In a new report, the B.C. government is being accused of hugely inflating the number of new social housing units available, exaggerating figures by a factor of more than 40.

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives is slamming the government's claims that it has added 11,530 new social housing units in the last five years.

"What we've tried to do is to isolate what's actually come on stream that's actually new, low-income, non-market housing. And it's very little," the group's Seth Klein told CTV News.

The result is just 280 new social housing units added since 2005.

The group says that 63 per cent of the new units are actually subsidies to people living in privately owned apartments. Another 10 per cent are emergency shelter beds, and yet another 10 per cent are Downtown Eastside hotels that were already housing the poor.

"When you look at the government's touting of their own progress, they count that as if it's new units, and they aren't new units. It's government preservation of the low-income stock," Klein said.

But the government stands by its figures, saying that subsidized housing can provide the same relief for the poor without actually building something new.

"Rather than build other social housing for families, we're giving people making less than $35,000 a year a supplement cheque so they could choose the rental market they wanted to live in," Housing Minister Rich Coleman wrote in an op-ed dismissing the group's report.

"It would take many years to build 8,800 units of low-income housing for families, and cost approximately $2 billion."

Coleman also says that 4,063 new social housing units are currently under construction.

Those units will be allocated based on need.

People like Sherese Johnson understand the struggle for housing first-hand. She lives in a Vancouver co-op with her daughter, but says her living situation might not last for long.

"My income won't allow me to live in my place and work full-time, and have her cared for after school," Johnson told CTV News.

She works for a web-development company, but can't make ends meet. She applied for social housing, but was told she'd have to wait for a year or more.

"You can start to understand how people become homeless because there are these waitlists that are a year. I feel scared and nervous, actually," Johnson said.

Long waitlists are just one symptom of the social housing crunch, according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

With a report from CTV British Columbia's Jon Woodward