Making $70,000/year and not able to find a rental

We need more housing

This woman makes $67K a year. She's couch-surfing until she can find affordable housing.

A story from CBC: Teresa Chhina works for the province as a community integration specialist, helping people find affordable housing. Since her apartment in New Westminster burned down in March, she’s been homeless. With rental vacancies at super-low levels, she can’t find housing, even though she makes close to $70,000/year.

Audio: Is renting out of reach in Vancouver? Teresa called in at 6:07. A segment from the Early Edition with Margareta Dovgal (from Vancouver’s Renters Advisory Committee) and Noha Sedky (a planner).

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“Shelters are ‘gentrifying,’ with working-class people needing services and housing that once served people on welfare or disability.” An eye-opening comment from this May 2023 Vancouver Sun article: B.C. rest areas, park-and-rides fill with people who can't afford a home.

When we're not building enough market housing, the people who would have lived there don't vanish - they move down the housing ladder. You get trickle-down evictions and tremendous pressure on people closer to the bottom of the ladder.

And then in the last three years housing scarcity has been severely aggravated by Covid: more remote work => people needing more space at home.

To me the obvious solution is to build as much housing as we can, as rapidly as we can, both market and non-market. It's like musical chairs: we simply don't have enough chairs, so prices and rents have to rise to unbearable levels to force people out.