EDITORIAL: Home affordability must be a top civic priority

You won’t find politicians and bureaucrats boasting about this week’s news that Vancouver is the most expensive city in North America in which to live, according to The Economist magazine.

For those who watch the Lower Mainland real estate market, that’s certainly not news, as high-home prices have been the norm here for much of the past decade.

But how does this latest acknowledgement change things?

It certainly brings some perspective.

The idea that it’s more expensive to live here than New York and Los Angeles is certainly sobering.

And it should serve as yet another wake-up call to civic leaders and city planners, who need to make housing affordability a top priority for the foreseeable future.

One strategy is to permit the construction of secondary suites, coach houses, granny flats. This needs to be put on the front-burner, and expedited as much as possible, as the prospect of finding affordable accommodations is already bleak.

Couples wanting to raise a family will increasingly have to turn to apartments and townhouses, rather than following in their parents’ footsteps of providing a home with a front and back yard.

Secondary suites and coach houses do more than just provide space for young people.

They provide income for overtaxed homeowners struggling to make their mortgage payments.

Should the economy continue to unravel, and should China’s positive influence on the Lower Mainland economy diminish, and in the event the U.S. doesn’t fare better in the future, interest rate adjustments could push new homeowners already indebted to the hilt, over the edge.

Local politicians will say that their goal is to make Richmond a great place in which to live, work and play, but what happens when living here becomes something only the rich can afford.

Only a well-thought-out, multi-faceted approach to the problem stands any chance of coming up with a solution.