In February 2026, only 64 presale homes launched across the entire Lower Mainland. Six per cent of an average February. Let that sit. 

No single policy did this. That is the point. 

Ask any developer trying to build housing in BC today, and you won’t hear about one catastrophic decision. You’ll hear about a list. Development Cost Charges, stacked at the municipal, regional, and provincial level. Community Amenity Contributions. Amenity Cost Charges. School site acquisition charges. Foreign buyer ban. Foreign buyer tax. Inclusionary zoning requirements. Green building requirements. Approval timelines that stretch years, with financing charges compounding the whole time. The list goes on. Examined individually, each one may be defensible.

Each has a rationale, a policy purpose, a constituency that fought for it. 

But stack them together on a pro forma? The project doesn’t work. And eventually, neither does the market. 

The Metaphor That Fits 

Think of Jenga. Each block pulled from the tower is a policy decision: a new fee, a higher charge, an added requirement. Individually, each one looks manageable. The tower wobbles but holds. You pull another. It holds. Another. It holds. Then someone pulls one more block, and the whole thing comes down. Not because that last block was uniquely dangerous, but because of everything that had already been taken.

That is where BC's housing market is right now. This is not a crisis with a single villain, and there is no one decision that broke the pro forma. Instead, there is the relentless accumulation of individually defensible, politically palatable, well-intentioned choices. Each carrying a cost that someone, somewhere, ends up paying. The builder absorbs it in eroding margins until they can't. The buyer attempts to absorb it in prices they can no longer afford. The renter absorbs it in rents that keep climbing. And the region absorbs it in a housing deficit that no level of government has managed to close. 

What the Market Is Telling Us

Presale launches at six per cent of normal is not a market correction. It is a system that has stopped functioning. 

Presales are the financial engine of new housing construction. Without them, lenders won’t advance construction financing. Without financing, shovels don’t go in the ground. Without shovels, the housing this region desperately needs simply doesn’t get built. And the economic ripple extends well beyond housing, into the trades, the supply chain, and the broader provincial economy that depends on construction staying active. 

Years of policy-driven cost accumulation have quietly pushed the floor of what it costs to build past the ceiling of what buyers and renters can pay. When those two numbers stop meeting, projects don’t launch. 

This is not a blip. Metro Vancouver housing starts have declined two years in a row, from 33,244 in 2023 down to 27,185 in 2025. CMHC expects more condo projects to be postponed or cancelled through 2026, with the effects extending into 2027 and 2028. The pipeline behind what is being built today is running dry. 

The uncertainty layered on top makes it worse. Developers, lenders, and buyers are all being asked to make multi-year commitments in a climate where the rules keep shifting and costs are hard to predict. That uncertainty is its own cost. It tightens financing, inflates contingencies, and drains the confidence the market needs to act. 

Cost kills individual deals. Uncertainty kills entire pipelines. 

A Different Way of Looking at Policy 

The problem is not intent. Governments at every level have introduced these policies with some legitimate purpose. The problem is that no one is adding them up. 

Housing development does not experience policy one decision at a time. Every new cost, requirement, or delay impacts a project already carrying the full weight of everything that came before it. That is the lens that is missing from how these decisions get made, and until it exists, well-intentioned policy will keep producing unintended outcomes.  

The question that needs to be asked, at every level of government, before any new measure is introduced: how does this interact with everything else we have already asked? What does the stack look like now, and can the industry bear it?

The cuts have been made one at a time. The damage is felt all at once. Until the gap closes, between how policy gets written and how it gets lived, six per cent of a normal February is not the floor. It is yet another warning.

Jay Chadha is Director of Policy & Advocacy at the Urban Development Institute.