ALR - Agricultural Land Reserve helps keeps Vancouver land prices sky high

Vancouver politicians spend a huge amount of time these days debating ways to house the homeless. But I think they're ignoring another group that also badly needs housing help -- namely young people, especially those with families.

Housing costs here are so high that, for many, the prospects of raising children in the city seem bleak.

They're often well-educated people like Province reader Mathew Fournier and his girlfriend from back east, who both earn more than the so-called living wage of $18 an hour, but wonder whether Vancouver really is the greatest place in Canada, as everybody says.

"Our choice is to continue to be gouged on renting a sardine-can-sized apartment near work or look far up the Fraser Valley for something that is just affordable [and likely buy two cars to commute]," Fournier said in a letter to the editor last week.

I know just where he's coming from. Housing costs were one reason why my son and his wife left Vancouver last year for Montreal. They now live in a town house costing half of what it would here.

Why are prices so high in the Lower Mainland? It's simply supply and demand. Sandwiched between the sea and the mountains, there continues to be a greater demand for land for housing than there is a supply of it.

Compounding that is the Agricultural Land Reserve, introduced by the NDP government in 1973 to restrict housing development. It's driven housing costs by at least 20 per cent, according to one estimate.

For many, of course, the ALR is a sacred cow. They include Richmond city Coun. Harold Steves who, as an NDP MLA, was the architect of the ALR.

A beef farmer, Steves says we have a duty to preserve farmland so we can grow as much local food as possible. And those in the "localism" movement agree with him.

Other farmers, however, believe their right to sell their land for a decent price shouldn't be sacrificed to city folks' romantic notions about going organic.

And I question whether the ALR has actually made the Fraser Valley a more pleasant place to live or simply resulted in a superabundance of large, scraggly looking lots frozen uncomfortably in time.

Besides, some of the intensive farming these days, especially that under acres of glass, is far from pleasing to look at or live beside.

A recent study by the Fraser Institute found the ALR has failed to sustain family farms, but has helped make the Vancouver housing market one of the most expensive in North America.

"The Agricultural Land Reserve is a social engineering experiment gone awry," said report author Diane Katz.

Indeed, I think the ALR may eventually have to be scrapped. But first we need a thorough examination of our mushrooming region's housing -- and farming needs -- and the best way to go about providing them.

If that results in removing large parcels of land from the reserve in the Lower Mainland and replacing them with land elsewhere in B.C., so be it. Affordable housing shouldn't just be for the homeless.

(prepared by Jon Ferry/Vancouver Province)