Burnaby mayor slams B.C. government for cutting funding for affordable housing
Burnaby Mayor Mike Hurley has written an open letter criticizing the Government of British Columbia for pulling back its funding for affordable housing.
In the Province’s Budget 2026, it states that it is “slowing the pace of new housing projects,” including “reallocating nearly $1.4 billion across the fiscal plan.”
According to the Union of BC Municipalities, some of this “reallocation” is from the Community Housing Fund (CHF), a $3.3-billion program the province started in 2018 to build over 20,000 affordable homes for people with low or moderate incomes. It is B.C.’s main funding program for affordable rental housing, which municipalities and non-profits have relied on.
Since it started, it has supported about 13,600 homes. Hurley wrote that it was supposed to fund thousands more, but “its pause effectively cancels the latest intake of proposals, leaving new projects without a funding source.”
He said about 100 proposed projects have been left in limbo, even though non-profits have invested millions in the pre-development work.
“Housing sector leaders have warned that without provincial funding, most deeply affordable projects cannot proceed, projecting a drop in annual community housing completions from roughly 4,500 to about 2,500 homes per year,” he wrote.
Hurley acknowledged that B.C. is experiencing a historic deficit, with the government estimating it to hit $13.3 billion in the 2026/2027 fiscal year. Following this budget release, an international agency downgraded B.C.’s credit rating.
“But if this pause is intended as a cost-saving measure, that raises further questions,” Hurley wrote.
He pointed out that the cost of building affordable homes continues to rise by about four to five per cent each year. Thus, as each year passes, it only gets more expensive to build.
“Delaying investment now does not reduce the cost of solving the problem; it only makes it more expensive to fix later.”
What is affordable housing?
Hurley said that the issue in housing isn’t the number of homes — there are currently lots of vacant units in Burnaby — it’s that rents and prices have risen faster than people’s incomes. According to analysis from the Vancity Community Foundation, wage and rent increases kept pace until 2015, when rent started to quickly outpace wage increases.
Affordable housing aims to create homes where rents are more in line with what people earn. There are two types: below-market and non-market.
Non-market is when governments or non-profit providers set the rents, basing them on a percentage of the tenant’s income or within income-based tiers.
Below-market is when rents are set based on market benchmarks, not an individual household’s income.
How do we build affordable housing?
To build affordable housing, all three governments and non-profit partners need to step up, Hurley wrote.
He said that while the federal government provides capital funding and financing tools, like low-cost loans and grants, the provincial government’s contributions “form the backbone of actually getting projects built.”
This includes major capital funding, operating subsidies, and BC Housing programs.
Meanwhile, municipalities like Burnaby provide the land, planning approvals, and infrastructure services, and non-profit housing organizations develop and operate affordable rental and co-op homes.
Hurley pointed out that the federal government cut funding for affordable housing in the ’80s and ’90s, which became a “major driver of the crisis we face today.”
“The Province’s decision in Budget 2026 to indefinitely pause new funding through its primary affordable housing program risks repeating that same kind of short-term thinking–and the same long-term consequences.”