Feedback on Canada’s New Federal Approach to Housing Affordability

Infrastructure Canada has published their Market Sounding Guide for Build Canada Homes, their new, more hands-on approach to creating affordable housing:

https://housing-infrastructure.canada.ca/bch-mc/market-sounding-guide-sondage-marche-eng.html

I have provided the following feedback on the Guide and thought there might be interest in what I shared:

Thank you for the opportunity to provide feedback on the Build Canada Homes – Market Sounding Guide.

I come to this reflection from two decades of research on homelessness, as Managing Editor of the International Journal on Homelessness, and as a recipient of the Gold Roof Award for housing research from CMHC.

I wanted to highlight a priority sector and ensure there was clarity around the model best designed to help this sector. When we look at other jurisdictions that have better sustained housing affordability and limited their homelessness crises, the clear differentiator is the proportion of housing stock that is ‘public housing’ (referred to in the Sounding Guide and hereon as ‘community housing’). Community housing is the only current model in Canada providing deep affordability and as such is the primary point of exit from homelessness. While rent supplements open up affordable housing or even market housing, the rate of growth of market rents and affordable rents indexed to market rents, strains the efficacy of supplements.

The Sounding Guide includes “community housing developments” as an affordable housing partner. It also includes investment selection criteria of community sector growth meaning more affordable housing for low-income households. I believe these are very important goals if the housing approach is going to meaningfully address homelessness.

That said, I wanted to flag the named funding approaches and this sector. It is worth noting that the community housing sector faces an overwhelming capital deficit in terms of existing housing stock. Additionally, this sector is not adding new units except when there is an opportunity to demolish current stock that is beyond its lifecycle and replace it with more units than demolished. In this context, how resources are provided to the community housing sector needs to be extremely intentional if it is going to be to the end of a significant increase in the number of deeply affordable units. Repair of existing stock is important, but providing capital dollars into this sector could also see all of the funding absorbed into repairs. The sector is in an extreme deficit position. Therefore, models named in the Market Sounding Guide, such as building units and leasing them to the affordable provider, would not be a good fit for this sector. Rather, using public land, building the new units, and turning them over to the community housing provider would be the most reasonable means of increasing this form of stock. This is expansive, but is a vital approach if we are going to come anywhere close to matching our economic peers and addressing those in greatest housing need.

My fear is that the Build Canada Homes approach will follow the current path and only increase the stock of affordable housing and not increase the stock of community housing. While affordable housing is vital and fills a very large need of those in low income, it does not meet the needs of those in the lowest income level. For these individuals and families, we need to increase our community housing stock and this requires federal and provincial/territorial governments to carry the full cost given the capital deficits of community housing providers.

Thank you for your consideration.