Housing pressure reaches beyond the biggest cities
Why mid-sized Island communities are asking different questions about supply.
COURTENAY — The housing pressure that defined Victoria a decade ago has moved up-Island on schedule, and the mid-sized communities absorbing it are asking a question the big cities skipped: supply of what, for whom?
The Comox Valley's numbers sketch the pattern. Prices driven by in-migration — retirees, remote workers, and Vancouver equity arriving by ferry — rather than local wages; a rental vacancy rate below one per cent; and a construction industry building, rationally, for the buyers who exist rather than the workers who serve them.
The different question shows up in the tools. Where the metros debated towers, the Island's mid-sized councils are regulating tenure: residency-linked incentives, non-market land trusts seeded with municipal property, and — the sharpest instrument — zoning that permits the fourth unit only if one is secured rental. The legal footing for some of it is untested, which the councils acknowledge with a shrug that says: so test it.
What the Island communities have that the metros lacked is timing. The pressure arrived here with a decade's warning and a library of other cities' mistakes. The next two years of council votes will show whether warning is the same thing as preparation.
