AFFORDABILITY CRUNCH FOR RENTERS#.
AS PRICES CLIMB, AVAILABILITY DECLINES
Joanna Fletcher lives in a one-bedroom apartment on Vancouver’s east side with her 10-year-old son. The building has mice and mould, and her new landlord is threatening eviction.
While she has plenty of reasons to leave, Fletcher says she’s fighting to stay for as long as possible because she can’t afford anything else in the area and leaving would mean disrupting her son’s school year.
“It’s not just like I can pick up and go, there isn’t anything for me to go (to),” she said in a recent interview.
Fletcher isn’t alone in feeling the impact of the housing affordability crisis affecting cities across the country.
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. says average rents nationally went up last year by 2.7 per cent to $947 per month.
Meanwhile, the availability of rentals is becoming increasingly limited. The CMHC says the overall vacancy rate for cities across the country was three per cent in 2017, down from 3.7 per cent in 2016.
In its annual report on rental housing, the corporation said the demand for purpose-built rental is outpacing the growth in supply, while the rate of condominiums rented out also declined.
Craig Jones, a PhD candidate in geography at the University of British Columbia, said the situation is largely the result of the federal government’s move away from building rental housing in the early 1990s, combined with the extreme profitability of building condominiums over rentals in the private sector.
The government used to build thousands of units of rental housing annually, and the private sector does not appear to have filled the gap in the years since, Jones said.
Although up to a third of condos are estimated to be rented out by owners, Jones said the rents are typically not as affordable as rental-only properties and tenancies aren’t secure because owners can always choose to move back in, renovate or trigger other means of eviction.
Statistics Canada reported last year that nearly a quarter of Canadians spent more than 30 per cent of their income on shelter costs, which is the marker for affordability.
Jones said the statistics are a sign that many people live in precarious circumstances.
“It’s taken us a long time to get here, it’s taken decades of ignoring the system,” he said, adding it would take a least 10 years of government commitments to resolve the problem. “That is something that is difficult to do because it’s expensive and it doesn’t show immediate results.”
Fletcher is one of those people caught in the housing crisis.
Her building was recently sold to a company and Fletcher said the new landlord began approaching tenants in January offering to pay them three months’ rent if they move out by April. She was offered five months’ rent if she signed an agreement by mid-February.
A spokesman for the Tenant Resource and Advisory Centre in B.C. said evictions caused by renovations or redevelopment are among the most common problems tenants report.
Andrew Sakamoto said the province’s Residential Tenancy Act should be changed to double the notice time for evictions to four months, and offer greater compensation to renters.
Technology and the fourth Industrial Revolution are having untold impact, Carney said, and it’s going to take huge efforts to make sure workers ultimately benefit. The effect of automation is just one part of the change and examples of the seismic shift can be seen in finance, where many “unglamorous” data entry jobs have already been transformed.
Drawing examples from his own experience, he said the disruption to the labour force will be intense and could last for some time.
“When I look back 30 years ago, what I used to do in the City of London when I worked at an investment bank, probably about threequarters of what I did is now done by machine. It is a relentless process of moving a series of decisions that are made by humans to machines.”
While ultimately there will be a benefit to workers from increased productivity, Carney said that will require imaginative solutions by companies, governments and policy-makers in terms of training and social change.
“Get a grip on the scale of the problem. Assess and address,” he said.
Carney added that part of the solution could require major social change, with workers having to extend or return to education in later life to prepare themselves for the new world of labour. He acknowledged that wouldn’t be simple, when many people will have mortgages and other financial responsibilities, and added that up to now not everyone is getting training right.
As for Carney himself, he is set to step down as BoE governor in June 2019. Asked what the future holds for his own future in the workforce, he replied that he, too, will need to find a job and retrain.