Canada’s finance minister set to make announcement about affordable housing in B.C.
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland is in B.C. Wednesday.
She will likely be in Surrey at 12:15 p.m. PT to make an announcement on the funds’s 2022 measures to make housing extra inexpensive within the province.
It’s a topic that’s high of thoughts for British Columbians.
The funds promised $1.5 billion in funding for the fast housing initiative, which helps construct houses shortly for susceptible individuals. Not less than 1 / 4 of that’s put aside for women-focused initiatives.
The Liberal funds additionally introduced greater than $10 billion in funding to hurry up residence development and repairs, together with measures to chill the market and assist these attempting to purchase their first residence.
However advocates say whereas the deal with housing affordability within the federal funds is promising, its measures may go additional to assist individuals in probably the most dire want.
A report final month from the Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM) discovered that whereas B.C.’s housing stock is maintaining with inhabitants development, a lot of these new houses stay unattainable.
The report exhibits that the province’s inhabitants grew 7.6 per cent whereas the variety of dwellings grew 7.2 per cent between 2016 and 2021.
In some main cities — together with Vancouver, Kelowna and Victoria — new housing provide truly outpaced native inhabitants development, the report discovered.
But the UBCM mentioned investor-driven actual property practices and pre-sale flipping, amongst different practices, have continued to drive up residence costs, making it troublesome for first-time homebuyers specifically to enter the market.
The province has acknowledged the necessity for extra housing provide and has even floated the thought of overriding municipalities to hurry up the tempo of approving new developments.
Laws was additionally launched final month for a “cooling off interval” supposed to cease so-called blind bidding on residence purchases. However business representatives have raised issues that the transfer would merely push extra danger onto sellers and do little to handle the market general.
Extra to come back.
— with recordsdata from Sean Boynton and The Canadian Press
