Federal government needs to step up for housing affordability in Vancouver: Gordon Price

With a 0.6 per cent vacancy rate and overheated real estate prices, Vancouver is the picture of an unaffordable housing market.

Yesterday, to alleviate some of this pressure, the city announced that it was adding 400 affordable new homesworth $50 millionto its rental stock over the next two years.

Gordon Price, former city councillor and director of Simon Fraser University's City Program, said it was a good start.

"It's better than what most councils have been able to do the in the past two decades," he said.

But Price says the key stumbling block in addressing Vancouver's housing crisis is the lack of funding for affordable housing from the federal government.

Past federal programs added to housing stock

Previously, Price explained, Vancouver had benefited from affordable housing programs subsidized by the federal government.

These programs added thousands of affordable housing units to the city, he said, before they were cut.

"The Liberal government back in 1993 really did conclude this was too great a budget burden, the deficits were too high, this was a program that couldn't be traditionally funded in the ways Canadians had assumed previously."

Price said these cuts have had long-lasting consequences, and without their reinstatement, the city has very little power to make a sustainable difference to the city's affordability crisis.

"The question isn't whether the number of units that the city has allocated for this year is enough it isn't. It is whether there will be the same the next year or the next year," he said.

If feds won't fund, cities should be given power

In fact, he said, if cities are expected to shoulder the burden of housing, they need the political power to do so.

"If [housing] is going to be dumped down to the local government, then we have to make an almost constitutional decision about whether cities actually get the power ... that will allow them to resource housing on the scale that would be needed."

The problem of housing affordability is becoming too politically important for senior levels of government to ignore, because without long term planning, the affordability crisis in Vancouver is only going to get worse, he added.

"Making those long term programs gives you the kind of stability, allows cities to plan, and gives the public expectations that at least their concerns are being addressed."

With files from The Early Edition

To listen to the interview, click on the link labelled Former city councillor Gordon Price says federal government needs to step in to create housing affordability in Vancouver