William Boei
Sun
A hoped-for migration of young construction workers back to British Columbia has not materialized and that’s one reason the home-building industry can’t keep up with demand.
In fact, experts say B.C. is on the threshold of a demographic squeeze that will have us scrambling for skilled workers for as long as 40 years.
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. reported Monday that housing starts in Greater Vancouver fell by 24 per cent in June from the same month last year, and that the home-building industry doesn’t have the capacity to keep up with demand.
As recently as last winter, some building industry officials were predicting construction workers who left during a slump in the 1990s would come trooping back for the biggest building boom in B.C. history.
But it’s not happening. The rest of Canada is too prosperous. Ontario, Alberta and B.C. are all flirting with all-time-low unemployment rates and the competition for skilled labour is fierce.
“People aren’t moving back into B.C. because they’ve got good-paying jobs where they are,” said Maureen Enser, executive director of the Urban Development Institute, which represents large developers.
“Some are coming back, but we’re not holding out hope that there’s going to be droves of them.
“We are working at full capacity. The challenge is the number of skilled workers we have to work on these projects.”
The home-building industry will face a second wave of competition for labour as Olympic venues and large public transportation projects are built between now and 2010.
“If there is a big increase in development in non-residential sectors,” said Tom Hutton, a professor in the University of B.C.‘s School of Community and Regional Planning, “it’s bound to have an impact on what’s going on in housing.
“We are going to see more competition [for construction labour] between these sectors,” Hutton said.
We’re seeing only the beginning of the problem, said demographer David Baxter of the Urban Futures Institute.
As baby boomers increasingly take early retirement, the labour force will start to shrink and we’ll have to look to more immigration for fresh blood, Baxter said. But most immigrants with skills now head directly for Ontario‘s manufacturing sector.
B.C.’s labour shortages can be expected to “really bite” in about 18 years, when the biggest slice of the baby boom hits retirement age. In all, labour shortages can be expected to continue for the next 35 to 40 years, Baxter said.
“We might as well get used to it.”
In the meantime, Enser said, it’s going to be “a real challenge” to keep housing prices affordable in Greater Vancouver.
“It’s the cost of land, it’s the cost of labour, it’s regulatory costs, all of those things are aggravations to house prices. How do we keep housing costs so that the average family can afford a decent place to live?”
Downtown Vancouver’s building boom will end soon because all the big pieces of land are taken. But in the rest of Vancouver, the density of residential neighbourhoods can be increased with more townhouses and duplexes.
Burnaby Mountain has been opened to development and that will help, but Enser said developers are looking east.
“In the future we’re going to have to look further east — Mission, Abbotsford, the Langleys, those are the areas where you’ll see more growth in the single-family market.”
© The Vancouver Sun 2005