On May 11, Citizen reporter Arthur Williams wrote that Prince George city councillors Brian Skakun and Trudy Klassen “seek transparency regarding numbered companies” that wish to rezone land, apply for a land variance or to buy city land. BC’s Land Owner Transparency Act lays out the disclosures required by numbered companies, and what B.C. government needs to do to ensure transparency.
But why should we expect to know who’s buying, building or re-zoning city land. Isn’t that confidential?
The Hub Collection Ltd., builders based in Vancouver, were offered great incentives, purchased seriously underpriced city land, then stopped the proceedings, and waited a little while, all in the dark, while the city's land buy-back time ran out, leaving The Hub with a piece of property worth seven times its original purchase price. In a while, they returned with a new, more lucrative plan to build a seniors housing complex.
In 2022, a report for the Office of the Federal Housing Advocate called ‘The Financialization of Multi-Family Rental Housing in Canada’ defined three policies Canada put together which gave large investment firms a leg-up to buy, in bulk, massive blocks of apartment buildings and the opportunity to “squeeze new value from old buildings by raising rents and fees and cutting maintenance.”
Rental housing as a money-maker for real estate investment trusts and the firms reported on have exploded in value. The report recommended tracking ownership, the impacts of commercializing housing on renters, suspending subsidies and support for commercialized landlords, and applying greater rent controls and tenant protection, province by province.
When we don’t know who wants to buy or rezone land or we don’t know who we are dealing with, then we don’t know for certain what they intend to do with Prince George. Over decades, city lands have been purchased, sold, zoned and rezoned, with and definitely without, the best interests of the larger community. Cities can be notorious for shady land sales and Prince George has had its fair share of rotten deals.
But it does not have to be that way. There’s no honest reason why we shouldn’t know exactly who and what we are dealing with.
Jan Manning
Prince George
