Tough decisions ahead for government

The unwillingness of the Clark government to address the escalating cost of housing in the Lower Mainland until the major damage was done will have a long-term deleterious impact upon the region and the entire province.

This delay allowed the Liberal party to stuff their coffers with funds from grateful developers and realtors while many middle-class residents found the dream of buying a home in-creasingly beyond their financial capacity.

A quick example: Friends in West Vancouver bought a renovated home with four bedrooms (including two in a self-contained basement suite) on a 50 foot lot about 7 years ago when its value was well below $1 million. The assessed value of that property today is over $2.6 million!

Such increases are not uncommon throughout the Lower Mainland.

Now consider the impact of such increases on the supply of labour available to staff any number of service jobs from sales clerks to waiters to kitchen staff in West Vancouver. People earning $60,000 or less certainly cannot afford a home where the average cost is in excess of $1.4 million, and they cannot find rental accommodation when vacancy rates are less than one per cent and rents are rising to record levels.

The only solution in many cases is to move out into the suburbs — indeed, into the far suburbs. That implies long commutes to work and significant costs for transportation and, for those dependent on cars, parking. Further, with the paucity of public transport within the Lower Mainland, the urban core is experiencing ever greater traffic congestion.

As a result, it is becoming more difficult, if not impossible, to attract new labour or to staff the myriad of service positions typical in a major urban centre.

The Lower Mainland is starting to suffer something akin to sclerosis because of a failure on the part of the Liberals to develop an effective urban transportation system during their 16 years in power. Fixing this deficiency will not be easy nor quick.

Any successful approach to the problem must be multi-faceted. One facet will be a sweeping change to zoning in the urban centre to permit substantially increased density combined with a tax regime that will encourage such an increase.

Coincident with this will be the commitment to and implementation of a system of rapid transit to the north, east and south of the city— specifically not including the 10-lane bridge crossing the Fraser that the Liberals have committed, apparently in an effort to further en-hance traffic congestion downtown.

An effective transit system will require time and money — lots of money.

Finally, to encourage the use of such a transit system, the city will have to implement fees for cars using Vancouver. That means an annual cost to people living within the central city and those coming into the city on a daily basis. That fee, in effect a tax, will engender protests as will the financing of expensive high-speed public transit. The alternative, however, is even longer commutation time to work and the enormous social costs of such a misallocation of time.

Effective and forthright leadership on this file by the provincial government, the Greater Vancouver Regional District and Vancouver city government is essential.

Because Vancouver is not an international centre for finance nor a major logistics centre serving a substantial hinterland, continued failure to deal with this challenge will eventually result in Vancouver becoming a community where only the wealthy can afford housing in the urban centre. A resort community of wealthy individuals will not play the role of key driver of the provincial economy.

The Liberals, having successfully avoided making difficult decisions for so long, will now, if they manage to form a stable government, have to face these issues head on with vision, thoughtful planning and concern for the long-term rather than photo ops. Otherwise, our province will slowly fade into irrelevance — a kind of Monaco-by-the-Pacific.

David Bond is an author and retired bank economist. To contact the writer: curmudgeon@harumpf.com.