No room for low-income renters in Metro, study finds
You think people wanting to buy a home in overpriced Metro Vancouver have it bad? The media have for years justifiably reported on their plight.
But what about low-income renters?
A new national study has found that skyrocketing rents are pushing low-income renters out of 97 per cent of the country’s neighbourhoods. And nowhere is the situation more dire than Metro Vancouver.
A minimum-wage worker in Metro Vancouver would have to toil 112 hours a week to afford a two-bedroom apartment in the region, or 84 hours a week to pay for a one-bedroom unit, according to the study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
The extensive report on rental options across the country determined that housing becomes “unaffordable” when individuals devote more than 30 per cent of their earnings to it, a threshold set by the federal government’s housing agency.
At that ratio, the study by senior economist David Macdonald determined, a resident of Metro Vancouver would have to haul in a salary of $27 an hour just to afford an average one-bedroom rental unit, or $35 an hour to finance a two-bedroom.
The long-term solution to the crisis facing Canada’s renters — who account for roughly onethird of all households across both Metro Vancouver and the country — is for provincial and federal governments to more substantially get into building rental housing, as they did more than three decades ago, argues the left-leaning CCPA.
B.C.-based CCPA economist Marc Lee, who assisted on the report, provided detailed data showing the north side of Vancouver’s False Creek has the most expensive rents in Metro Vancouver, with a one-bedroom going for almost $2,000 a month and a two-bedroom for $3,168.
Those sky-high rents are followed in the City of Vancouver by costly units in the West End, South Granville, Kitsilano-Point Grey and Mount Pleasant, where in the latter neighbourhood it costs about $1,382 a month for a one-bedroom apartment.
Escalating rents in the core of Canada’s major cities are making modest-income people more vulnerable, and pushing them further out into the suburbs, where they end up spending a great deal of time away from their family commuting.
The CCPA’s detailed data shows an average one-bedroom unit costs roughly $1,357 a month in South Richmond, $1,272 in parts of North Vancouver, $1,213 in Port Coquitlam, $1,247 in Langley and $1,143 in eastern New Westminster.
After Metro Vancouver, the most pricey rents in Canada are in the Greater Toronto Area, Victoria, Calgary, Ottawa, Barrie, Ont., and Edmonton. More than 4.7 million Canadian families rent their homes, with most living in purpose-built rental buildings or as tenants in private condos.
“Governments need to get back into building affordable housing in a big way,” Lee said in an interview.
“The B.C. government has started to do some of that and the federal government is getting back into it. But it’s still taking quite a while,” said Lee, who noted that virtually all of the country’s provincial and federal governments stopped building social housing in the 1990s.
Private developers don’t on their own appear ready to build enough rental housing, said Lee. Even with the recent slight downturn in Metro Vancouver construction, he said, “we’re still building almost at record levels. The trouble is we’re not building the housing most ordinary Vancouverites need. We’re building too much housing for people who don’t live here, for people who own many properties.”
Instead of creating “investment vehicles” for buyers from China, the U.S. or Calgary, Lee said, the priority should be putting affordable roofs over the heads of people who live and work in the city, particularly the low-income renters that any vibrant urban culture relies on. The CCPA notes an average administrative assistant makes $22 an hour and a retail salesperson earns $18 an hour, while cashiers and most food-service workers take in less than $14 an hour.
Cities in Austria and Germany can serve as a model for Canadian governments, Lee said. “In the city of Vienna, about half of the overall housing stock is some sort of social housing.” The city of Berlin has also recently been buying up private property to start providing rental units.
Even Whistler provides inspiration, Lee said. “It has the same kind of resort dynamic (as Vancouver), with a lower-wage workforce for the lift operators and service employees. Whistler had to create a housing authority to actually build dedicated, affordable units to buy or rent.”
Even though the demand for rental accommodation is acute in Metro Vancouver in part because the region each year takes in 30,000 new immigrants, as well as almost 100,000 new foreign students and temporary workers, Lee said, “there’s only so much a region can do in terms of the flows of people that come in.”
While he urged governments to provide more dedicated housing for international and domestic students, he acknowledged that “Vancouver will always be sort of a destination for people because it’s a beautiful city. If you can have a roof over your head at an affordable rate, it’s a great place to live. But the challenge is getting to that.”
He argued taxpayers would not necessarily suffer a net loss over time if governments became more involved in financing the creation of various forms of rental housing.
“The big hurdle is the upfront capital cost,” he said. “If you’re the B.C. government and you build a certain project, you’re going to have the initial outlay. But you get a stream of income from all those units over 20,
30 or 50 years. And the math suggests that the payback for the government comes after about 20 to 30 years.”
The plight of renters in Canada and especially Metro Vancouver is not going to be solved overnight, given rapid population growth.
But Lee makes an argument worth taking seriously when he maintains that, since governments dropped out of supporting public housing and other options for a generation, it will likely take another generation to get close to a solution.