Erick Villagomez teaches architecture and urban design at UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning. His work examines how cities are shaped by often-invisible systems that influence power, equity, and democratic participation. An article by Villagomez published at spacing.ca is worth serious attention. It followed the announcement by Premier Eby and Prime Minister Carney of a welfare plan for developers that involves the purchase of unsold condominiums.
Villagomez posed this question:
If Canada is facing a severe housing shortage, why are there thousands of completed homes available for governments to buy in the first place?
Villagomez continues:
For years, Canadians have been told that housing affordability is primarily a supply problem. There are not enough homes, so governments must make it easier to build them. Municipal approvals should be accelerated. Development charges should be reduced. Regulations should be streamlined. More housing, we were told, would improve affordability. This narrative has shaped housing policy across the country. Government has increasingly aligned itself around one objective: maintaining a continuous pipeline of housing production.
Yet Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. data show thousands of completed condominium units sitting vacant across B.C.,
Governments at the national, provincial, and local levels are simplifying or removing barriers faced by developers. But the industry has little interest in building homes for families in need when greater profits can be made from luxurious high-end condominiums.
Public policy is therefore less about meeting the housing needs of citizens than about keeping the development system running profitably. That segment of the economy is treated as essential because so much private wealth in British Columbia has been accumulated through land speculation, real estate development, and rising property values. With few exceptions, the province’s wealthiest moguls were real estate developers.
Housing policy has become less a public-interest strategy than a wealth-preservation system for people already positioned to profit from scarcity. The result is predictable: governments claim to be addressing the housing crisis while protecting the economic arrangements that helped create it.
Erick Villagomez has written many articles about urban planning, and he quotes Albert Einstein, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
At spacing.ca Villagomez has written a series titled Rising High, Falling Short. It is about the impacts of urban policies and official dedication to housing people in high-rise buildings.
Despite a rich history of architectural innovation, most contemporary high-rises follow a rigid formula dictated by economic efficiency rather than human well-being. While visionary exceptions exist, they remain anomalies—not necessarily because they are flawed, but because they do not align with the financial and regulatory structures that shape modern development. As a result, many residential high-rises fall short when viewed through a broader lens…
Beneath the sleek facades of contemporary high-rises lie a host of challenges: significant carbon emissions embedded in their materials, excessive energy demands throughout their lifespans, and detrimental impacts on the surrounding urban environment—from overshadowing public spaces to creating microclimates that make streets less hospitable. These costs, often invisible in standard financial calculations, distort our perception of high-rises as the inevitable or even optimal solution to urban growth…
Contemporary residential towers excel at one thing in particular: generating wealth for speculators, investors, and developers, along with their associated consultants…
Today, financial lending practices, municipal zoning policies, and development incentives have all been tailored to promote high-rise construction, making alternative models increasingly difficult to envision—especially for those embedded within the system…
Anticipating the inevitable criticisms—that this series is “anti-density” or rooted in NIMBYism—let us be clear: density is not synonymous with high-rises. In fact, when considering factors like access to natural light and open space, high-rises are not even the most spatially efficient form of urban development. Alternative models balance density with environmental sustainability, social cohesion, and long-term livability—many of which have been successfully implemented worldwide…
Categories: Housing
in-sights.ca 
If I’ve misunderstood what this post conveys feel free to correct me.
Our intensely unbiased yet steadfastly labouu-friendly NDP government in fact maintains a Corporate Welfare System to keep BC developers in business. Yes?
This, while absent-mindedly limiting a new inventory of affordable homes, condos, and rental units, to keep the game going? Yes?
Buying up amazingly expensive unsellable Vancouver/Victoria condos is much better than building lots of new affordable housing for our Just Plain Folks-type voters?
And nobody in the labour movement objects to this? Not so much as a squeak?
Cities abroad like Helsinki and Vienna, innovative states like Singapore, various Scandinavian nations all have it wrong about who should be housed, how well, and for how much?
Let’s ask notoriously astute The Beaverton for help disentangling political PR fiction from much more academic PR fiction..
https://thebeaverton.com/2026/06/5-reasons-why-bailing-out-rich-vancouver-condo-developers-with-taxpayer-money-is-what-the-free-market-is-all-about-by-mark-carney/
Good afternoon, taxpayers of Canada. It is me, Mark Carney, your Definitely Liberal Prime Minister. I hope that you are all having a wonderful, fiscally profitable day.
My secretary told me this morning that some of you are upset to hear that I plan to use a paltry three billion of your tax dollars to bail out wealthy convo developers in Vancouver because no one can afford to buy their units. What you don’t understand, however, is that I am a numbers man. A banker. I understand the free market better than you, because I went to Oxford (that is a school in England, which is a country in Europe).
Thus, let me tell you five reasons why what I am doing is actually perfectly aligned with free market principles. I will try to use simple everyday language.
1: The “free” part of “free market” stands for “As the leader of Canada’s government, I am free to do whatever I need to do in order to keep wealthy developers and boomer voters happy by ensuring housing prices don’t go down.” It’s okay if you didn’t learn that in whatever public school you went to. Don’t be ashamed of your ignorance.
2: The free market concept of supply and demand is perfectly exemplified in this very situation. You see developers, who are determined to supply you with wildly-overpriced, tiny shoebox condos, demand your money whether you like it or not. Hence, where your tax dollars are going in this new venture of mine.
3: While free market principles include limited government interference, “limited” is in the eye of the beholder. Specifically, the developers to whom I am beholden, because if I lose the confidence of the wealthy investor class, they’ve vowed to publicly reveal that I am secretly just Stephen Harper in one of those hyper realistic silicone masks. Thus, in this case, “limited” means “complete and total intervention.”
4: The concept of “voluntary exchange” between buyers and sellers is a core tenant of the free market. In this case, the sellers are the developers who refuse to acknowledge that none of you have any money for their over-valued products, and the buyer is technically you, by way of me using your tax dollars. So technically, you are all buying condos. I am very happy for you.
5: I can think of no better example of free market fundamentals in action than the Vancouver condo market: a massively-overpriced housing bubble held aloft for decades by wealthy investors, speculators, and laundered overseas money, wherein the vast majority of citizens are permanently priced out of home ownership and will be renting for the rest of their lives.
Having cleared that up, now imagine if Pierre Poilievre were your prime minister right now. Haha, I know, right? This measly bailout doesn’t sound so bad now, does it? Please remember that when you find out my next plan, which is to turn all of our national parks into privatized ski hills.
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So there. Yet some of you ungrateful sots think that our PM hasn’t suffered enough already? Really?
As an employee of Goldman Sachs for 13 years this unselfish patriot had no choice but to relocate and survive in the wilds of London, Tokyo, New York and Toronto. In relative luxury. Yes?
But now he is cruelly separated from Wall Street and Now York (and those other gloried sites) by being stuck in dismal hayseed populated Ottawa?
Confined to an archaic cottage!
What have we come to?
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It’s always buried in the fine print, isn’t it?
Just when it seemed that finding affordable housing was a top government priority The Tyee says, “Well…no. Not really.”.
https://thetyee.ca/News/2026/07/07/BC-Affordable-Homes-Budget-Cuts/
When the British Columbia government published Budget 2026 in February, much of the initial focus was on its historic deficit and planned tax hikes.
Then people noticed a nugget buried in the backgrounder section of the press release: “government is adjusting the pace of some housing investments. This includes reallocating nearly $1.4 billion across the fiscal plan.”
That adjustment included pausing the Community Housing Fund, which was created in 2018 to “build rental homes for people, including families, seniors, and people with disabilities.” Immediately, there were numerous reports about various projects being stranded by the change.
“Slowing down investment in light of the fiscal environment would have been understood by the sector,” the BC Non-Profit Housing Association said in an extensive and blunt press release. “But to decide not to proceed with last year’s call for proposals under the Community Housing Fund has the sector reeling.”
“We cannot think of another example of government asking any industry to spend millions in responding in good faith to planned investments, and then cancelling the call with no notice,” the association added. “It is unprecedented and shakes the confidence of the community housing sector, as well as our municipal and private sector partners.”
The BC Non-Profit Housing Association said the province told them that they “remain committed to meeting the overall targets for the CHF program but over a longer time horizon,” but did not provide clarity on the timeline and “offered no transition supports or mitigation measures for housing societies who invested significant time and money into CHF proposals, leaving the millions of dollars of financial impacts of these broken promises with the non-profit housing sector.”
The dust has settled a bit since then and a recent report authored by staff of the Metro Vancouver Regional District provides a clearer sense of just how many projects have been impacted.
“BC’s 2026 budget defers $1.4 billion in previously announced housing investments, including cancelling the 2025 Community Housing Fund call, deferring the Indigenous Housing Fund call, and reducing important rent supplements and operating grants,” the report states. “Member jurisdictions report at least 25 affected projects representing over 3,500 units.”
While Metro Vancouver estimated that 3,500 units across 25 projects have been impacted, a BC Non-Profit Housing Association document estimates 4,000 units have been lost across 49 projects.
The loss of so many units that were previously in the development pipeline will also make it harder for Metro Vancouver municipalities to meet the B.C.’s government’s own legally-mandated housing targets for municipalities, the report warns.
In response to this story, the Ministry of Housing and Municipal affairs said the decision to discontinue proposals for the community housing fund, and to slow down some projects, “was difficult.”
[…and what does the Housing Minister say?]
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Just a thought:
If the federal majority government refused to investigate BC’s Condo buy-back it could look suspicious. Like a cover-up.
So what did the Liberals do when faced with the request to investigate?
They made it look worse.
https://globalnews.ca/news/11958849/federal-liberals-quash-probe-bc-condo-buyout-plan/
Federal Liberals quash probe into B.C.’s condo buyout plan
The federal government will not be investigating the decisions that led to the B.C. vacant condo buyout plan.
Some Conservative MPs recalled the Commons Ethics Committee and demanded the probe during a meeting on Tuesday, but were shut down.
The hope was to call on ministers, developers and others to find out more about the plan and how it came about, but the Liberals used their majority on the committee to shut it down.
“Canadians are intelligent and they will make their own minds up through the facts and that is exactly how it should be,” Fares Al Soud, Liberal MP for Mississauga-Centre, said at the meeting.
Under the $1.4-billion plan, Build Canada Homes and BC Housing would purchase some 2,200 unsold condos outside the City of Vancouver and offer them under a rent-to-buy scheme.
[“Canadians are intelligent and they will make their own minds up.” Without access to all the facts? Wonderful non-denial-denial, no?]
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