WHISTLER—B.C.’s slowing real-estate market shows new measures targeting speculation and foreign buyers are working, experts told political leaders at an annual conference Monday.

But falling prices haven’t yet translated to real affordability, said Sharon Gaetz, president of the Union of B.C. Municipalities (UBCM) and mayor of Chilliwack, B.C.

As the province’s mayors and councillors head into the fall civic election — with housing at the forefront in many communities — the UBCM placed the emphasis squarely on unhealthy business practices rather than the need to build more homes.

Gaetz said B.C. municipalities are already doing a good job of adding supply.

“We think it’s more about the speculation,” she said, adding that she’s eager to see the rollout of new provincial legislation that will reveal the true ownership of properties held in shell companies or trusts.

The UBCM heard a dire warning from John Rose, a geography professor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, about Vancouver’s strategy of rezoning single-family neighbourhoods to allow duplexes and other infill. Rose said there is little evidence that rezoning low-density areas will create affordable housing.

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That skepticism was echoed by several speakers, including Josh Gordon, a professor at Simon Fraser University. If single-family-home neighbourhoods are densified, he said, governments should make sure to capture part of the rise in land value in development fees or taxes.

Gordon showed delegates how high housing prices had rippled outward from West Vancouver and Vancouver’s Westside to lower-priced areas like Surrey. The points at which prices started to fall, he said, coincide with the introduction of the foreign buyer tax in the summer of 2016 and the NDP’s February 2018 budget, which introduced further measures including a speculation tax and an increase to property tax for homes worth over $3 million.

“The market is now turning and we’re going to start to get more affordable housing,” Gordon said.

Mayor Bruce Milne said that in his community of Sechelt, 30 per cent of renters pay over half their income on housing. He thanked Gordon and Rose for their research.

“I’ve been using it at council meetings to say that density and affordability are not matched,” Milne said. “And we have to pay some attention to that. Developers hate to hear that.”

But not everyone in the room agreed. Rachel Selinger, the housing strategist for a lobby group called Generation Squeeze, said the debate is often framed as supply versus demand.

“I think it’s both,” Selinger said.

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She noted that she herself lives in a co-housing multi-family building on land that was once zoned for single-family houses.

“The Making Room policy is coming on Sept. 8, and there’s a lot of people calling it … a wrecking ball for the City of Vancouver,” Selinger said, referring to the city’s plan to allow duplexes and more infill on single-family lots.

“If you look at the argument that it’s a gift to developers, the likelihood of large developers building a duplex on a single-family lot seems unlikely to me. We’ve seen a lot of families trying to do housing for them and their children, or some small local developers.”

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