It is hard to imagine where we go from here, but we have to try.
Squamish reached a real estate milestone last month with the benchmark price of a detached family home topping $1 million for the first time, clocking in at $1,013,000, according to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver’s November figures.
That is an increase of 105 per cent over five years ago. No other community in the Lower Mainland experienced that much of an increase over five years. Our single family home benchmark price is well above the benchmark price of a home on the Sunshine Coast ($589,000), and also above Bowen Island ($969,000), Maple Ridge ($815,000), Pitt Meadows ($885,400), and Port Coquitlam ($1,000,300).
It is possible the proverbial real estate bubble will burst and housing prices will go down, but it isn’t likely. The horse is out of the barn, so to speak.
This is great news for investors, real estate agents and for those who bought when Squamish was still an undiscovered gem.
But the increasing cost of a Squamish home, which is now comparable to New Westminster, Ladner and parts of Burnaby, does mean that we have to make some changes as a community.
We need to be building more multi-family housing — thankfully more is on the way with Waterfront Landing and the oceanfront. The cost of a detached family home is now out of reach of many, as it is in Vancouver. Townhouses aren’t far behind. The benchmark for a Squamish townhouse in November was $883,000. That doesn’t mean “deals” can’t be found in Squamish. Older developments will sell for less, of course. But the trend is an increasing creep toward $1 million for a townhouse. The condo benchmark rings in at what houses used to cost five years ago, at $449,000 as of November.
If we want Squamish to be a place where those in the service sector — our largest employment sector according to the latest census — can live, we also need more purpose-built rentals. We have to put aside our nostalgia for what Squamish was, a place with only low-rises and forest beside every neighbourhood, and embrace new rentals.
This may mean embracing high rises of purpose-built rentals and developments built by the government on land where we walk our dogs.
Yes, it would be nice if we were still an inexpensive town with trails up to our doorsteps and no buildings over two stories. But either we accept those days are gone and try to accommodate “lower income” earners, or we acknowledge we have become something else: a resort where only the upper middle class and wealthy live comfortably. In that scenario, we also have to accept that our business owners will continually struggle to find workers and that current workers may not be able to find a place to live.
We can’t go back, so we now have to find a way forward.
