housing
05. housing
Communities throughout British Columbia have struggled to add enough housing to keep pace with their ever-growing populations. Without a substantial increase to the pace of construction, existing housing deficits will grow.
A GROWING DIVIDE
It’s well documented that the cost of housing has historically been more expensive in British Columbia than in other parts of the country. And costly housing, whether ownership or rental, means that some people make different choices regarding their own living situation than they otherwise would if housing were more abundant. Adult children living at home for longer, living with roommates, and families sharing bedrooms are all relatively common examples of the trade-offs people make in BC and elsewhere. But we can also estimate how people might prefer to live if housing was sufficiently available and affordable to them. If we use a starting point of 2001 when housing was more affordable in BC, we can model how much housing construction our growing population would have needed if we were to hold those living conditions constant. This is done by looking at population growth by age, and allocating housing needs based on 2001
levels of household formation—when 18 year olds could more easily move out. From there we can compare it to the number of households actually formed, and the difference between the two is the deficit (or surplus) of housing that has accumulated since 2001. In Greater Victoria, we’ve built up a deficit of almost 9,000 homes in a little over two decades, which at 2.1 persons per household represents housing for almost 19,000 people—more than the entire population of Central Saanich. This millennium we’ve underbuilt by an annual average of just over 400 homes, on a net basis. With demolitions in Greater Victoria representing about 9% of housing construction, this means we should have been building more than 450 additional homes each year. With population growth expected to slow in the coming years, we expect the deficit to shrink a little, but we’ll need to substantially increase the pace of construction to make further progress.
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