Renderings of the planned Brightside Community Homes Foundation project in Kitsilano.Brightside Community Homes Foundation
Changes announced by the B.C. provincial government in its most recent budget statement have upset the non-profit housing sector by pulling funding for a key program that they say has helped house thousands of people.
Subsidies from the Community Housing Fund (CHF) have helped provide 13,600 homes in the past eight years, proponents say. Now, applicants for about 100 projects that were awaiting approvals have discovered that the funding has been pulled this year. They had applied for some of the $775-million in new funding announced in May, 2025, and had done substantial work to meet the looming deadline for applications.
“Affordable housing is the No. 1 issue that comes up election after election at the federal level, at the provincial level, at municipal levels. It’s just the thing that everyone is talking about. And we’re finally starting to make some progress,” said Brightside Community Homes Foundation chief executive officer William Azaroff, who added he was “shocked” at the announcement.
B.C. advocates push recreational vehicles as permanent homes
“Everyone anticipated a tight budget, and fiscal constraints going on in our province right now are serious,” he said. “But to be at a point where we’re finally making progress in affordable housing and basically have at least a two-year pause in funding, retroactively in 2025, and now no new money in 2026 – that means we’re going to lose ground.”
Brightside has been active in the non-profit sector for 70 years. They had applied for provincial aid to build a 200-unit project at West 5th Avenue and Arbutus Street, which would replace their older 21-unit three-storey seniors’ residence and would also have become the group’s headquarters. They had spent $1.4 million on the project so far, including grants and loans. Brightside had used CHF funds for its 82-unit, 12-storey building at 349 East 6th Ave. in Mount Pleasant, called The Aster, completed two years ago. They have another CHF-funded, 146-unit project due for completion this year, at Venables and Renfrew streets in the Hastings-Sunrise neighbourhood.
Mr. Azaroff said now is the time to build affordable housing because the for-profit sector has stalled, and construction costs are more manageable. But that could change in a couple of years, he said.
The planned project has been impacted by the loss of provincial funding.Brightside Community Homes Foundation
“We’ve really upskilled our organization, which is why we want to keep building,” said Mr. Azaroff. “We now have the proven track record of being able to deliver deeply affordable housing during a housing crisis. And we want to keep doing that.”
The CHF and other programs aim to help homeless people, seniors on fixed incomes and people with low incomes. Applying for the CHF wasn’t simply a matter of filling out a form, said Jill Atkey, chief executive officer for the BC Non-Profit Housing Association. The projects had to be “shovel ready” within 12 months to qualify, which meant rezonings, permits and “soft costs” such as designs, engineering reports and all the professional services required to begin work.
“Nobody would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars – in some cases over $1-million – on a project that had zero chance of being approved,” she said.
Although appreciative that the province had invested in and grown the sector significantly since 2018, the frustration is that the sector had momentum and could “deliver at scale,” said Ms. Atkey. Non-profit housing is not a tap that can be turned on and off, she said. “I’m not sure government realizes just what is lost through decisions like this. … I’ve talked to so many non-profit developers in the last couple of weeks, and they’ve just shelved all of that work. They may not be able to retain the staff to continue doing it,” said Ms. Atkey.
B.C. budget worries advocates for seniors’ housing
Ms. Atkey said she knew that the province’s fiscal situation was dire, but she hadn’t anticipated that active calls for proposals would be outright cancelled.
“So, it’s an erosion of trust, I think, between non-profits and government, private-sector partners and government, municipalities and government, and a whole lot of vendors wondering how they’re going to be paid for the work they did.”
“It wasn’t lost on me, sitting in the budget lockup and seeing the finance minister put up a slide that said ‘protecting the things that are important,’ and housing wasn’t on that list,” said Ms. Atkey.
Housing Minister Christine Boyle says that Housing First remains government’s approach.
The CHF program is not cancelled, she said, and “thousands of units are actively under construction and in the early stages of the development process from past funding cycles.”
“There will be more cycles of funding into the future. It was just last year’s funding cycle that got cancelled, and again, I understand the frustration with that,” said Ms. Boyle.
She said she has been talking to key players in the non-profit sector, including Ms. Atkey, Thom Armstrong, CEO of the Co-operative Housing Federation of B.C., and Margaret Pfoh, CEO of the Aboriginal Housing Management Association.
“I was making calls to the sector immediately. I was on the phone with Jill Atkey and with Thom Armstrong and with Margaret Pfoh. Between myself and our ministry team and the B.C. Housing team, we’ve been on the phone with project proponents and local governments.
“This is such partnership work, and I really place huge value in those relationships and the work that we’ve been able to do as a government alongside the community housing sector and alongside local governments,” said Ms. Boyle.
“The conversation I’ve been having with [the Union of B.C. Municipalities] and with local governments has been very clear that our priority is to have local governments, alongside the provincial government, do everything that we each can within our own jurisdiction, within our own control, to reduce barriers and help deliver more badly needed homes.”