In these days where consensus on important issues seems in short supply, there is one thing that everyone seems to agree on: Canada has a housing crisis. What there is little consensus on is what, or who, caused it. As Canada heads for an election by fall 2025, media reports declare housing will be one of the central issues.
According to a Dec. 4, 2023 CBC article, “Housing costs have been on the rise for years in Canada, with the national average home price sitting at roughly $650,000 in October 2023. Canadians are also facing increased pressure from rental costs, as well as mortgage costs as interest rates climb.”
Like many stories that suddenly burst onto the scene as a “crisis”, the roots of the housing crisis date back decades partly to actions taken by both Liberal and Conservative federal governments.
According to the Canadian Centre for Housing Rights May 2022 article Fifty years in the making of Ontario’s housing crisis – a timeline, Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government ended the federal co-operative housing program in 1992, after successive federal governments had built nearly 60,000 affordable homes for low- and moderate-income households. Mulroney froze investments in social housing the following year. In 1995, Jean Chretien’s Liberal government stopped funding the development of affordable housing for the first time in 50 years. From that year until 2002, almost no new non-profit housing units were created. In 1999, the Chretien government shifted the responsibility of administering and funding social housing to provincial governments. In Ontario, this was done through the signing of the Canada-Ontario Social Housing Agreement. A year earlier in 1998, Ontario Premier Mike Harris’ Conservatives passed Ontario’s Tenant Protection Act, which provided more protection to landlords than tenants by eliminating rent controls on vacant units. Because of these cutbacks, 17,000 non-profit and co-operative housing units that had been slated for construction were cancelled.
That was the beginning of things getting bad for many Canadians regarding housing. But, as with most national crises, evidence indicates the housing crisis is having a disproportionately negative effect on Black Canadians.
According to Statistics Canada’s Housing experiences in Canada: Black people in 2018, in 2018, 52% of Black people in Canada lived in rented dwellings compared to 27% for the total population. Among Black people who rented their dwellings, 57% reported being satisfied (or very satisfied) with their dwelling compared to 69% in the total population. Of Black people who lived in rented dwellings 30% were more likely to live in unsuitable housing compared 19% of the total population who lived in rented dwellings.
According to the Canadian Housing Survey, in 2021, Black and Indigenous Canadians were 2 times more likely to be evicted compared to white Canadians. This same study found that 12% of Black and 13% of Indigenous respondents had experienced an eviction in their lifetime compared to 7% of respondents who identified as neither Black nor Indigenous.
There are many more stats just as there are many organizations taking action to address the crisis.
The federal government’s 2019 National Housing Strategy Act declared that “the right to adequate housing is a fundamental human right affirmed in international law.” Adequate housing is understood in international law as housing that provides secure tenure; is affordable; is habitable; provides access to basic infrastructure; is located close to employment, services and amenities; is accessible for people of all abilities; and is culturally appropriate.”
In December, 2020, the federal government, in partnership with the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation and Habitat for Humanity Canada, announced an investment of $40 million to create 200 home ownership “opportunities” across the country for Black Canadians (it’s very unclear what that means as it doesn’t say it means 200 new homes.)
February 1, 2022 the federal government announced up to $50 million dedicated to building housing for Black households. The funding through the National Housing Co-Investment Fund (NHCF) will support Black-led organizations to build housing, as well as more affordable housing for Black renter households in Canada. On June 24, 2022, the federal government launched applications for funding for Black-led organizations dedicated to building housing for Black households through the $50 million program.
February 18, 2022, the federal government announced $10 million in federal funding for the BlackNorth Homeownership Bridge Program. The announcement said the investment will help deliver an estimated 200 affordable homes to first-time homeowner Black families in the Greater Toronto Area within the next four years. The program is led by BlackNorth Initiative (BNI) in partnership with Habitat for Humanity Greater Toronto Area and the Dream Legacy Foundation.
According to the BNI website, the program works by enabling families to get mortgages – with no down payment required – for as much of the home purchase price as they qualify for. BNI then gives them a mortgage for the remaining amount and shares the equity in the house with the family.
In December 2023, Ontario passed the Affordable Homes and Good Jobs Act, which it claims will make it cheaper and easier to build affordable homes, provide certainty to municipalities and help more Ontarians find an affordable home based on their household income. The Act is supposed to support measures made through the government’s housing supply actions plans and its commitment to help communities across Ontario build at least 1.5 million homes by 2031. The Ontario government says the proposed changes would update the definition of affordable housing units that would qualify for development-related charge discounts and exemptions and help lower the cost of building, purchasing and renting affordable homes across the province.
Locally, the City of Ottawa increased its affordable housing budget from $15 million to $23.8 million in its 2024 budget but media reports said the budget increase won’t necessarily result in more units hitting the market as the federal and provincial governments need to sign on first.
The Alliance to End Homelessness continues its work in Ottawa including producing a report on scaling up affordable housing in Ottawa, convening an expert steering team including people with lived experience of homelessness and leading the DASH Project in collaboration with researchers at the University of Ottawa to create a dashboard that will integrate existing databases of people waiting for social housing, people in the shelter system, and the available housing stock in a given community.
Starts With Home is leading an initiative in my home town of Ottawa. The initiative focuses on three key messages: stop the loss, create more and preserve the quality.
Stop the loss means stopping things like renovictions where landlords evict tenants to renovate their properties and turn them into high priced unaffordable units. Start With Home recommends stopping the loss by 1) creating municipal policies strengthening tenant protections against renovictions and demovictions and 2) creating a non-profit housing acquisition strategy, supported by City purchases of private market residential properties, for the purpose of turning them over to non-profit housing providers.
Starts With Home recommends creating more affordable housing by 1) developing a strong Inclusionary Zoning policy ensuring new builds have permanent affordable units, based on a household’s income and 2) increasing the municipal budget to house 1,000 households each year, committing 30% as part of a For Indigenous, By Indigenous Housing Strategy.
Finally, to preserve the quality Starts With Home recommends 1) requiring landlords in Ottawa to be licensed for more effective oversight of property maintenance and providing funding, where needed, for small landlords to do maintenance repairs rather than sell their rental units and 2) assigning an independent Housing Ombudsperson to implement the right to housing in line with the federal commitment to housing as a human right.
Starts With Home’s recommendation to create a non-profit housing acquisition strategy has support from at least one organization that’s part of the group some blame as being one of the main contributors to the housing crisis: real estate investment trusts. REITs are companies that own, and in most cases operate, income-producing real estate. REITs can own many types of commercial real estate, including office and apartment buildings, warehouses, hospitals, shopping centers, hotels and commercial forests. REITs have been criticised as enabling speculation on housing, and reducing housing affordability, without increasing finance for building. However, in a July 2023 article, Canadian Apartment Properties REIT (CAPREIT) President and CEO Mark Kenney supported the idea of an “affordable acquisition fund” very similar to Start With Home’s non-profit housing acquisition strategy. CAPREIT’s website says its Canada’s largest publicly traded provider of quality rental housing that, as of September 30, 2023, owned approximately 64,500 residential apartment suites, townhomes and manufactured home community sites well-located across Canada and the Netherlands.
ACORN Canada, an independent national organization of low and moderate income people with 160,000+ members in 20+ neighbourhood chapters across 9 cities is linking housing justice and climate justice with its eco-tenant union initiative. ACORN’s website says, “…no one is reaching out and connecting [low income tenants’] primary concerns of high rent, expensive bills, and disrepair in their units, to the issue of climate change. This is where ACORN’s eco-tenant unions come in. These are tenant unions that work to advance improvements in their buildings, neighbourhoods and city that are win-win for tenants AND the environment.”
I also came across a poster for the Rental Registry with ACORN’s Tenant Union logo at top. The Rental Registry is a public website where people can list their rents that allows tenants to know the rent paid for a rental unit, currently or in the past. “It gives the power of open data to tenants, by creating transparency in the rental market.”
The Black-owned consulting firm CP Planning works on affordable housing in Toronto, Peel, York, Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo and Ottawa. It describes itself as “a non-profit urban planning organization practicing a human rights-based approach to community planning. Our mission is to align public, non-profit, and private sector organizations within the land use development industry to invest in solutions that uphold the economic, social, and cultural rights of marginalized people to have access to good housing, good jobs, an adequate standard of living, and opportunities for cultural expression. We envision a world with more joy, where people are affirmed through a sense of community and belonging.”
I have attended several excellent in-person and online CP Planning events focused on a broad range of affordable housing issues. They have a workshop series that includes several covering how people can organize to develop their own affordable housing projects. CP meets people in their neighborhoods instead of always requiring people to come to them.
With all these initiatives underway the main question will be: are they getting houses built? This question is particularly important given the complexity of the housing issue makes it especially vulnerable to diversity and inclusion illusion initiatives that support collective resistance I talked about in my post It’s time to end the “War On Hate”.
If program websites don’t have big “NUMBER OF HOUSES BUILT SO FAR” buttons right at the top of their website and testimonials from people who have actually gotten houses via the program we must ask: why not?