Thank you.

Hello. My name is Russil Wvong. I'm a volunteer with Abundant Housing Vancouver. I don’t work in development or in policy. I just read all the reports. I’d like to focus on three things.

We have increasing homelessness because we have an overall dire shortage of housing, and it's worse for the people who are poorest.

First, the housing shortage is a problem that's fixable. In Texas, Austin is building so many apartments that rents have dropped 12% in one year. In Vancouver, we have people who want to live and work here and other people who want to build housing for them. The problem is that the approval process is extremely slow. It's easier to elect a pope.

Housing is a ladder. It's all connected. Whenever we block market housing that somebody wants to build, the people who would have lived there don't disappear. They move down the housing ladder, competing with everyone else for the limited supply of existing housing. Prices and rents then have to rise to unbearable levels to force people out. We get trickle-down evictions.

In metro Vancouver, the result is a housing shortage that's bad for everyone, terrible for younger people and renters, and worst of all for people near the bottom of the housing ladder. They're forced to move away, crowd into substandard housing or end up homeless.

Second is COVID. Housing being painfully scarce and expensive is no longer a problem confined to Toronto and Vancouver. When COVID hit and there was a sudden massive surge in people working from home instead of the office, total demand for residential space went way up, while demand for office space went way down. Plus, a lot of people moved in order to find cheaper housing, which was great for them but bad for local renters and homebuyers.

The housing shortages in the GTA and metro Vancouver basically spilled over to the rest of the country. This means that we need to build a lot more housing everywhere—not just in the biggest cities—for the next 10 years or more. Our pre-COVID housing stock no longer lines up with where people want to live and work. Other countries are facing the same challenge.

Third, in the GTA and metro Vancouver, we need to move away from taxing new housing like it's a gold mine. Over the 10 years from 2011 to 2020, the City of Vancouver extracted $2.5 billion in “community amenity contributions”. The thing to remember is that there's no free lunch. Someone has to pay. If costs are too high, what happens is that nothing gets built until prices and rents rise further, for both new and existing housing. That's exactly what's happening now. In other words, it's renters and homebuyers who end up paying for these increased costs.

The federal government has made two major changes to reduce the cost of building new rental housing: removing the GST and allowing accelerated depreciation. This will help to counter the headwinds that result from higher costs. The problem is that local governments in Ontario and B.C. have strong incentives to raise development charges, slowing things down again, because they need money to meet local needs and because it's very difficult to raise property taxes. The B.C., Ontario and federal governments are all pushing municipalities to freeze or reduce development charges, but as long as local governments need the money, they're going to push back hard.

There are a number of proposals for alternatives. Benjamin Dachis suggests paying for water and sewer infrastructure by issuing long-term bonds that are then repaid from water usage fees. Municipalities have proposed progressive property taxes, regional sales taxes and regional income taxes. If you look at the U.S., they have property tax rates that stay the same instead of being adjusted each year, so if there's a lot of demand and property prices are rising, municipal revenues automatically go up, allowing them to build more infrastructure.

Finally, how can the federal government convince local governments to stop regulating new housing like a nuclear power plant and taxing it like a gold mine? Unlike provincial governments, the federal government doesn't have direct control. Machiavelli describes the three elements of diplomacy as persuasion, promises and threats. It's most effective to use a combination of all three.

Sean Fraser has been quite successful in using housing accelerator funding to convince municipal governments to allow more housing, with denial of funding as a stick to go along with the carrot.

Persuasion is also vitally important, and federal MPs from all parties can help. It's great that we seem to have consensus across the political spectrum on the need for more housing.

For example, when Calgary city council voted down its own housing task force recommendations by eight to seven, it was very helpful to immediately see critical comments from Scott Aitchison and Michelle Rempel Garner. It seems likely that this contributed to Calgary city council's reversing of its decision the next day.

Thank you.