In what can only be described as the result of profound and prolonged economic mismanagement and failed housing policies, the average house in BC, Canada, now costs $1 million.
According to data from the Canadian Real Estate Association, by February 2024, the benchmark home price in BC was $966,100, while homes in Vancouver shot up to $1,276,517.
This is approximately double or more than double the price of homes in every province except Ontario, where the housing situation is almost equally abysmal at an average of $868,200.
And while data for April has yet to be made available, given the fact that home prices have increased in Vancouver by 3.3% over the course of March, it’s now expected that the average home in BC will cost just over $1 million.
To put this in perspective, the average home in California (the second most expensive US state after Hawaii) in November 2023 was valued at 793,600 USD. Converted to CAD, that’s $1,093,612. In other words, a house in BC is now as expensive as one in California, a place renowned for its unaffordability and low cost-to-quality-of-life ratio.
What is the BC government doing to address the housing crisis?
It isn’t like the BC government isn’t aware of the situation, either. They acknowledged the housing crisis in 2019, along with announcing several billion dollars in funding to begin addressing it.
However, most of the money wasn’t intended for single-family or even multi-family homes; it was intended to build more rental units in a desperate attempt to provide any form of housing, as there’s simply no way that the government can possibly build enough new homes fast enough to get a grip on the situation.
However, even with hundreds of thousands of new rental units being built over the next ten years, this is still unlikely to even make a dent in the problem as BC receives somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 new immigrants each and every year.
The picture is bleak, and it’s not clear if or when a reversal in current trends will come.
As it stands, the dream of owning a home for most British Columbians may be dead, with those who don’t currently own a home and who are hellbent on staying in the province likely destined to remain renters for the foreseeable future.
