Homes, History, and the OCP
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| Built in 1978 |
Setting the Stage
This evening, the Victoria BC Council will be holding the third, and hopefully the last, day of their public hearing for their 10-year OCP Update.
In British Columbia, where I live, municipalities are required to adopt an Official Community Plan, or OCP. According to the province:
Official community plans describe the long-term vision of communities. They are a statement of objectives and policies that guide decisions on municipal and regional district planning and land use management. These decisions impact communities' sustainability and resilience.
The province changed some of the rules around OCPs as part of their recent housing reforms. Among other things:
- They have to be updated every five years (down from every ten).
- They must be aligned with the municipality's Housing Needs Report (HNRs), which identify housing requirements over a 20-year period.
- They must designate enough land for development to meet the anticipated housing needs.
- They must conduct public engagement as part of the OCP, as public hearings are no longer permitted for individual projects that are consistent with the OCP.
- They must complete their first full OCP and zoning update by the end of 2025.
The last major OCP update was in 2012. The City kicked off their current 10-year Official Community Plan Update in April of 2023. After debate, Council decided on a plan with the following engagement timeline.
My Times Colonist Op-Ed
On September 11, 2025, the Time Colonist, one of Victoria's major local papers, published an opinion piece I sent them. They called it Comment: OCP is a return to the good old days. I'd like to thank them for printing it!
I'm including the piece here. The Time Colonist limits Op-Eds to 500-750 words, which I remember being hard to fill when I was in grade school, but which seems to disappear quickly now!
After the comment are some additional sections that elaborate on various points. I've added links to those sections in the comment text for convenience.
The Comment
Dear Editor,
When there’s a bad fruit crop in Canada, the price of fresh fruit goes up. Back in the days of the Soviet Union, when there was a bad fruit crop, the price stayed the same, but grocery lines stretched around the block. Different outcomes, but the same root cause—not enough fruit to go around.
All across Canada, we used to build small apartment buildings. The federal government made low cost loans available to construct rentals and co-ops, and cities didn’t make it too difficult to build. We ended up with places like Cook Street Village and James Bay. Unsubsidized new homes were never cheap, but the consistent supply of new buildings translated to a good supply of less expensive, older, homes and people of “average means” could usually find a place to live.
But in the 1980s this stopped. Here in Victoria, the City made it illegal to build new apartments, townhouses, or multiplexes on most of its land. We had our reasons, but one result was that we stopped building new homes in the City. The population grew, and when it grew enough prices went through the roof.
There were other effects as well. Although government regulations limited where new homes could be built, the demand didn’t go away and industry responded by building new homes where it was legal. Unfortunately, Victoria was built out, and most of the places that allowed apartment buildings already had them. That meant that we tore the older, less expensive, homes down to build new ones.
Another effect was building up. Instead of building modest numbers of four to six storey buildings where it made sense, we started building a few towers in downtown where it was legal, even though tower construction is expensive. Sometimes the towers replaced older buildings; other times they replaced parking lots.
Yet another effect was that the ever increasing cost of housing turned homes into speculation targets and, again, the market responded.
And, most unfortunately of all, as the very cheapest homes disappeared, the people who had been just scraping by fell out of the system. A family crisis, a split-up, a medical emergency, a temporary breakdown, shifted from a surmountable problem to a full fledged crisis. And since more people were living in smaller places, there was often no spare bedroom, or even a couch, that a friend or relative could offer for respite.
All of this was a consequence of the government overly restricting what and where homes could be built. Housing was, and is, one of the most tightly regulated industries in Canada.
Over the last half a century we’ve dug ourselves into a deep hole. Housing is unaffordable for far too many people. Older, less expensive, apartment buildings are falling apart or gone. New homes are more expensive to build than ever, and a lot of that cost is the years of red tape to negotiate through before the first shovel can pierce the ground.
To get out of the hole will take government action. We’ll need money, lots of money, to create new homes that people of low or moderate income can afford. But most of that will not be coming from cities. It will come from the provincial and federal governments. Our city doesn’t have to pay for new homes—we just have to stop blocking the new homes that people want and need. It should be easy and predictable to build both market and non-market homes in the City of Victoria.
That’s what the OCP update does. It’s not a radical move; it’s a return to the way we built “in the good old days.” It’s not going to make housing inexpensive; but if the experience of other cities holds, it will start to make things better. It’s not going to create a “race to the bottom”; if anything, the new OCP has too many guardrails. Most importantly, though, we’ll stop digging the hole deeper, and will set the stage so that provincial and federal actions on housing will do more than spit into the wind.
Homelessness and the Price of Housing
I learned about the relationship between high housing prices and homelessness from the book Homelessness is a Housing Problem by Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern. The authors tested a range of beliefs about the rates of homelessness in cities.
They looked at mental illness, drug use, poverty, weather, and even the politics of the local councils. They found none of those explain the different rates in different cities. What did correlate was the cost of housing. From the author's description:
Using accessible statistics, the researchers test a range of conventional beliefs about what drives the prevalence of homelessness in a given city—including mental illness, drug use, poverty, weather, generosity of public assistance, and low-income mobility—and find that none explain why, for example, rates are so much higher in Seattle than in Chicago. Instead, housing market conditions, such as the cost and availability of rental housing, offer a more convincing explanation.
The authors were writing about the United States, but researchers, including Jens von Bergmann and Nathan Lauster, have shown that the findings also hold here in Canada. Their article is called Homelessness and Rents in Canada.
That article also discusses a piece by Salim Furth called Why housing shortages cause homelessness that appears in Works in Progress. Furth's piece argues that there's more to the correlation than just housing prices, and proposes a specific mechanism: that people don’t become homeless when they run out of money, they become homeless when they run out of people who love them and have a spare room.
The simpler explanation, that expensive markets have very few really cheap rentals, and that turns annoying events like having a roommate leave into disasters, also has data supporting it. But whether Salim Furth's hypothesis holds, or the simpler explanation, or both, the correlations between the cost of housing, and particularly the cost of the least expensive housing, and homelessness rates is very strong.
Here are some links:
- Colburn, G., & Aldern, C. P. (2022). Homelessness is a Housing Problem. University of Califormia Press.
- von Bergmann, J. & Lauster, N. (2025). Homelessness and Rents in Canada. Mountain Doodles.
- Furth, S. (2024). Why housing shortages cause homelessness. Works in Progress.
- Wvong, R. (2025). Municipal land-use restrictions and homelessness. Vancouver Needs More Housing
We Made it Hard to Build New Housing
With our current (and, hopefully, former) zoning, building a new small apartment building requires a rezoning, and that process is extremely expensive and time consuming.
In housing markets like Victoria's and Vancouver's, it can take several years for a project to go from proposal to completion, while places like Edmonton can do it in a single year. Russil Wvong has a good piece, with many references, on how this works out in Vancouver. It's called Bonsai City.
Here in Victoria, Luke Mari, who is an urban planner, land economist, and Principal at Aryze Developments, described the situation in his Capital Daily opinion piece Opinion: Victoria's fleeing families are a product of our housing decisions.
Another blog post of mine called Building Height, Livability, the Housing Crisis, and the City of Lights touched on some of the same issues.
Perhaps the easiest way to visualize what's happened is too see it in action. Check out the aerial picture of Vancouver that appeared on Reddit a few years ago!
New Apartments and Displacement
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) has an article on this titled Provincial zoning reform essential to reduce housing exclusion and displacement. They put it well:
Opening up these single-family areas to apartments can also help reduce displacement. Under the status quo, with apartments blocked in detached housing zones, development is steered towards existing apartment areas, which leads to demolitions of older apartments. Burnaby notoriously saw mass evictions in this manner near Metrotown. Badly needed new apartments could have been built instead in nearby single-family areas if the city had allowed it.
The basic idea is that by allowing small apartment buildings across the city, we stop pushing developers, non-profits, etc. to meet the demand for new homes by redeveloping existing apartment buildings. That, coupled with efforts by the BC and federal governments to enable no-profits to buy older, less expensive, apartment buildings that are up for sale, should help minimize the amount of displacement as new homes are built.
Yes, We Need Subsidized Housing
We have been restricting housing for a long time. For a while, we avoided the consequences of ever rising housing prices by encouraging people to move farther away from the core. Within Greater Victoria, this showed up in explosive growth in places like Langford and brought us the famous "Colwood Crawl" traffic congestion. But, now, Victoria's version of "drive till you qualify" practically requires a personal airplane, and more and more people are coming to realize that clearcutting forests to preserve single-detached homes close to downtown is an environmental disaster.
It's also true that Canada used to build a lot more below-market housing, such as co-ops. And, despite what many people opposed to Victoria's OCP update would have you believe, very few housing proponents—even "YIMBY" (Yes In My Back Yard) advocates—argue that we can just build our way out of the housing crisis.
At the same time, even when Canada's funding of non-market housing was at its peak, the vast majority of new homes being built were market rate. As Russil Wvong put it in 2024:
Non-market housing is limited by people's willingness to pay taxes. It costs about $500K to build an apartment, so even $1 billion will only build about 2000 apartments. Building one million apartments would cost 500X as much, so $500 billion ($12,500 per Canadian). Given people's opposition to tax changes like combining 5% GST and 7% PST into 12% HST, or a carbon tax that rises every year, it seems extremely unlikely that people would be willing to pay that much.
As Alex Usher points out: from 1973 to 1984, the heyday of social housing in Canada, we added about 16,000 apartments per year. CMHC's estimate is that to restore affordability to 2003-2004 levels, we need about 350,000 apartments per year for the next 10 years.
If you visit the website for the pro-hosing group Homes for Living, the boogie man of the anti-OCP crowd, and check out the "How do we fix this?" section you'll sections with the following titles:
- Give non-market housing a leg up
- Legalize housing more broadly
- Make housing more affordable to build
In the context of the OCP, cities in BC are not chartered to build housing. Cities do, however, have broad control over land use regulations, transportation infrastructure, and policy implementation.
Our current restrictions on building new housing are what got us into the housing crisis in the first place. Yes, it will take years for new construction to start replenishing our supply of older, more affordable, housing. Yes, we should make it as easy to build new, non-market, housing as we can. But by allowing more housing in more places, we can remove the upward pressure on housing prices that our artificial scarcity has generated, and that will provide some space for non-market housing to take up the slack.
However, if we don't address the underlying problem, then we'll end up needing more non-market housing than we are ever likely to build.
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