Housing is a chain of costs and constraints. Put stress on one link and it shows up somewhere else, usually on the people least able to absorb it. This week's budget applies pressure to several links at once, then uses the word affordability with a straight face.
Land holding costs, professional services, the capital that gets projects off the ground. The market has a simpler name for all of it: higher costs, more friction, fewer shovels.
And yet here we are, doing it again. The problem isn't complicated. We just keep misreading it and reaching for solutions that make it worse. Housing affordability isn't a greed problem or a speculation problem. It never was. The correct diagnosis is just less satisfying politically, so we keep avoiding it. It's a production problem. We are not building enough homes. Everything else is a footnote.
When demand rises and supply can respond, prices stabilize. When demand rises and supply can't respond, prices rise and stay there. That's not ideology. It's the first week of any economics course. High-demand cities stay expensive when building is slow, uncertain, and costly. Add more barriers and you get more expensive scarcity. It really is that straightforward, and that's what makes this budget so frustrating.
Victoria is the textbook case. We're land-constrained. Timelines are long. Trades are expensive. Financing is cautious. Permitting is slow. Neighbourhood politics are real. In this environment, raising costs before a shovel hits dirt isn't a revenue strategy. It's a project killer. A dead project pays nothing and houses nobody.
Developers aren't sitting on infinite margins. Projects get approved on spreadsheets, not optimism. The burden doesn't stay where you put it. It moves through the chain until it reaches whoever has the least ability to push back, and in housing, that's almost always the end buyer or the renter trying to find a unit that doesn't exist yet. Taxing the inputs is a strange strategy when affordability is your stated goal.
The new professional services taxes matter more than people think. Architects, engineers, consultants, project managers. Those are costs paid up front, when risk is highest and financing is tightest. Tax those inputs and you're not clawing back profit from a completed home. You're making it harder to start one.
The province can't have it both ways. You can't raise the cost of housing production at every turn and talk about affordability out of the other side of your mouth. At some point that stops being a policy tension and becomes a credibility problem.
You can't tax your way to housing affordability. Every time we raise the cost of building, we're not teaching the industry a lesson. We're pricing out the next buyer, the one who doesn't know yet that the home they needed was never built.
Projects that don't start in 2026 don't complete in 2028. BC doesn't need another speech about taking action. It needs units.
