By Stan Chung

Op-Ed Commentary

Why can a town attract millions in investment, create jobs, and build new homes—yet become less affordable for the people who already live there?

Because economic growth and household affordability are not the same thing.

Here is a radical idea: the best economic development strategy may not be attracting more money.

It may be helping families keep more of what they already earn.

Communities can do this by owning essential assets, sharing costs, and preventing expensive problems before they happen.

And some of the best examples are right here in British Columbia and Alberta.

Here are 10 ways to rethink affordability.

1. Stop approving development without knowing its 30-year cost.

Every subdivision brings new taxpayers. It also brings roads, water pipes, sewers, snow removal, and infrastructure that eventually needs replacing.

A development that looks profitable today can become tomorrow’s tax burden.

What if every municipality published a 30-year financial forecast for major developments, showing the full costs against expected tax revenue?

The smart rethink: Stop celebrating new tax revenue until we know whether it will pay for the infrastructure we inherit.

2. Stop making affordable housing affordable only once.

In Fernie, the average assessed detached home reached approximately $847,000 in 2024, up 53% in four years.

Canmore offers another approach. Its municipally owned nonprofit housing organization has developed hundreds of homes for local workers and families.

Whistler uses employee-restricted housing and resale controls to preserve affordability across generations.

These approaches recognize that affordable housing should not become unaffordable the moment someone sells it.

What if rural communities owned more land, partnered with nonprofit developers, and protected housing affordability permanently?

The smart rethink: Stop making homes affordable for one buyer. Keep them affordable for generations.

3. Stop subsidizing energy bills. Start owning energy systems.

Revelstoke has operated a community-owned district energy system since 2005, using waste wood from a local sawmill to heat buildings.

Medicine Hat owns its electricity and natural gas utilities. Its residential customers paid an average of $1,029 less in 2025 than comparable customers in six other Alberta cities, according to the city’s published comparison.

Denmark heats roughly two-thirds of its homes through district heating systems.

Imagine if Columbia Basin communities invested in large-scale shared heating networks using forestry waste, geothermal energy, or recovered industrial heat.

Why do we help private companies sell us energy while doing so little to build energy assets we could own?

The smart rethink: Stop treating energy solely as a household bill. Treat it as community infrastructure capable of generating long-term public value.

Columbia Basin Trust, are you listening?

4. Stop making every household buy essential services alone.

In Logan Lake, B.C., residents collectively fund a community television service for roughly $23 per month per household.

Olds, Alberta, built a pioneering community fibre-optic network, O-NET. The town eventually sold the business to Telus in 2024, demonstrating that community ownership also requires sound financial management.

In rural England, B4RN delivers community-built gigabit internet.

The principle is simple. A thousand households purchasing essential services separately may have less bargaining power than a community acting together.

What else could we buy, build, or negotiate collectively?

The smart rethink: Stop assuming every essential service must be purchased individually from a private provider.

5. Stop managing homelessness. Start preventing it.

Finland offers one of the world’s most important lessons.

Instead of requiring people to become sober, employed, or otherwise ready for housing, Finland adopted Housing First. People receive permanent housing first, followed by the support they need.

Beginning in 2008, the country combined housing investment, social services, prevention, and national coordination. Thousands of permanent homes replaced temporary accommodation.

Homelessness declined dramatically over the longer term, although rising housing costs, unemployment, and social-security changes contributed to renewed increases in 2024 and 2025.

Medicine Hat demonstrated what a Canadian community could achieve. In 2021, it became Canada’s first city to reach functional zero chronic homelessness. Its achievement depended on coordinated services, housing access, and tracking people needing help.

That achievement has since suffered setbacks. Yet its 2025–26 report records 160 people placed in permanent housing and 107 people or households receiving prevention support.

The difference matters. Medicine Hat demonstrated that a city could dramatically improve its response. Finland demonstrated how national housing policy could be redesigned.

What if we compared the cost of permanent housing and prevention with the recurring costs of shelters, emergency rooms, policing, and crisis intervention?

The smart rethink: Stop spending so much managing the consequences of homelessness while underinvesting in the systems that prevent it.

6. Stop designing rural life around two-car households.

The Kootenays already have an alternative.

Kootenay Carshare operates shared vehicles in communities including Nelson, Kaslo, and Revelstoke.

Switzerland’s Mobility cooperative shows how shared transportation can operate at a much larger scale.

Of course, rural distances make private vehicles necessary for many families. But needing one vehicle does not always mean needing two.

What if communities combined shared cars, employer transportation, demand-responsive shuttles, and safer walking routes?

The smart reversal: The best transportation investment may be the second car a family never needs to buy, insure, fuel, or repair.

7. Stop attracting investors. Start becoming investors.

Burns Lake offers a remarkable example.

Its community forest purchased more than $16 million in goods and services in 2023–24, with over 90% purchased locally. It also contributed approximately $262,000 to community organizations.

Instead of simply inviting outside companies to extract local resources, communities can own productive assets themselves.

Medicine Hat’s utilities offer another lesson. Public ownership can produce financial benefits that reach ordinary households.

Imagine community investment trusts owning commercial property, renewable energy, forestry operations, or other income-producing assets.

The smart rethink: Stop measuring economic development only by the investment coming into town. Measure the productive wealth the community owns.

8. Stop treating Reconciliation as a one-time cost.

In Saskatoon, Muskeg Lake Cree Nation’s urban reserve supports approximately 50 businesses and more than 750 jobs.

On Vancouver Island, T’Sou-ke Nation has pioneered solar energy and greenhouse innovation.

In central B.C., Ulkatcho First Nation is developing a major community-owned solar project.

Closer to home, Yaqan Nukiy owns Ainsworth Hot Springs Resort and other businesses that contribute to the regional economy.

These examples challenge the idea that Indigenous rights and economic prosperity are competing interests.

Reconciliation begins with respecting rights, jurisdiction, and self-determination. It can also create businesses, jobs, infrastructure, and wealth that benefit entire regions.

In my experience, Ktunaxa communities are extraordinary innovators whose economic imagination often reaches beyond conventional development thinking.

The smart rethink: Stop treating Reconciliation as an expense or risk. Build respectful partnerships in which Indigenous ownership and regional prosperity can grow together.

9. Stop subsidizing replacement. Make repair cheaper.

Repair Café Nelson reports hundreds of successful repairs through volunteer-supported events.

France has gone further by requiring producers in several industries to contribute to the cost of repairing products.

This turns a familiar economic assumption upside down.

A broken appliance should not automatically become a new purchase. Repair can create local employment while reducing household expenses and waste.

What if B.C. communities supported repair workshops, tool libraries, trades training, and producer-funded repair discounts?

The smart rethink: Stop making replacement the easiest option. Make repairing things cheaper, simpler, and more accessible.

10. Stop measuring economic growth. Start measuring money families keep.

New Zealand and Bhutan have challenged the idea that economic success can be measured by production alone.

But we could begin much closer to home.

Imagine 1,000 Cranbrook households reducing their recurring expenses by just $100 a month.

That represents $1.2 million annually available for savings, debt reduction, children’s needs, and potentially local spending.

No new factory. No extraordinary economic boom.

Just families keeping more of what they earn.

What if every municipality measured housing costs, energy bills, transportation expenses, and other necessities alongside jobs and investment?

The smart rethink: Stop celebrating every new dollar coming into town. Start measuring how much prosperity reaches ordinary households.

The real economic development question

None of these ideas is magic.

Community ownership can fail. Shared infrastructure requires investment. Prevention takes patience.

Indigenous partnerships must respect rights and self-determination, not merely promise economic returns.

But the economic principle is simple.

When families spend less on essentials, they have more to save, reduce debt, and support local businesses.

When communities own productive assets, more returns can remain local. When governments prevent expensive crises, taxpayers may avoid even greater future costs.

We still need good jobs, higher wages, and new investment.

But those achievements mean less if the cost of living rises just as quickly.

A town can get richer while its people get poorer.

Perhaps the most radical economic development strategy is to help citizens reduce their collective expenses.

And perhaps the most important question for every mayor, councillor, and economic development officer is this:

Are we building a wealthier community—or making life more affordable for the people who live here?

– Stan Chung, PhD, is a speaker, writer, and 2026 Governor General’s laureate.

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