#as privatization to them means offloading government responsibility/assets to their buddies who are free to jack prices up

[awkward-teabag]

You're pretty correct, neither is actually good as the NDP idea of middle-class is not in line with the reality of things and their income thresholds to rent a unit from BC Builds are absurdly high.

That said, 15% of units would amount to <10 units (sometimes only 1 or 2) in most new builds that are rent-to-own given zoning laws and NIMBYs who fight against anything that's more than a couple stories tall.

Though my biggest issue is he wants to sell off Crown land to private developers rather than have the government build on that land. BC United (formerly BC Liberals) are notorious and infamous for privatization and selling off public land/companies to private ones.

One of the big examples being BC Ferries. It's the primary way for people to get to or from Vancouver Island (and the gulf islands) and considered part of the Trans Canada Highway. It was government-funded and controlled for a long, long time so while it wasn't ~fancy~ it was affordable and reliable and people would take monthly/multiple times a year/yearly trips to or from the island and/or you could impulse travel with a car and not break the bank.

Since it was funded by the government, there was no need to push for profits as operating costs were covered by its fares and provincial taxes.

Then the BC Liberals privatized it (saying it was a Crown Corporation) so the government was still the sole shareholder but suddenly it had a C-suite and motivation to drive profits up so said C-suite could get bigger bonuses. Union jobs were made redundant (as they couldn't target unionized workers specifically), corners were cut, fares went up (and continue to go up), routes were cancelled, sailings were cancelled...

Now people don't bother using them unless needed because it can cost $200+ one way if you drive and you never know if a sailing is going to be cancelled due to staffing issues because they have an asinine backasswards way of doing staffing (tldr: you get no set schedule but are on-call and expected to drop everything and work with an hour or so of notice if called in... also there is (or was) a marine workers shortage and BC Ferries paid less than what people could make for companies that gave them a set schedule and work hours).

Also they complain about usage going down constantly so they increase fare prices to make up for the shortfall and just hired 4 more VPs while saying they couldn't possibly hire more workers/make jobs permanent because that would be too expensive.

Oh and the ships built during the government era are still chugging along and keep being pulled out of retirement while the ones built after privatization are either being sold for scrap or limping along with constant mechanical issues because the company kept going for cheap contracts and didn't look at reliability or post-purchase costs.

Which is a long way to say that I would not trust BC United for anything other than making rich people richer and am also not surprised Falcon's proposal involves selling off Crown assets to private developers.

Some of the things he says makes sense but that's not worth the risk of everything else. While I don't like the BC NDP's plan and think it falls far short of what's actually needed, it's still better than Falcon's proposal.

Also the biggest obstacle is not the lack of new land, it's zoning laws that limit building up and it takes too much time and costs too much for developers to petition to get them changed. Plus NIMBYs who are determined to fight against it because they got theirs and it would "ruin their view" or "ruin the character of the town". If Falcon really cared about housing and not giving private developers sweet, sweet deals, he'd be proposing zoning changes instead of breaking new ground.

Oh and before they changed their name, BC United was tied to money laundering via gambling and public sentiment and suspicion was they were using housing as another way to launder large sums of money given luxury condos suddenly started springing up during the same time period but were suspiciously empty.

“You are not going to get there if you try to have the government build the housing or government be the developer, or government come up with these complex programs that nobody can figure out.”

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That statement alone makes my head explode…