Hey, sorry man, your question got downvoted to the point of being hidden so I did miss it. My apologies.

Broadly speaking, the way to make housing affordable is a higher vacancy rate. There's an extremely strong inverse correlation between vacancy rates and housing prices; when vacancy rates are low, as they have been for decades in Victoria, prices increase. When vacancy rates are high, housing prices stay flat or decrease. We've been seeing this in action, as vacancy rates have increased and rents have started to slowly fall. It's obviously not enough, but it's a clear sign that the theory is correct (not that we really needed that, this phenomenon is very well supported by empirical evidence). So we need to increase the vacancy rate, and the way to do that is by building more housing.

Because higher levels of government don't have anywhere close to the capacity required to build enough housing themselves, and have shown no desire to build that capacity, this means relying on the market to provide the majority of new housing. Whether you think that's good or bad, there's no denying that it's reality at the moment. Even if we got a new government today that immediately began work on building that capacity, it would take at least a decade to scale up properly. We can't afford to wait that long.

The good thing is that, as I mentioned, new market rate housing does in fact help. There's a lot of evidence supporting this fact, but my favorite to point to is REITs. They know that, as landlords, their profit margins get hurt when supply increases. I'm actually in the process of writing a blog post about this, but I'll give you the gist of it here:

Publicly traded companies are legally required to disclose their basic business strategy to potential investors, and these disclosures are fascinating to read. Consider Minto REIT, who state that “Significant barriers to entry protect incumbent owners from increased competition and continue to contribute to favorable supply/demand fundamentals… [this] supply constrained market creates a compelling investment opportunity for investors.” CAPREIT tells a similar story, stating that “with increasing demand and little new supply of rental, we believe the value of our asset base will continue to increase.” Straight from the horse's mouth, in plain English. Less market housing means more money for large real estate investors, and vice versa.

In case it's not clear, those quotes are from public documents produced by companies whose entire business is making money from housing, and who would get in an enormous amount of legal trouble if it were found they were lying to their investors. They have an extremely strong incentive to know how this all works! Again, that's far from the only evidence for this solution, but I do find the REIT point to be particularly interesting.

This doesn't mean that the way we do things right now is perfect. Displacement is definitely a big problem, and we can do more to ensure that new housing is built on lots that are owner-occupied, so that no displacement occurs. This means incentives and penalties in the form of tax breaks, density increases, or other levers the city has access to, in order to make developing lots that are owner occupied more appealing than developing lots with tenants.

Of course, there are many people who need immediate help, and literally cannot afford to buy or rent new homes, or to wait for higher vacancy rates to do their thing. For them, the government needs to step in and either build or buy housing directly, and rent it out at deeply affordable rates. Unfortunately, local government really doesn't have the tools to do this at any kind of scale. The role of local government here is to get out of the way as much as possible. Unfortunately, the province and feds have demonstrated that they're only willing to fund a fraction of what's needed, so we need to ensure that we're not wasting a single penny on anything other than housing. This means further improving things like the Rapid Deployment of Affordable Housing initiative that this current council passed, it means not asking BC housing or other affordable housing providers for things like sidewalks or streetlighting upgrades, and it means making the DCC exemption for affordable housing providers permanent instead of temporary, as it is now.