Helping the middle class buy homes

Driving forward, Today's BC Liberals will:

• Increase housing supply by working with municipalities to speed up permitting and open new opportunities to housing.
• Expand the Renovation Tax Credit eligibility to those renovating their home to accommodate a secondary suite.
• Raise the threshold of the First Time Home Buyers' Program exemption to $500,000, saving first-time home buyers up to $8,000.
• Invest $700 million in the BC HOME Partnership program to provide mortgage down payment assistance loans to an estimated 42,000 first-time home buyers over the next three years.

Making your home more affordable

We will take action with a comprehensive 10-year plan for affordable housing:

Building homes:

• Building 114,000 affordable rental, non-profit and co-op housing units through partnerships over 10 years, building on public land where available. As much as possible, we will build with innovative BC-manufactured wood products, creating new markets for BC wood products and new jobs in BC's forest industry-based communities.

  Protecting renters:

• Providing a new renter's rebate of $400 dollars per rental household per year.
• Closing the BC Liberals' "fixed term lease" loophole and ensure controls on rent increases are enforced.
• Passing legislation requiring fair treatment during renovations and demolitions of rental properties.

  Taxing speculators:

• Closing loopholes that let speculators dodge taxes and hide their identities, and charging a yearly 2% absentee speculators' tax to crack down on empty homes.
• Directing revenue from the absentee speculators' tax into a Housing Affordability Fund.
• Establishing a multi-agency task force to fight tax fraud and money laundering in the BC real estate marketplace.

Affordable Housing

A BC Green government will:

• Introduce measures to eliminate money laundering and property speculation
• Implement a provincial housing plan for affordable rental accommodation
• Invest up to $750 million per year to create approx. 4,000 units of affordable housing per year
• Update the Residential Tenancy Act to protect renters

Reduce Government Interference that Makes Housing Unaffordable

Housing prices reached new highs during the past year, making the dream of ownership more difficult. The BC Liberals want to spend billions on interest-free loans, which place a heavy burden on taxpayers while further inflating home prices and put our economy at risk of a 2008 style sub-prime mortgage crisis. A safer and less costly way to keep home prices reasonable is to increase supply. Bringing new housing stock to market is restrained in numerous ways. For example, over 80% of the land in Vancouver is zoned for single-family residential only. By relaxing or removing these restrictions, we can free up the market to provide more housing at lower cost.

Work with municipalities to reduce development costs, streamline building permit processes, and simplify and accelerate rezoning

Affordable Housing

The YPP believes that the cost and availability of homes in BC is directly affected by government regulation.

The YPP will Remove BC income tax from rental income to encourage people to create rental properties, remove the property transfer tax that consistently drives up the price of a home every time it transfers ownership, remove restrictions on secondary suites and minimum home sizes so that higher density homes can be available at a lower cost, and work with developers to ensure that big box retail and large industrial developments also include high density residential.

Reduce housing prices by banning foreign purchases

Extravagant incomes of some foreign buyers has allowed the housing market to skyrocket. Purchases of homes and land should be restricted to Canadian residents and in some cases to BC residents. Reduce taxes and fees connected with building and/or purchasing a home. These fees account for almost 37% of the cost in the lower mainland.

Priority given to BC Citizens to make housing affordable

Accordingly all overseas residents would be banned by the party from buying residential housing property in the Lower Mainland of BC from the date of the BC election on May 9th 2017. In addition all current overseas owners of the estimated 50,000 empty or infrequently used homes on the Lower Mainland will be required to sell their homes within 12 months of the election. These sales must occur at public auctions, with a requirement that the properties can only be sold to individual citizens (excluding private companies and corporations) with any intermediate ‘in trust” ownership declared illegal. Unsold residential properties at the end of 12 months would be forfeited to the BC Government.