Castanet – Aug 28, 2024 / 10:00 am | Story: 503631
Re: Alan Sanderson’s letter, Land prices too high in OK (Castanet, Aug. 27)
I agree land prices are too high in the Okanagan but let’s not blame the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR).
There is no comparison to the desirability of the suburbs of Saskatoon to B.C. and the Okanagan. Everyone wants to live in the sunny Okanagan. It is places like Kelowna (where land costs) $1 million.
A few years ago, the City of Kelowna allowed fourplexes on single family lots and suddenly, individuals were competing with developers for those houses and developers are hard to compete with. Prices of single-family homes doubled in a couple of years.
Then the city came up with a new land use designation called “Core Area Neighbourhood” in the the 2040 Official Community Plan (2022), which allowed any kind of development in any residential area . So, now developers can build apartment buildings on single family lots.
A lot of homeowners now consider their homes investments and want to cash in on this development frenzy, and that is what it is. To add to that, the city has to get its cut and apply development cost charges (DCCs) to new apartment/condo buildings and that drives up prices. Who pays for that? Homeowner and renters.
As house prices increase, new (homes) coming onto the market are price-matched and we have an out-of-control market. Homeowners have a gold mine and they are going to ask for whatever they can get, and on it goes. The increasing city taxes, the DCCs, housing speculation, local developers and those coming to the Okanagan from other cities to cash in, and the general “upzoning” are driving the house prices out of control.
Houses are now lumped into land assemblies, where sellers don’t even try to sell the them as homes but as development sites.
As David Ley stated in a 2022 Vancouver Sun column: “Once up-zoning occurs, the genie is out of the bottle, and the housing stock faces inflationary pressures the city cannot control.”
The ALR was established in 1973 as farmland was being lost to development at a rapid pace. Without this, we would have little, if any, good farmland left. The ALR covers less that 5% of the province. Eighty percent of B.C. residents live in the three critical agricultural areas, one of which is the Okanagan Valley.
We can’t rely on other countries for our food – they need it. The ALR needs to be retained to provide food for us now and in the future. Think of the ALR as a natural barrier, a no-go zone. It’s a non-renewable resource that supports everyone in B.C. and beyond.
Yes, it costs a lot to buy a starter home in the Okanagan, but it is the policies, the Okanagan climate, the central location and the proximity to Vancouver that is making it so desirable and, therefore, expensive.
Susan Ames
https://www.castanet.net/news/Letters/503631/ALR-not-to-blame-for-cost
