whole bill onto the people trying to buy their first place.

The second is how we physically build. Prefabricated and modular construction moves much of the work into a factory, which compresses timelines and tightens quality control, and the sooner a building is finished, the less interest it has accumulated. Mass timber does something similar and adds an argument this riding should care about: it is a BC product, made from a BC resource, by a workforce this corridor used to employ a great deal more of. A housing answer and a forestry answer in the same sentence is rare enough to be worth saying out loud.

None of this is exotic. It is how a lot of housing already gets built elsewhere. The province’s job is to stop treating it as the exception.

Treat employee and workforce housing in resort and tourism communities as its own category with its own tools, instead of forcing it through frameworks designed for urban Metro Vancouver.

Get serious about public land. The province, health authorities, school districts and Crown corporations hold parcels across this corridor that could carry housing tomorrow if someone had the mandate and the capacity to assemble the deals. That is a staffing and mandate problem as much as a policy one.

Shorten the approval-to-shovel timeline by attacking the sequencing, not just the rules: the repeated, serial reviews that add years without adding scrutiny.

Back the non-profit and Indigenous-led housing sector with the pre-development capital that actually determines whether a project ever reaches an application.