The story of the last 20 years in Langley has been one of explosive growth, but as fast as homes and whole neighbourhoods have gone up, 2023 still found people grappling with the high cost of housing.
At the end of the year, real estate markets were in a funk, with sales down from the previous year, but prices still higher than in 2022, when rising interest rates finally stopped a wild pandemic-era market in its tracks.
If you wanted to buy a typical single-family home in Langley, it would have cost you about $1.522 million, according to November data from the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board (FVREB). Townhouses cost around $862,000, and condos had topped $604,900.
For comparison, a detached home in the Fraser Valley area cost about $600,000 in 2013, and just under $300,000 in 2003.
The high cost of housing was a major problem for seniors on fixed incomes, with many facing eviction due to their older rental housing being demolished for new construction.
Demoviction and renoviction were one concern highlighed by both local seniors like Paul Zwingé, facing an imminent move when his older apartment gets turned into condos, and by the Langley Seniors Resource Society, which is seeing increasing requests from locals for help keeping or finding suitable homes.
Seniors in Langley were living in cars or storage containers, and people with $700 or $800 a month to spend on rent were facing a market where a typical single-bedroom apartment could cost double or triple that.
“The struggle is huge right now,” said Wendy Rachwalski, manager of community services at LSRS.
Langley also saw an increase in the number of people living on the streets.
It wasn’t exactly good news, but the rate of homelessness in Langley rose at a slower rate than in many neighbouring communities, according to the 2023 Homeless Count for Greater Vancouver.
The count still found a 12 per cent increase in the number of people living on the streets and in shelters compared to the previous count, in 2020.
This count, prepared by the Homelessness Services Association of B.C., found that 235 people were homeless in Langley on the two days of the survey in March.
The survey found 76 people in homeless shelters, 15 in emergency weather shelters, 11 with “no fixed address,” which for most meant they were in a hospital or police holding cell, but the largest group, 133 people in total, were simply “unsheltered,” which meant they were sleeping outside in a tent or under a tarp, in a vehicle, or in about 19 per cent of cases regionally, staying temporarily with someone who did have a conventional shelter.
The rate of housing across Metro Vancouver rose by 32 per cent in three years.
Langley had slowed the rate of increase thanks to a lot of hard work by local agencies and outreach groups, according to Fraser Holland, the head of the Langley Intensive Case Management Team.
“What we’re doing right is we have a collection of agencies and individuals that are interested in not adding service provision, but putting the housing and shelter pieces in place,” he said.
But there remained a lack of spaces for people with little to no money to stay. There are so few cheap housing options, that people living in Langley’s supportive housing projects can’t move out once they’re stabilized – there’s simply nowhere they can afford to live.