81% of people think the BC NDP could do more to address the housing crisis, says poll

An updated BC poll shows that the housing crisis has worsened since 2022 and a majority of people polled want all levels of government to do more to fix it.

The poll, which was Commissioned by the BC General Employees' Union (BCGEU) as part of its Affordable BC Campaign, said 31% of respondents are homeowners whose home has been paid for outright while 29% are still financing their homes. The majority, or 35% of respondents, are renters.

Half of renters and homeowners are spending more than 30% of their income on shelter, the poll found.

According to the BCGEU, that is up 11% from a previous poll conducted two years ago.

Additionally, 27% of renters said they were “forced” to move out of their areas in the past five years because they could not afford to stay.

Only 17% of renters surveyed said they could afford rent for a comparable home in their community if they had to end their tenancy immediately while 50% of renters surveyed said they do not believe home ownership is achievable for them.

That jumped to nearly 60% of renters in the lowest income bracket.

"These numbers reflect the underlying affordability crisis that has resulted from rising land values over the past decade," said BCGEU treasurer Paul Finch.

"Without meaningful near-term regulation of land prices, rent and mortgage costs will continue to create shortages of skilled workers in the economy from nurses to trades people, and further erode quality of life."

In order to address the lack of affordable housing, three-in-four or 78% of respondents said the federal government needs to do more.

That number increased to 81% of people thinking the provincial government needed to do more to address the issue of affordable housing.

More than seven-in-ten respondents (73%) said they want their municipal government to do more to address the issue of affordable housing.

According to Finch, the price of land values, which have dramatically increased, often more than double, is due to “substantive” changes in zoning and infrastructure investment.

“Instead of passing those windfall profits off to landowners, a portion created by public investment should be reinvested into rapid transit services and affordable housing,” he said in the news release from the BCGEU.

“While we applaud the province for implementing our policy suggestions on upzoning around transit hubs, the method fails to properly capture the land value increases that have been generated."

Calls for more to be done to address affordable housing issues

The BCGEU said it is calling for the implementation of a land value capture tax, which would keep land values from rising further while generating revenue for affordable housing and public transit.

Also under the Affordable BC Campaign, the union is calling for the implementation of vacancy control across the province, which they said would tie rent to the suite rather than the tenant, an emergency measure which would help preserve some of the last affordable units left on the market.

According to the Research Co. fact sheet, BC does have a limit on how much a landlord can increase rent annually for continuous tenants, however, the rules do not apply between tenancies.

That means landlords can increase rent drastically between tenancies.

Although 45% of respondents said they were not initially aware of the policy, 62% supported it.

The BCGEU claimed that instead of implementing these policies, the province has designed policies to fast-track for-profit housing with minimal affordability requirements.

“Market-driven policies don't solve the stark inequity between working people and wealthy investors,” said BCGEU executive vice-president Kari Michaels in the news release.

“They simply maintain the province's reliance on the private market, which is exactly what created the crisis in the first place."

According to the poll, three-in-four, or 76%, of respondents support the idea of implementing stronger provincial and federal investments in non-market public housing to address the housing crisis.

The survey found that nearly two-thirds (65%) of respondents confirmed that governments’ housing policies haven’t had a positive impact over the past two years while a majority (73%) agree the provincial government must do more.

The BCGEU, which represents 90,000 working people across BC, conducted the survey from April 29 to May 2 and surveyed over 800 British Columbians.