To the editor:
Re: “Want Vision to listen? Try court action,” Dec. 16.
Allen Garr is technically incorrect about the concept of affordable. There is an objective definition for “affordable shelter cost.” It was created and agreed upon by the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation and the provinces of Canada in 1986.
It is used by Statistics Canada to measure and report in their Homeownership and Shelter Costs in Canada 2011. “Shelter costs,” according to StatsCan, “for owner households include, where applicable, the mortgage payment, the costs of electricity, heat, water and other municipal services, property taxes and condominium fees.
Shelter costs for tenant households include, where applicable, the monthly rent and the costs of electricity, heat and other municipal services.” This definition is straight out of the CMHC 1991 Core Housing Need in Canada report.
If you want to put this definition in practical terms, then take the monthly shelter costs and multiply by the magic number 40 to get the annual total income that a person would need to be living in affordable housing.
For example if your rent, hydro and other shelter costs are $1,000 then you would need to earn more that $40,000 total income to be classified as affordable. T
o put this into perspective, the medium income of Canada is about $27,000, which means that half of the population is below you and the other half is above you, or that greater than half of the population in Canada could not find affordable housing in Vancouver and, for that matter, Metro Vancouver.
The 2011 National Household Survey: Homeownership and Shelter Costs in Canada press release issued Sept. 11, 2013 summed it up:
“The proportion of households that paid 30 per cent or more of total income towards shelter costs also varied among census metropolitan areas. Vancouver had the largest proportion (33.5 per cent).”
This statistic explains the frustration that Vancouverites are having with the current housing policy of Vision.
Chris Shelton,
Vancouver
