ROTHENBURGER – Eby housing strategy pushes us back to the era of little boxes
Tract housing in Ontario. (Image: Wikipedia)
THE MARCH TO TICKY TACKY continues apace.
David Eby’s NDP government is determined to run roughshod over the rights of cities to plan how they’ll grow. Maybe Pete Seeger’s famous “Little Boxes” anthem to sameness plays over and over again in his dreams, and he sees it as just the thing.
I raised the alarm last April about the end result of Eby’s approach to the housing crunch: the end of urban planning and the rebirth of monotone communities that are bound to fail.
Kamloops is on a list of what one commentator calls “naughty” cities that have been judged by some concoction of mysterious Eby algorithms to be falling short in their duty to build housing.
There are 10 cities on the list, all of which were recently given quotas for the number of units they must build over an unspecified period of time. The magic number for Kamloops is 4,236. Among other cities on the list are Vancouver, Victoria, Abbotsord and Port Moody.
See also: EDITORIAL – NDP government’s housing mandate threatens civic autonomy
B.C. Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon says the numbers are “based on an amalgam of population growth and housing data, together with discussion and input from the 10 municipalities during the summer months.”
Kamloops City council is on record with Kahlon as being opposed to provincial government interference with local government land-use decision-making authority.
The Tournament Capital is on another new list, too.
Mel Rothenburger is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He has served as mayor of Kamloops, school board chair and TNRD director, and is a retired daily newspaper editor. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.
ArmchairMayor.ca 
We don’t have enough land to build many tiny houses. Apartments, that is going up vertically, is going to be the better use of available land.
Eby’s efforts are laudable however he is not an expert on building dwellings nor land use.
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The assault on private property rights from senior levels of government continues to spread. Their all-knowing experts-in-everything attitude and position is ridiculous. This heavy-handed move to dictate municipal housing policy, zoning, disrupt neighborhoods, and to take away the right to do with your property that, last time I checked, you do own and are making the payments on, is way over the line. If what you want are rows of government-owned grey featureless apartment buildings that are falling apart because government “experts” built them, they are available in Moscow, Havana, Beijing, and other garden spots around the world. Consider moving there, if they will let you. People come to Canada, BC, and by extension places like Kamloops for many reasons, but one of the biggest is freedom of choice, economic opportunity, and living where and how you choose in this very large country. We need to help and house refugees, absolutely, but obviously our short-sighted and inept federal government should have checked housing policy and availability before they opened both the legal and illegal Roxham Road-style immigration floodgates and started fire-hosing money at pet projects, because we are stuck playing catch-up now. Housing providers and developers spend loads of time trying to cut through reams of red tape, taxes, fees, and regulations created by all levels of government mostly under the guise of that holiest of Holy Grails for this government, “fighting climate change”, (yeah right), but mostly an insatiable thirst for more tax money, which makes housing way more expensive, and is what slowed housing development in the first place. A 2018 Vancouver Board of Trade study found that taxes and fees account for 26% of a new home’s price in Vancouver. Developers don’t, nor should they, absorb fees, they get passed to the end user. Remove or reduce regulations, taxes, fees and bureaucratic delays, leave housing development to the actual experts in the private sector, allow for modest (gasp) profits, and this logjam will start to clear up.
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Well, you can have your un-tacky, unaffordable housing units which are being built today. Large rows of apartments, soviet style maybe? Let’s face it, the heli-ski crowd isn’t going to live there. There’s no retiree carrying a large nest egg that dreams of spending their golden years in a “tacky” box. On the other hand, there is a whole army of people out there who are more worried about paying rent than curb appeal. The province is stepping in because municipalities like Vancouver and Kamloops have let developers dictate what should be built. Sorry, but building things like City Gardens isn’t going to relieve the housing situation.
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