Editor:
Re: Burnaby mayor urges fed housing funding, NOW Opinion
Who and or what is the B.C. Urban Mayors’ Caucus?
This is what I asked myself after reading the op-ed penned by the BCUMC and printed in the Burnaby NOW as well as The Province newspaper. Has the Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM) become too large and unwieldly to manage? Why do we have a new acronym vying for attention and funding from multiple levels of government? This new group claims to represent 55% of the provincial population and formed in response to the COVID pandemic.
The op-ed article was basically a plea from this relatively new branch of governance requesting that the federal and provincial governments stop threatening to remove authority from local municipal bureaucracies and work cooperatively to fund and implement necessary changes regarding housing affordability. It quotes the success of the Federal Rapid Housing Initiative (RHI) as well as a proposed federal program referred to as the Housing Accelerator Fund (HAF). This new 4 billion federally budgeted HAF appears to have triggered a reaction from these 13 mayors. They would like to secure assurances that they will be able to access these funds to “empower cities to meet individual needs including hiring more staff, updating permitting systems, streamlining processes, acquiring land and other solutions to get housing built” in their individual communities.
I was put off when I read the article the first time in The Province. I found no clarity upon reading the same article in the local Burnaby NOW the next day. After reading the Blueprint for BC’s Urban future on the BCUMC website I was no further ahead. The goals of the group are just as vague as one might imagine a child’s description of future aspirations: very flowery with absolutely no detailed solutions put forward.
As a lifelong citizen of Burnaby, I was dismayed to see our own Mayor as a signatory to the letter in question. I wish to be clear: I support Mayor Hurley in his pursuit to provide a safe, joyous, and affordable community for all; he has displayed great courage in attempting to change the course of Burnaby’s inflexible planning/zoning of the past several decades. He has had 4 years to initiate change. I have yet to see the fruits of his labour. The current council is talking the talk on restructuring (though removal would be more appropriate) of single-family zoning but has yet to provide details. The clock has run out. We have no more time for handholding and self-conciliatory back-patting. It appears Minister David Eby’s patience has run out as well. I can only hope he carries through on his threat to take local governments’ ability to run housing programs out of the equation.
Stalling or reducing real-estate prices, lowering construction costs through updated building processes, and lowering the carbon footprint of current and future homes will require complex solutions! Judging by their past performance, I’m not sure that I trust the municipal government to administer these programs.
Generation Squeeze has produced a solutions-based document
Clark Campbell, Burnaby
