Maple Ridge Is Building Homes. Just Not for the People Who Live Here.

New residential development in Maple Ridge is accelerating. The units being built are priced for buyers who are already well-off. The gap between what is being built and what the community actually needs is growing wider every year.

Drive along any of Maple Ridge's major arterials and the construction cranes are visible. New townhouse complexes. New low-rise condo buildings. New single-family subdivisions on the edges of what used to be farmland. The housing supply is growing. The affordability problem is not improving.

The units being built in Maple Ridge are, by and large, not affordable to the nurses, the teachers, the trades workers, the retail employees, and the service industry staff who make this community function. They are priced for buyers arriving with equity from Vancouver properties, for investors purchasing presale units as assets, for households in the top third of the regional income distribution.

This is not an accident. It is the predictable outcome of a development approval process that prioritizes market-rate residential construction without adequate requirements for affordable or non-market units. The community benefit agreements extracted from developers — where they exist at all — do not come close to offsetting the affordability gap that the approved development itself widens.

Maple Ridge has tools available to it that it has not fully deployed. Below-market requirements as a condition of rezoning. Partnerships with non-profit housing providers on municipally owned land. Advocacy with the province for dedicated affordable housing funding targeted to communities with Maple Ridge's demographic profile.

The question is whether the political will exists to use them. So far, the answer has been a housing strategy that acknowledges the affordability problem and delivers market-rate units.

Share this story