On June 18, 2026, the federal and BC governments announced new investments for affordable housing in BC. The first announcement will bring new infrastructure funding to support municipalities looking to increase housing supply, injecting $3.2 billion over 10 years into community upgrades. However, the second announcement of a Canada-BC partnership to convert more than 2,200 vacant condos into affordable housing took many by surprise. The planned condo conversion program raises more questions than answers, especially given British Columbia’s recent announcement of cuts to the Community Housing Fund and Indigenous Housing Fund. The information we do have yields a few concerning implications:
The Condo Conversion: What Would Affordability Really Look Like?
The terms of the condo conversion partnership are quite vague. In the initial press release, no dollar amount was provided. Instead, it simply declared that Build Canada Homes and BC Housing “will leverage innovative financing tools”. Last week, more clarity emerged $1.45 billion is to be invested in the conversion project, with 90% of that provided by the BC government.
According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), there were 4,376 completed, vacant condos in Metro Vancouver in May 2026, which is a staggering 76% increase from the previous year. One expert has noted that around one-third of these empty condos are listed for over $1 million each. Although the federal Ministry of Housing claims the condos will be purchased from developers at a below-market rate, the exact amount of the discount is still up in the air.
Overall, several pieces of key information are still missing, including who will own the units, who will manage the units, who exactly these units will be affordable for, and how long they will maintain that affordability.
Who will these units be affordable for?
Most conventions agree that affordable rent should be, at most, 30% of monthly household income. Build Canada Homes defines this threshold relative to the median household income of the local municipality or census subdivision, or the area median household income (AMHI).
Both federal and provincial governments have stressed that the converted condo units will be geared towards moderate earners, providing them with a rent-to-own pathway. In British Columbia, there is a need for 68,690 units for moderate-income households (rents under $1,720 per month) and 10,730 units for median-income earners (rents under $2,580 per month). The 2,200-4,376 vacant condos converted by this partnership would be a small contribution, then, to these targets.
Plus, this still leaves a sizeable gap in BC’s core housing need:
| Income Bracket | Region | # Units Needed | Monthly Rental Rate Needed |
| Very-low-income (20% or less of AMHI) | British Columbia | 20,835 | < $430 |
| Greater Vancouver | 11,465 | < $450 | |
| Low-income (21-50% of AMHI) | British Columbia | 156,595 | < $1,075 |
| Greater Vancouver | 97,370 | < $1,125 |
Together, these two income brackets (very-low-income and low-income) make up 69% of all 257,060 units needed to meet the province’s core housing need. The program as currently structured would do nothing to alleviate this gap.
Finally, if the government fails to buy these units at enough of a discount, it will likely create less affordability across the entire housing system, especially for those in lower-income brackets. This is because, as Khelsilem’s analysis points out, if the government left the vacant units on the market instead, it would ultimately improve affordability since the surplus would, in economic terms, push prices down.
“Removing them with public money may help a chosen group of buyers while keeping prices higher for everyone outside the program. That is the uncomfortable logic of intervening in a downturn: relief for some can mean cushioning the very correction that would have helped many more.” -Khelsilem
Similarly, new homebuyer programs have mostly increased affordability for higher-income brackets, while further eroding affordability for lower-income brackets. Incentives like the First Home Savings Account (FHSA) are disproportionately used by higher-earning households (>$60,000 annual income). A recent CMHC analysis showed that new homebuyer programs can increase demand for middle-income households before adequate supply is available. This increase in demand drives up both housing and rental prices for all income brackets. As a result, lower-income earners, who are already excluded from participating in new homebuyer programs, also suffer from these overall price increases.
This Could Signal a Bigger Shift Away from Funding Non-Market Housing
It’s worth thinking about the repercussions of the BC government choosing to bail out condos over supporting non-profit housing providers. These announcements come hot on the heels of BC’s suspension of the Community Housing Fund (CHF), a key subsidy program for non-market housing which was rolled back in budget 2026. The CHF was a $3.3-billion fund pledged towards building 20,000 affordable units over 10 years at 50% rent-geared-to-income, 30% market rate, and 20% deeply subsidized per building. Its suspension was a devastating blow to BC non-profit housing providers, stalling progress on roughly 4,000 homes, including some that were years into development, and thousands that were shovel-ready. This decision has impacted at least 29 organizations, losing $21 million in pre-development costs. At the time of the suspension, the CHF had already created roughly 13,600 homes.
Furthermore, the CHF suspension is part of a larger housing cut in the provincial government’s 2026 budget. Specifically, the BC government is reallocating $1.4 billion from the housing strategy across its three-year fiscal plan. Of this amount, only $900 million has been set aside for reinvestment into existing housing services, including funding for non-profit housing operators. What we do know is that BC is choosing to invest $1.6 billion towards the new $3.2 billion local infrastructure fund, although it is unclear whether part of this amount will come out of the $1.4-billion reallocation from the housing budget. Regardless, this is potentially troubling, as the affordability implications of the local infrastructure fund’s requirement that local governments scrap development cost charges (DCCs) are unclear. DCCs are one-time fees developers pay to local governments. Some local governments and housing experts are in favour of dropping DCCs, arguing that this would help lower upfront costs and reduce barriers for new builds. However, DCCs are often a key revenue stream that allow municipal governments to pay for the infrastructure to support new affordable housing projects, beyond the infrastructural updates funded by these new investments from senior levels of government. Although this $3.2 billion fund is pledged towards housing-enabling infrastructure, one mayor commented that replacing DCCs with a similar amount of public funding would still not be enough to cover his municipality’s infrastructural needs.
What Happens Next?
The Canada-BC condo conversion plan sits at a crossroads moment for Canadian housing policy. BCNPHA Executive Director Jill Atkey’s question is key: if governments purchase unsold inventory to backstop developers’ bottom lines, are governments privatizing profit while socializing risk? If the answer is yes, then this intervention is not merely a bailout; it is a precedent.
Community and Indigenous housing organizations in BC, whose funding has been paused while this deal moves forward, might reasonably ask why the same urgency and fiscal flexibility extended to private developers has not been extended to them. A housing system that rescues the market while making non-market housing wait is not a system organized around need. Canadians deserve a clear and honest public debate about what kind of housing future their governments are actually building, and for whom.
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, housing financialization, and sustainable housing futures across Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal.
