Both Parties Have Aggressive Proposals Towards Affordable Housing
It looks like Christy Clark and the BC Liberals run has come to an end. Announced today the NDP & Green Party have teamed up to form a stable minority government over the next four years. This could mean big changes coming to the Vancouver real estate market and housing affordability across BC. Both parties had aggressive platforms targeting housing.
The Green Party’s Housing Platform is as follows:
- A BC Green government will work with the federal government to introduce measures to eliminate money laundering and international property speculation from the BC residential real estate market.
- Enhance the progressive nature of the property transfer tax by introducing a sliding scale of rates from 0% on the first $200,000 for a property’s value, to 12% on property value over $3 Million.
- Apply the PTT to the transfer of beneficial ownership
- introduce a speculation tax to discourage flipping of property
- Expand the foreign buyers tax to apply across the province to 30%
- Introduce measures to tax lifetime capital gains in excess of $750,000 on principal residences on homes bought and sold within 5 years.
- Work with financial institutions and the federal government to develop protections for recent homebuyers who are negatively affected by market cooling initiatives
- A BC Green government will invest up to $750 million per year to support the construction of 4000 new units of affordable housing per year.
- A BC green government will enhance the provisions to the residential tenancy act to control rent increases, and to protect tenants from tenure termination that will result in the loss of affordable accommodation.
The NDP’s Housing Platform is as follows:
- Through partnerships, we will build 114,000 new rental, social and co-op, and owner-purchase housing units.
- provide a refundable renter’s rebate of $400 dollars per rental household in BC each year
- Close the BC Liberals’ “fixed term lease” loophole and ensure controls on rent increases are enforced.
- Close the loopholes that let speculators dodge taxes and hide their identities and we’ll require them to pay their fair share of tax on their empty houses through a yearly two per cent absentee speculators’ tax.
- We will also establish a multi-agency task force to fight tax fraud and money laundering in the BC real estate marketplace
While it’s easy to make election promises it’s another thing to actually implement them. We’ll have to see which moves they make in the coming months. However, one things for sure, these aggressive policies would be a drastic change from the BC Liberal’s stance over the past 16 years. For further context on the NDP’s housing views, here’s an interview I did with the NDP’s David Eby just a few weeks ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yRczBxZBhs&t=3s
