A major build-out of affordable housing requires us to stop relying on the current private, for-profit approach in BC and Canada. Instead we need to expand the stock of non-market and co-op housing with public-led approaches and non-profit development.
This report does the math on how it can be done in pricey Vancouver. To address the housing affordability crisis, in previous research we called for 10,000 new, non-market, rental units per year to be built in the Metro Vancouver region. These numbers are necessary to keep up with population growth and to alleviate the imbalance in the rental housing market. This piece looks at the costs of building that housing and how it can be delivered at much lower rents than for newly built market rental housing. These break-even rents cover the upfront construction costs of building new housing and this housing thus pays for itself over time.
About the author
Marc Lee is a Senior Economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Marc joined the CCPA’s British Columbia office in 1998, and is one of Canada’s leading progressive commentators on economic and environmental policy issues. From 2009 to 2015, Marc led the CCPA’s Climate Justice Project (CJP), which published a wide range of research on fair and effective approaches to climate action through integrating principles of social justice. Marc continues to write about climate and energy policy, strategies for affordable housing, federal and provincial budgets and macroeconomics. Marc has an MA in Economics from Simon Fraser University and a BA in Economics from the University of Western Ontario. Marc is a past chair of the Progressive Economics Forum, a national network of heterodox economists. He also served as a Visiting Professor at Simon Fraser University’s School of Public Policy in 2024 to 2025.
