We Are Failing at Housing
We've been in a "housing crisis" for a long time.
Housing
This has become the number one topic dominating conversations in pretty much every community and with every order of government across Canada. And rightly so, we are in a housing crisis.
Every day, there is a new story about the housing challenges coast-to-coast-to-coast. While the current crisis is grabbing everyone’s attention, regardless of where we live, we have been on a low boil for a long time getting to this point. The journey to a full-blown crisis is long and complicated. And untangling it will be long and complicated.
But let’s be clear, none of this is new. We’ve had a housing crisis for a while. It is incredibly disingenuous to start blaming immigrants, temporary foreign workers, or students from abroad as the cause of the problem. Canada has not been building enough housing for a long time.
What was a housing crisis for those who need housing assistance the most has morphed into a housing crisis for everyone. And while we fundamentally need more housing, all forms of housing, we can’t lose sight of those who have been suffering from a lack of housing they can afford for a very long time.
In the Beginning
We have been talking for years, for decades even, about the affordable housing crisis in Canada. Affordable housing providers and municipalities in particular have been raising the alarm about the lack of affordable housing since the early 2000s. That was when we started seeing waiting lists for subsidized housing explode, pretty much everywhere across the country.
The calls for increased funding for affordable housing was consistently falling on deaf ears. And while wait lists were growing existing affordable housing units were falling into disrepair dues to lack of funding. The housing that was being built was either single family homes in suburbs or condos. None of that housing was addressing the incredible and growing need for affordable housing.
Finally, in response to the pressure of municipalities through the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM), in 2017 the federal government announced the National Housing Strategy. While not perfect, and not covering all the challenges within the affordable housing sector, the NHS was bringing the federal government back to the table in funding housing across the country. The Strategy contained a major commitment to spending over $40Billion on housing over 10 years. This was a much needed and celebrated investment.
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Election
Then, we had a couple of federal elections, in 2019 and 2021. The conversation shifted from “affordable housing” to “housing affordability”. Until then, when everyone had been talking about affordable housing, it was understood to mean addressing the needs of those in “core housing need”, people spending more than 30% on housing. Those are the people on the growing wait lists for housing. Those are the people who need subsidized housing that has rents geared to income (RGI).
But during those 2 elections, government began speaking of “housing affordability” and challenges of first time home owners. Promises were made to make it easier for young people to buy a home, all in the name of affordability. Mortgages were extended, the ability to tap into RRSP’s was expanded, and the “cut red tape” advocates targeted municipal approvals and permitting.
Now, when government is supporting “affordable housing”, they are no longer working to build housing for those in core housing need, they are talking about ownership rather than rental.
“Affordable Housing vs Housing Affordability”
The Housing Accelerator Fund is just the latest example of the shift away from building more affordable rental housing.
Many cities applied to the $4Billion HAF to “build more homes, faster”. The federal Minister of Housing, Sean Fraser, famously wrote letters to municipalities indicating the types of targets and changes there were looking for in order for a city to qualify.
Speficifically, to address the housing crisis, the federal government was looking for municipalities to:
grow their housing supply faster than their historical average;
increasing densification;
speed up approval times;
tackle NIMBYism and establish inclusionary zoning; and,
encourage public transit-oriented development
Note what is missing from this list: AFFORDABLE HOUSING!!!!!
Oh sure, a city could get bonus points in their application to the HAF by including “affordable housing” targets. The City of Winnipeg received $122Million from the HAF. They indicate that this will lead to an increase of 3,100 housing units over the next three years, of which 900 will be “affordable”.
In the context of the HAF, “affordable” no longer means housing for those in core housing needs with RGI units. “Affordable” now means a rent that is 80% of the mean market rent in that community, rent that is far above what someone needing a subsidized RGI unit is able to pay. You can do that math for pretty much any community in Canada and targeting 80% of market rent is nowhere near “affordable”.
So, let’s look at what rents in municipalities across Canada look like in January 2024. Rentals.ca pulls together all the data and tracks it over time. The average rent in Canada has increased by 8.8% year over year.
With this, we can have a look at what rent is actually affordable for the 20% of renters who are in Core Housing Need (per StatsCan data). There are tools out there that let us look at what the housing needs are in Canada. The Housing Resource Assessment Tools (HART) is a great place to start.
Let’s look at what this means in Winnipeg. Pulling the Low Income Cut Off data from Statistics Canada, a single person making less than $27,500 per year is considered to be living in poverty. That goes up based on the number of people in the household. Let’s put that together with the rents, and the 80% of market rents.
The “affordable” target of 80% of market rent does not provide a single unit for anyone, let alone a family. Looking at what people in core housing needs can afford illustrates the very sharp disconnect in policy and how many people are left out.
Clearly, the “affordable housing” being built does not address the needs of people below the median income. In Winnipeg that is over 30,000 households, over 60,000 people. This when Winnipeg has over 3,000 households on the waiting list for an affordable housing unit. That is 4,600 people that will not be helped by the Housing Accelerator Fund.
This scenarios is repeated Canada, where over 250,000 households are on waiting lists for affordable housing.
The Housing Crisis
Governments have ignored housing for a long time. Those living in and in need of subsidized housing have been ignored for a long time. As governments try to respond to the current housing crisis, they are continuing to leave those who need housing assistance behind.
Definitely, the changes our cities are making as part of the Housing Accelerator Fund are needed. We have a huge deficit in available housing right across the country. But, we can’t pretend that the HAF is addressing the affordable housing crisis we’ve been in for decades.
The Auditor General of Canada did a review of the National Housing Strategy in 2022. The strategy is a 10-year plan with targets for building more affordable housing (real affordable housing!) and significantly reducing homelessness. The Auditor General found that the Housing Strategy is simply not achieving what it is intended to do.
Auditor General Report, November 2022
Another 2022 review of the National Housing Strategy by the National Housing Council Working Group (created by the government as part of the NHS) also found that it is not meeting the goals and targets. The review found that the Strategy is not creating very much housing for those in core housing need.
Housing For All
The affordable housing crisis is not going away. We have been in an affordable housing crisis for a long time, the difference is that it is now affecting more than the most socio-economically marginalized in our communities.
When the Housing Accelerator Fund has run its course, and the National Housing Strategy is done in 5 years, we will indeed have more homes built. But those truly in need, those most vulnerable in our community, will still literally be left out in the cold.
The National Housing Strategy recognizes housing as a basic human right. Its intention is to improve “the housing outcomes for persons in greatest need”. We are going to need all orders of government to actually commit to those outcomes.
Until we truly are committed to Housing For All we will not solve the crisis.
Brian
ps. This was a very difficult piece to write. It has had many starts and restarts. I have been steeped in this issue for a long time, and there is a lot more to explore when it comes to the affordable housing crisis. Expect more from me.
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