Anshu Arora LLM, MSc, PMP

Burnaby council has approved the development of two small highrises on a stretch of properties across the street from Royal Oak SkyTrain station. The rental-only development at 6877, 6891, 6913, 6939 and 6945 Palm Ave. includes a 20-storey tower and a 16-storey tower with 292 homes.

Half of the homes will be rented at 20 per cent below the market median for the neighbourhood. The development also includes a café space, affordable child-care facility, outdoor green space and offices for the BCGEU. BCGEU treasurer Paul Finch told the Burnaby NOW the union is excited the project is progressing to the next stage.

"When we launched this project in 2020, we didn't anticipate the length of time the regulatory process would take," Finch said. "Major swings in interest rates and construction costs during that period have required us to make some design changes, but with continued commitment to deliver more affordable housing options, we remain hopeful that the building will be complete in early 2027."

In August last year, the union submitted several changes to the development planbecause the original version was "no longer economically feasible without modifications to the project." The changes kept the number of residential units and the mix of uses, like office and café, but changed the size and number of parking spaces required.

Council approved the changes unanimously and did not require a second public hearing. The first public hearing, held in 2022, for the development was contentious, as some neighbours opposed the project. Still, the Royal Oak neighbourhood is set for more change, as the City of Burnaby is currently drafting a Royal Oak community plan and the province has introduced new legislation allowing for much taller minimum heights near SkyTrain stations.

#anshu

#gogle

#millions

#billions

#land

#realestate

#development

#kingslistings

Forget “location, location, location.” As Metro Vancouver rents have risen dramatically over the past few years, renters’ priorities have shifted away from location to affordability, according to a survey from rentals.ca. The survey suggests more people are packing up and leaving the West Coast.

“Amongst our population of prospective renters, we found that 49 per cent had last moved within the past three years, with 26 per cent having moved within the last year alone,” a report from rentals.ca highlighted.More than a third of renters in B.C., Alberta, and Ontario say they’ve been searching for a new place for more than two months and about 15 per cent say they’ve been hunting for six months or longer.

Rentals.ca Giacomo Ladas tells CityNews that interprovincial migration is “really, really high in Canada right now because people are not able to find an affordable rental in the region [that they live].” More than half of respondents expressed frustration over the limited availability within their budget when searching for rental accommodations. “People can’t find anything affordable and where they live. So, they’re now finding more affordable areas across the country,” Ladas explained.

“People are leaving Ontario and British Columbia for areas like Alberta. And because of that rents in Alberta have skyrocketed over the past year.”

Policy watchers are split on the value of B.C.’s plans for a provincial flipping tax targeting those looking to make a quick buck in the real estate market. Brendon Ogmundson, chief economist of the B.C. Real Estate Association, says the tax could end up reducing the overall number of homes on the market while only applying to a small number of properties.

Paul Kershaw, a policy professor at the University of B.C. and founder of the think tank Generation Squeeze, said while the tax may only impact a small number of properties, it sends an important message that the province is “recalibrating” around the principle of having a home first and an investment second.

“We still need to turn our attention to the here and now, looking back at how much wealth has already been accumulated, and just putting in a flipping tax is not going to address that,” he said. As of Jan. 1, 2025, homes in B.C. sold within the first year after being purchased will face a tax rate of 20 per cent of the profit, while that tax rate drops gradually to zero after two years.

Ogmundson said about 10 per cent of real estate transactions in Metro Vancouver take place within two years of a purchase, and many of those would qualify under a long list of exemptions including divorce or job relocation. He said would-be sellers who don’t qualify for an exemption but are near the end of the two-year window may be tempted to wait it out.

“It’s a very real risk that because of the way this policy is written, how it discourages potential listings, that you could end up with prices higher than they would have been otherwise,” he said. Kershaw said B.C.’s housing situation is caused by more than issues with supply and people have normalized the idea that housing prices will continue to rise.

While crediting Premier David Eby with having “better housing policy than any premier we’ve had before,” Kershaw said it’s not accurate for the premier to blame all of the province’s housing woes on abuse from investors. “What we need to be saying is, hard truth: We’ve created a lot of housing unaffordability in this province over the last many years, but we’ve also created a lot of housing wealth,” he said.

#anshu

#kingslistings

#vancouvercondoking

#surreycondoking

#realestate

#billions

#trillions

#luxury

Mass-timber construction for residential tower uses will be pushed to new limits in British Columbia, following Vancouver City Council’s approval last week of a 260 ft, 25-storey tower project. This represents an upcoming phase of Westbank’s Main Alley tech campus and the first residential addition to an otherwise job-space-focused complex of buildings. The tower, named “Prototype” or M5, a reference to this project being a taller mass timber case study and the fifth building at Main Alley, will replace the surface vehicle parking lot at 2015 Main Street — the northwest corner of the intersection of Main Street and East 4th Avenue on the easternmost edge of the Mount Pleasant Industrial Area.

This tower will carry 100% secured purpose-built rental housing for its residential uses on top of nearly 6,000 sq ft of retail/restaurant uses on the ground level. Like other taller mass timber buildings currently being built in Vancouver, this design uses cross-laminated timber (CLT) components that are pre-fabricated off-site before being delivered for assembly and installation. This project is also made visually distinct with its mass timber checkerboard facade.

In recent years, the "progressive YIMBY” (Yes, in my backyard) movement has embraced the idea that a surge in market-housing supply will magically lead to affordability. However, all housing supply is not created equal. Despite a construction boom building thousands of new market units of multi-family supply, affordable housing remains elusive for over a third of British Columbians. The economic theory is not producing the promised housing affordability.

As the modelling and analysis that Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon used to justify the BC NDP’s mass upzoning of single-family, middle-class neighbourhoods showsit will produce less than half the supply needed to meet the demand. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation estimates for B.C. to get housing affordability back to what we experienced in the early 2000s, we need to build 610,000 units more than would have been constructed. Tom Davidoff, one of the report’s authors, is cautious in his predictions of both the affordability achieved by the upzoning and the immediacy of the changes. The BC NDP’s approach is not an urgent solution to a housing affordability crisis but rather a short-term communication exercise, increasing the wealth of homeowners and hopes of renters leading into a provincial election.

We have an urgent housing affordability crisis and this is evidence of how inefficient it is to wait for the private sector to deliver housing affordability. The housing crisis is more localized for those experiencing core housing need. The core housing needs are the people in our communities whose housing is insecure, inadequate or unaffordable. In B.C., nearly 15 per cent of the population is paying more than 30 to 50 per cent of their annual income on housing. This is the most critical intervention point for the provincial government.

A 2021 Statistics Canada report shows the core housing need in Canada is 10.1 per cent, ranging from Quebec at six per cent to Nunavut at 32.9 per cent. B.C. is second worst at 13.4 per cent, followed closely by Northwest Territories (13.2 per cent) and Yukon (13.1 per cent). The next closest province is Ontario, at 12.1 per cent.

A Statistics Canada report published on Nov. 20, 2023, shows unsurprisingly the dramatic intergenerational advantage the adult children of homeowners born in the 1990s have over their peers whose parents weren’t homeowners. Additionally concerning is the findings that “adult children of multiple property owners were nearly three times more likely to be homeowners in 2021 than those whose parents were non-homeowners,” and B.C. has the lowest rate of homeownership of people born in the 1990s in the country.