Insights: How much affordable housing can we build on public land?

Most cities and towns have vacant or underutilized land owned by the municipality and other levels of government. For instance, an easy walk from my home takes me past a vacant patch of land where an old firehall was demolished when a bigger one was built nearby.

While previously these properties may have simply been sold off to generate revenue, communities are now increasingly looking to these lands strategically to address the housing crisis and to bring back affordability.   

But how much underutilized municipal land is there? And how much housing could we build on it? 

That’s what this edition of Insights aims to tackle. 

Maximizing affordability using public land

While it is encouraging to see how many projects have already been built, we know so much more is needed to address the crisis in housing affordability. If we are going to use public land for housing, we need to ensure we get maximum community benefit. The best option is to partner with community housing organizations to build permanently affordable, non-market housing directed to those who are currently struggling the most with housing costs.  

But how much of this public land is available? A team of researchers at UBC had the same questions and developed the Land Assessment Tool. It identifies vacant and potentially underutilized public land that is well located for affordable housing based on its proximity to amenities and services. We applied this tool to 12 municipalities in Canada and derived an average of 0.42 Hectares of vacant and underused public land per 1,000 people. By applying this to the urban population in B.C., we can develop a rough estimate of how much land could be available:       

This is a lot of land that could be used for housing. It's equivalent to approximately 2200 city blocks, or double the size of YVR airport! 

But not all this land can easily transform into affordable housing. So let’s be very conservative and say housing could be successfully built on 5% of this land (100 hectares). Continuing our cautious approach, let’s also assume this housing is low-rise, about 260 homes per hectare. This would provide over 26,000 permanently affordable rental homes.  

If we assume an average household size of 2.8, we could be talking homes for 73,194 people across B.C. 

That’s a number that could go a long way in providing affordable, good quality housing to households that are currently paying too large a share of their income on rent.   

Rental housing built by for-profit developers end up with only a portion of the units available at below-market rents for a 10-year period only. While the increase to overall supply may be helpful, it cannot be counted on to bring housing costs down significantly in the near term, particularly for those who are now faced with paying more than 30% and even 50% of their income on shelter costs. 

But what for-profit developers do have going for them are deeper pockets to foot the costs of early project design, and the time-consuming and complicated steps needed before a project even breaks ground. Non-profit housing providers simply don’t have the same access to capital.   

That’s why the Vancity Affordable Community Housing Program was developed: to address this challenge by providing flexible grants and loans at this early stage.  The program has gradually grown over the past decade to support a significant number of projects, mainly in BC.  So far, the program has worked with 129 organization on 176 projects that have helped create 11,290 affordable homes. 

 The total number of homes includes those that have already been built, under construction and those at an earlier stage (‘pre-development’). To date, most of these housing projects have been in the Lower Mainland and Capital Regional District, but the program is looking at ways to scale in BC and beyond.

Key Takeaways: 

• There is a lot of land available in municipalities across B.C. that could be used for housing. 

• Even a very conservative calculation shows more than 26,000 permanently affordable homes could be built on this land, helping house over 73,000 British Columbians. 

• Having a strong community housing sector is fundamental to this approach if we want to make this new housing as affordable as possible. 

• As municipalities and other levels of government move ahead, we have to build up the sector’s capacity through better access to flexible, early-stage funds and later stage construction financing.