6,200 affordable rental units needed: report

About 6,200 affordable rental apartment units are needed now in Greater Victoria just to catch up with current demand, according to the Capital Regional District’s draft housing affordability strategy.

The number was called “staggering” by some CRD directors last week.

Research by the B.C. Nonprofit Housing Association has identified a backlog of about 6,200 rental units to address the needs of low- to moderateincome households.

And projections suggest there are “significant potential gaps” in housing for households with incomes of $55,000 or less a year, says a CRD staff report to the hospitals and housing committee.

By 2038, 34,167 new units of affordable rental housing will be needed, the report says. The projections are based on an analysis of census, population growth and migration data and housing development, affordability and homelessness trends. “Without policy intervention and investments from government, current and future residents are likely to continue to face extreme hardship in the area of housing affordability,” the report says.

Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps called the numbers a “reality check,” adding that 2038 is “arguably just around the corner.”

An analysis found that the CRD’s best option is to focus on creating more rental units for households with incomes ranging from very low (less than $20,000 a year) to moderate ($35,000 to $55,000 year), the report says. It projects rental unit demand for those incomes will total more than 17,000 units by 2038 — about half of the estimated total rental demand of 34,167 new units.

The CRD has an overall vacancy rate of 0.7 per cent, including a vacancy rate of zero for three-bedroom units, “which creates upward pressure on rents, fewer housing choices for low-to-moderate income households and a worsening of the overall affordability profile,” the strategy says.

The report notes that there are approximately 24,855 purpose-built rental apartment units across Greater Victoria.

Between 2011 and 2016, 9,340 new households were added in the region, it says. Of those, almost 80 per cent chose to rent, but only 1,026 new rental housing units were added.

Excess rental demand was absorbed through the secondary rental market (single detached homes, basements, garden suites and rented condo units), the report says.

The average market rent in the Greater Victoria went up eight per cent or $78 in 2016 to $1,072. Newer, purpose-built rental housing stock rents at a much higher rate, with a twobedroom unit in the Greater Victoria built after 2005 renting at $1,527 a month.

View Royal Mayor David Screech and Victoria Coun. Marianne Alto, both committee members, called the numbers “staggering.”

Directors agreed to a suggestion from Helps that the definition of “affordability” be linked to the costs of transportation.

“The new metric is that if people are spending more than 45 per cent of their income on housing and transportation [combined], then it’s unaffordable,” Helps said, noting the old formula was that housing was unaffordable if it cost more than 30 per cent of a person’s income.

“If you can walk downtown to work, maybe you can afford to spend 45 per cent of your income on units that are closer to downtown or closer to transit,” Helps said.

The capital region Housing Corporation owns and manages 1,286 units of affordable rental housing for households with low- to moderate-incomes within 45 non-market housing developments in seven municipalities.