"Below market rents" is the wrong metric.

This statement in CBC's Feb. 13, 2024, article about building income-tested housing on public land highlights precisely what is wrong with BC Housing's approach to affordability:

"For B.C. Builds projects in partnership with non-profits and First Nations, at least 20 per cent of units must rent at 20 per cent below market rents, the province said."

Euphemistically-named "market rents" are a reflection of price-gouging by money-obsessed maniacs who use housing as a vehicle to prey on society.

The correct metric in terms of which "affordable" housing should be priced is what it costs to build and maintain it. Look at this in relation to public infrastructure, public healthcare delivery, public transportation, or any other service government provides. Profit – or more accurately economic rent – figures nowhere in the provision or administration of these services.

Rents in the private sector are set as high as they can possibly be by financial predators with one and only one objective in mind: extract as much economic rent from the productive economy as possible. Period.

This relationship between landlords and tenants is an anachronistic holdover from feudal times on the European continent when warlords conquered territory and demanded rents from the peasants who inhabited it. Its historical roots are sick, antisocial, violent, and psychopathic. The properties these predators conquered and their predatory economic model have been handed down from generation to generation for 600 years. Their entire system is obsolete.

From the perspective of representative government, all that is required in financial terms to price public housing is for the cost of building and maintaining it to be recovered from the people who occupy it. If this approach were taken by BC Housing, the entire predatory house of cards built on housing would collapse because no one would stand for it anymore.

Pricing public housing as a percentage of "market rents" is pure cowardice and accomplishes nothing more than to prop up the ill-gotten fortunes of financial predators who use housing to prey on everybody else.