Urban planner Louisa-May Khoo says she got a sense of deja-vu when British Columbia Premier David Eby announced the BC Builds housing program earlier this year.
Chuck Chiang, The Canadian PressA Harbour Air seaplane takes off past office and condo towers as a boat refuels at a floating Chevron station on the water, in Vancouver, on July 25 . THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck
“BC Builds has pegged their rental rates at 30 per cent of the household income, for instance, and that’s something the has always stuck by,” Khoo said. The BC Builds program aims to use “government, community and non-profit owned” land and $2 billion in low-cost financing to deliver middle-income homes.“We’re starting with rental housing,” Eby said during a February announcement for BC Builds. “We’re going to move into housing for purchases as well. This is a model that has been used in Singapore, in Vienna … we know that it works, and we are taking that model and we’re expanding it dramatically.
It led to the creation of the Housing and Development Board to build and sell public housing, as well as laws that gave government broad powers to acquire land for redistribution for “any public purpose.” “What that means in practice is that the kind of policies and the kind of interventions that a government in Singapore can make are next to impossible to replicate one-to-one in other contexts. So, at best, I think what’s possible is that some elements of the approach that Singapore has taken to public housing can be adapted to different contexts.”
He said he’s lived in different public housing units in Singapore in the last 25 years, “and in almost every case, within a couple of weeks, I knew my neighbours fairly well. And that has to do with the way that units are laid out.” Han said while Singapore is heavily reliant on these workers to provide labour, they are often housed in dormitories separated from other communities creating a significant social issue that is another part of the country’s housing model.
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