B.C. sets Coquitlam a target to build more than 6,000 homes in the next five years, but mayor and expert say it won’t get homes built

B.C. has set Coquitlam a housing target of 6,481 new homes over the next five years — but the city’s mayor says this figure is lower than what the city has already approved.

Coquitlam is one of the 10 cities the province assigned housing targets, which are based on 75 per cent of each municipality’s estimated housing need. Other cities on the list include Burnaby, Courtenay and Pitt Meadows.

“They’ve now put the weakest communities and the strongest communities on the same list. And developed housing target orders for communities that have always been advancing tremendous amounts of housing, like Coquitlam,” said Mayor Richard Stewart, who called Coquitlam’s inclusion on the list bewildering. 

In June, Stewart told the Dispatch that Coquitlam council has generally been approving about 6,000 housing units per year.

The province assigning housing targets doesn’t mean that homes will get built, he said.

‘Applications have dried up’

The mayor said the province is aware that Coquitlam has approved a significant amount of housing, and that it plans to continue as housing applications come in. Between 2020 and 2024, nearly 9,000 new homes were built in Coquitlam.

But beyond approving housing, city council is limited in what they can do.

“We can’t build it. We’re approving the housing that someone else will be building,” Stewart said.

“Unfortunately [housing] applications have kind of dried up, partly because of the provincial policies and partly because just the market has changed.”

Presales – what developers and financiers rely on to build – aren’t happening due to market conditions, like higher interest rates, construction costs and labour shortages. The U.S.-Canada trade war has also created economic uncertainty for buyers.

Stewart added that some of B.C.’s own housing regulations in recent years have also contributed to this. In 2023, the province enacted Bill 44, requiring local governments to update their bylaws to allow for greater density.

“Let’s face it, the housing industry requires financing, and financiers want predictability,” he said. “They need to know that the way it has happened in the past is still the way it’s going to happen. And … the province changed all those rules without the guiding documents, so we knew the rules had changed, but we didn’t know what the new rules were for more than a year.”

He said he saw some housing projects unable to secure financing because of this.

Andrey Pavlov, a professor of finance at SFU, agreed with Stewart that housing targets won’t get homes built.

“The provincial government is giving those targets, which allows politicians to talk at rallies about how committed they are to affordable housing. But this is in direct contradiction to the actual policies of the provincial government,” Pavlov said.

He attributed government policies like speculation and vacancy tax, foreign buyer ban, and regulations on short-term rentals as hindrances to housing investors.

“The net effect of them is that they’re making it very risky to invest in housing in British Columbia, and now we see the outcome that no one wants to do it anymore,” he said.

Pavlov estimated that housing investments would have to provide a return of 20 to 30 per cent to justify the risk they take on.

“Not because the economy is in particular trouble or people don’t need housing or anything like that. It is because the government itself represents a huge risk that needs to be compensated,” he said.

While Pavlov acknowledged the challenges of external market forces like tariffs, he believes provincial regulation has been the bigger barrier to building homes.

“The issue is that we have made it so difficult to build housing, and really to do any business in British Columbia, that no one wants to do it anymore.”

In a statement, a spokesperson from the Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs said they are giving developers “more financial flexibility, through on-demand surety bonds and extended repayment periods for development costs, to speed up construction of more affordable homes.”

They added that they have streamlined provincial permitting across multiple ministries.

What does Coquitlam need?

In an op-ed published on the city’s website, Mayor Stewart wrote that Coquitlam needs “partnership” from B.C. to support the city’s infrastructure needs.

While B.C. provided Coquitlam with $18.6 million through its Growing Communities Fund to support the infrastructure needed for new housing, Stewart called this “a drop in the bucket.”

The province’s new housing rules have made it harder for the city to fund municipal amenities like rec centres, according to Stewart. 

For example, the city had previously relied on a bonus density to build affordable housing — a tool where they would let developers build more units if they agreed to fund affordable housing.

However, since the B.C. government mandated Coquitlam and other municipalities to approve Transit Oriented Areas, a housing policy that increases density around eight major transit hubs, developers got this density for free.