Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you today.

My name is Danny Oleksiuk. I'm here from Vancouver. I'm a writer and researcher with the Sightline Institute and a co-founder of Abundant Housing Vancouver, Canada's first modern YIMBY group, which we started back in 2016.

I think there are some good directions with the housing accelerator fund, but I want to talk about how, in our view, it's not nearly aggressive enough. To do that, I wanted to start with the first house that I—to set the groundwork for that—lived in in Vancouver. I moved into it in 1990 as a small child. My parents bought it for $100,000 [Technical difficulty—Editor].

I had to stop and think about that number for a while when I looked it up. It was $207,000 for a detached house in East Vancouver. I mean, housing being that cheap back then, you could actually afford a lot of it, even if you were poor. It had all kinds of knock-on effects. For example, there wasn't nearly so much public drug use back then. Even broke people could afford housing.

There's a lot of talk today about the cost of new housing. Is it affordable enough? Who is it for? I think these questions miss the point so much as to be almost dangerous and misleading. What happened is not that new housing got too expensive, but that existing housing became a lot more expensive because of a shortage. We have built so little housing since 1990 that the old houses got expensive.

Again, going back to that old house of mine, it's now assessed at $2 million. It's a hundred-year-old house. It's 112 years old. The land under it is now assessed at $1,951,000. The building is assessed at just $90,000. Again, the problem is not so much that new housing is not affordable. It's that old housing, more precisely the land under it, got really expensive because of a shortage.

You can walk down that old street. It's East 11th Avenue. What's remarkable is that it looks almost exactly the same. A couple of the houses have been rebuilt, torn down and replaced with new houses, but there are no apartments. Until recently, the relevant zoning code for what we used to call RS-1 stated right at the top that the main goal was to preserve the single-family character of the neighbourhood, and it does look mostly the same.

What can the federal government do about it? Obviously, as other witnesses have said, the key levers in my view are property taxes and zoning. Although, as Mr. Finlayson has said, there are going to be labour constraints—and that's an important project too—the levers of zoning and property taxes are in provincial jurisdiction. Given that, I think that a model like the housing accelerator fund is a good one for the feds to get some leverage.

That said, I have a couple of points on the HAF that I think would make it better. The first is that it's not nearly aggressive enough. Again, things have gotten so much worse that just fourplexes in central neighbourhoods like Vancouver and Toronto are not really going to move the needle.

I'd suggest something more. What we need in those places is small apartment buildings and not just unit minimums but density minimums. If you don't do density minimums, then municipalities are going to formally legalize a certain number of units but not provide the density when they actually get built. Something like a 2.0 floor space ratio is what we need, especially in the really expensive central cities.

Then finally, property taxes are exceptionally low, especially in British Columbia. Municipalities are begging poor. They're saying that they want more infrastructure funding. I would also propose that the future version of the housing accelerator fund ask provinces for matching contributions for infrastructure from property taxes.

All of this new wealth has been created in land equity. It's just not going to be possible going forward. Most of that's really tax sheltered. Meanwhile, we're trying to run a whole government off of income taxes, corporate taxes and all these other taxes. There's a huge amount of wealth that's been created in property, and we have very low property taxes. I think something like the HAF could double its effectiveness by asking for matching contributions.

I'll just close by bringing us back to the $207,000 house to remind us of how far things have gone and to encourage you to be a little bit bolder, given how far we've gone.

Thank you very much.