Every community in B.C. is growing. In my hometown of Penticton, at least 5,500 more homes need to be built by 2041 to keep up with the population.
Premier David Eby promised 300,000 new homes over the next decade across the province, largely through efforts like the government's change to zoning regulations to increase density and cut down on public hearings.
That will certainly help, but building hundreds of thousands of four-plexes or carriage homes isn't going to make those homes dramatically more affordable.
A part of that is the costs involved in construction, such as labour or raw materials, which aren't under the direct control of any developer or government.
To make more affordable housing, or rather, to make more housing more affordably, as a province I think more radical solutions need to be proposed and used than what has so far been put on the table by any political party.
One solution is to look to the past and force the federal government to restart its housing program.
Whether it's buying food, negotiating medicine prices or building housing, the sheer economy of scale that the federal government is able to operate at means there will be savings compared to any individual developer, or even compared to the province.
The government can also afford to absorb more of the costs of building housing, which will as a result keep rents lower when they are finished.
A private developer, on the other hand, is going to have to keep profit in mind. That's a matter of fact and a necessity for any sustainable long-term business.
It's not like this is a new idea, although it does seem one that no federal party has truly considered lately. The government used to have a co-op housing construction program that built thousands of homes, up until it was cut down during the 90s.
Let's be honest, things like the Liberal Party's Housing Accelerator Fund have been a drop in the bucket in comparison to the federal government actually getting involved in building homes again.
If the federal government doesn't want to stay on operating the housing after it's built, that's fine, take a page from BC Housing's playbook and find a non-profit to run it, or just hand it over to BC Housing to manage.
Alternatively, we can look to Sweden and their development of industrialized modular housing construction as a means of addressing affordability here at home.
We already have modular housing construction here in B.C., in fact, one of the larger employers here in Penticton, Moduline, is one such company.
It's nowhere near the scale of what Sweden has, however. In an article in the New York Times last year, they toured one factory that was churning out a new unit for an apartment building every half-hour.
Penticton has an example of that kind of modular pre-fab housing too, specifically the Snpa蕯x虒t蓹ntn (Healing House) supportive housing building on Skaha Lake Road.
It works, it simply needs to be expanded. The first cars produced were expensive, beyond the means of many people. The Ford Motor Company revolutionized production and cut costs dramatically with the introduction of the assembly line.
With a 40-hour work week, it would take the Swedish factory less than two years to build all the units Penticton would need for the next 20.
On top of the scale, which requires investment that would pay off in the future, the Swedish model also requires a major change in housing policy.
Instead of individual building permits for each project, with constant inspections and strict codes to be followed for everything from insulation thickness to beam placement, Sweden effectively sets criteria and certifies the factories and has done with it.
For example, they require a wall to resist burning for a certain period of time, let the factories figure out how to achieve it and prove their work to the government, and then let them build away.
Now that is what I call cutting red tape and unnecessary bureaucracy.
These two ideas can even be combined together, to speed up the deployment of housing to communities where there isn't necessarily the workforce available.
Just building the way we have always done and largely relying on private enterprise to do it isn't the solution.
Our world is growing bigger, and we need big ideas if we want to keep up.
Brennan Phillips is the assistant editor of the Keremeos Review and a reporter with Black Press.
