this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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B.C. Housing warned about project issues but kept quiet: FOI docs (www.cbc.ca)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Two years before CBC News revealed that dozens of people had allegedly abused a B.C. Housing affordable homeownership program in Victoria, the agency's leaders were warned there was a "high risk" the situation could become public.

According to documents obtained through a freedom of information (FOI) request, B.C. Housing's executive committee was warned in April 2022 the public might take a "negative" view of the revelations as "a possible failing by B.C. Housing to prevent program abuse or, in the worst case, fraud."

The documents say the agency's communications team had a plan to demonstrate a "swift and fulsome approach" to dealing with purchasers accused of gaming a program that was designed to get middle-income British Columbians into the housing market — but kept quiet.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

This is going to keep happening as long as governments keep outsourcing new "affordable" housing projects to developers.

It makes far more sense to me to administer the projects publicly and source materials and trades directly instead of through the obnoxious matryoshka middleman system that is public-private partnership.

Also we badly need to fucking build non-market housing.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

But outsourcing them to an collection of independent bureaucracies(companies) is so much more ‘efficient’ than one bureaucracy just building what it needs to.

Besides, the government owning and developing housing would just be a huge cost to the taxpayers given how unprofitable it is to own or sell real-estate. Why the government might even build enough to actually house all the people waiting on public housing and then rent out the surplus out at below market rates but above cost in order to help fund the service, and that sounds like it could cut into the profit margins of the poor landlords.

Nope, far better to make a deal where the government assumes the risk for the project if a project fails, and the corporations get to take all the extra profit if a project succeeds./s

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

This is pure poetry. Well done.