What They Got Right, Where They Stumbled, and What Still Needs to Change
BC’s Budget 2026 arrived this week as the province’s most fiscally constrained in nearly a decade: a $13.3 billion deficit, 15,000 public sector job cuts over three years, and a deliberate ‘re-pacing’ of the capital plan. While there is some good news, for housing advocates, providers and researchers, the $1.4 billion in cuts is a marked turn away from the push in recent years to address affordable housing. With the scale of need facing people experiencing homelessness, renters in core housing need, and communities struggling to access anything resembling affordable shelter, this abandonment of housing support from the province is devastating.
What They Got Right
Strengthening Speculation and Vacancy Taxes (SVT)
One of the most meaningful tools a provincial government has against the financialization of housing is taxation that makes it costly to hold property as a speculative asset. Budget 2026 does deliver here. The province will increase the speculation and vacancy tax from three per cent to four per cent for foreign owners and untaxed worldwide earners. Reforms to the Additional School Tax will also increase the property tax burden on luxury homes assessed above $3 million. The province has also reformed the property tax deferment program, which had previously allowed equity-rich homeowners to defer taxes at low cost. New rules will require repayment at two per cent above prime, compounded monthly.
These are meaningful changes. Since the SVT’s introduction in 2018, it has, together with other housing measures, helped convert over 20,000 units back into the long-term rental market in Metro Vancouver. In the 2024-2025 fiscal year, the province invested $1.9 billion toward housing across SVT-designated areas. Extending and deepening these tools sends the right signal: housing is for homes, not for speculation.
Maintaining the 10-Year Housing Strategy
The government points to a cumulative 10-year housing investment, now described as nearly five times what it was in 2016, as evidence of continued commitment. This framing has some merit. The 2023 Homes for People plan committed $12 billion over 10 years, atop the 2018 Homes for BC commitment of $7 billion. On a raw dollar basis, the scale of ambition has shifted in the right direction.
The Supportive Housing Fund (SHF), launched in 2018, now carries a $2.3 billion capital commitment to deliver 5,700 units of supportive housing with 24/7 onsite services. While only two supportive housing projects were directly mentioned in the budget, capital spending on social housing (which includes BC Housing Management Commission), is set to increase from last fiscal year despite falling short of budget target. The programs under the SHF represent a meaningful acknowledgment that housing insecurity requires wraparound services.
Where They Stumbled
The Inflation Math Doesn’t Hold Up
The government’s comparison to 2016 housing investment is strategically chosen. That year was the nadir of provincial housing investment under the former BC Liberal government, a period when affordable housing programs were consistently underfunded and BC Housing’s budget was being squeezed. Using it as the baseline flatters the comparison considerably.
Adjusted for inflation (cumulative inflation of approximately 30% between 2016 and 2026), $758 million in 2016 housing spending is equivalent to roughly $985 million in today’s dollars. The province’s current annual housing investment runs approximately $1.9 billion per year, representing a real increase of roughly 2x, not five times as the budget claims.
More importantly, BC’s population has grown by an estimated 1 million people since 2016, a 20% increase. The backlog of unmet need, particularly for deeply affordable and supportive housing, has deepened in parallel. A 2x real increase in investment, spread across a much larger population with much greater need, is not the triumph the budget language implies.
The Capital Plan “Re-pacing” Hits Housing Hardest
Budget 2026 reduces overall taxpayer-supported capital spending by approximately $2 billion relative to last year’s fiscal plan. Housing projects, including long-term care and social housing, are disproportionately affected by delays because these projects do not have private sector partners to absorb slippage.
There is a vast body of research that clearly demonstrates that transitions out of encampments are rarely linear, and that the single greatest enabler of successful transitions is the availability of transitional and social housing.
The Union of BC Municipalities president called it a direct contradiction: the government continues to mandate municipal housing targets while simultaneously eliminating the primary funding mechanism non-profits rely on to meet them.
Jill Atkey from BSH-partner organization BCNPHA said in a CBC article this week:
“The rug [is] being pulled out from under the sector, particularly on projects that were put forward in good faith with significant costs incurred by the non-profit sector in order to make those projects work… We’re unsure of what the future looks like for affordable housing provision. The impacts of this will be felt for years.”
The impact is already visible. For example, the Community Land Trust, the development arm of the BC Non-Profit Housing Association, had already invested $2 million in pre-development costs on a shovel-ready project at 1885 East Pender Street in Vancouver. Those costs cannot be recovered, and there is now no reliable government program to fund the project.
Non-Market and Alternative Housing Models Remain Unaddressed
BSH’s research focuses on the full housing continuum, from emergency shelter through deeply affordable non-market housing, co-operative housing, and community land trusts, to market rental. Budget 2026 has almost nothing new to say about the non-market middle of that continuum. There is no new investment in co-operative housing development. Community land trusts receive no mention.
This is a significant missed opportunity that our research speaks to directly. BSH’s Policy Report and Profile Series on Canadian Community Land Trusts, developed in partnership with the Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts, documents how CLTs deliver permanently affordable housing by removing land from the speculative market. As researcher Kuni Kamizaki’s report in the series shows, CLTs offer long-term affordability in perpetuity and reduce ongoing dependency on government operating subsidies. The ambition to dramatically scale this kind of non-market housing is absent from Budget 2026.
BSH’s project on overcoming institutional obstacles to non-market housing production, based on the Montreal context but with clear applicability to BC, has identified the specific financial and regulatory barriers that limit non-profit housing actors: uncertain long-term financing, project selection opacity, and the absence of policy mechanisms to make funding truly accessible to smaller community-based organizations. Budget 2026 does not address any of these structural barriers.
What the government calls “adjusting the pace” is, in practice, the suspension of one of the province’s most critical tools for delivering affordable homes. The Community Housing Fund, which has helped build more than 13,000 affordable rentals for families, seniors, and people with disabilities since 2018, has been paused. The province has decided not to proceed with any of the new applications submitted to the Fund’s most recent call and announced, after the budget was released, no plans to accept more.
No New Renter Protections, Despite Mounting Evidence of Displacement
People who already have homes, particularly renters, remain exposed. Budget 2026 introduces no new renter protections other than a small $400 subsidy: no expansion of just-cause eviction requirements, no additional enforcement resources for the Residential Tenancy Branch, and no new funding to address the eviction crisis. This is a failure that our research quantifies directly.
In recent years, BSH researchers found that no-fault evictions account for 85% of evictions in British Columbia, one of the highest rates in the country. These are evictions driven not by tenant behaviour but by landlord decisions: property sales, owner move-ins, and renovictions. More recent BSH research on Vancouver and GTA filings, through the Filling the Gaps project, demonstrates that renters remain vulnerable to eviction, even during crisis periods, like COVID-19. More specifically, financialized landlords consistently file evictions at the highest rates, despite crises, and concentrate their activity in racialized and lower-income neighbourhoods—often displacing the most vulnerable populations.
An adequately funded Residential Tenancy Branch, staffed to investigate and enforce, could meaningfully disrupt such trends. Unfortunately, Budget 2026 does not move in that direction. The province is simultaneously reducing supply investment and failing to protect existing supply.
Indigenous Housing Needs Are Not Being Met With Urgency
Indigenous peoples in BC remain dramatically overrepresented among people experiencing homelessness, accounting for approximately one-third of those in homeless counts in major urban areas. Budget 2026 continues existing programming but breaks no new ground. BSH’s research on urban Indigenous housing in British Columbia, in partnership with the Aboriginal Housing Management Association (AHMA), found that although municipalities across BC express commitment to reconciliation, most do not adequately address urban Indigenous housing needs in their Official Community Plans or Housing Strategies. Three challenges recurred across the 30 municipalities studied: lack of financial and human resources, ambiguity over whether Indigenous housing needs are distinct, and uncertainty around municipal jurisdiction. These findings point to a gap that cannot be filled by municipal good intentions alone. It requires provincial investment and a clear provincial mandate.
Our project on Comparing First Nations-Led Land and Housing Regulation Models across Metro Vancouver, which documents how comprehensive land codes and Indigenous-led development models enable housing that prioritizes cultural connection, intergenerational stewardship, and community self-determination, shows what is possible when First Nations have genuine control and adequate resources. The suspension of the Community Housing Fund is particularly damaging as Indigenous non-profit housing providers were among those with active applications in the pipeline. Budget 2026 offers no new investment to expand Indigenous-led housing capacity and has removed one of the primary mechanisms through which Indigenous organizations accessed capital for development. The Aboriginal Housing Management Association and urban Indigenous housing providers continue to work with chronic underfunding relative to scale of need, and this budget does not change that picture.
Where There Is Room to Improve
Treat Non-Market Housing as Infrastructure
The most significant missed opportunity in Budget 2026 is the failure to dramatically expand non-market housing production using self-supported provincial debt. When the province builds a hospital or a SkyTrain line, it doesn’t pay for it out of annual program spending. It finances it through the capital plan, spreads the cost over decades, and treats it as a long-term public asset. Below-market and moderate-income housing deserves the same treatment. The province should treat social and co-operative housing as infrastructure in the same category as hospitals and transit and fund it through the capital plan rather than leaving it to compete with operating budget priorities during fiscal contractions.
Invest in Community Land Trusts and Co-operative Housing
Co-operative housing and community land trusts are among the most durable and cost-effective ways to deliver permanently affordable housing. They remove units from the speculative market in perpetuity, build community wealth, and reduce long-term dependency on government operating subsidies. Seeded with provincial land assets and low-interest financing, BC could easily make a lasting investment in affordable housing with minimal capital expenditure.
Address the Missing Middle of Supportive Housing
Between emergency shelter and subsidized social housing, there is a population of people who are housed but barely: in overcrowded conditions, in substandard suites, paying more than half their income on rent, or one eviction away from homelessness. This is the population served by housing with supports, complex care housing, and transitional housing. Budget 2026’s investments in mental health and addictions treatment ($131 million) are welcome, but they are not a housing strategy. The province needs a distinct, adequately funded plan for transitional and complex care housing, one that recognizes the inseparability of housing stability and health outcomes. We have a duty to uphold the right to housing for all, and this is where we can make a big impact.
The Bottom Line
A Structural Shift to Address Urgent Need
Budget 2026 has held important lines: the speculation and vacancy tax is strengthened, the 10-year housing strategy is nominally maintained, and the language of commitment persists. The government’s 95,000-unit target can make a real difference for the people waiting for supportive housing, for deeply affordable rentals, for co-operative housing, for Indigenous-led homes that honour their communities.
To achieve this, however, BC desperately needs funded, delivered, well-located homes with adequate supports.
We encourage organizations in the housing sector to review the full budget details at bcbudget.gov.bc.ca/2026 and follow provincial news implementation details emerge. We’ll continue advocating for the improvements needed to ensure the right to housing for all.
The Balanced Supply of Housing (BSH) is a SSHRC-CMHC funded partnership grant led by Dr. Alexandra Flynn at UBC’s Peter A. Allard School of Law, focused on land use and housing financialization across Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal.
