Modern living: Rebooting the affordable housing cause

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If you’re looking for a quick fix to Canada’s shortage of affordable homes, Carolyn Whitzman has sobering news for you. 

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“I think that Canada’s housing crisis is eminently fixable,” says Whitzman, an Ottawa housing and social policy researcher and the author of the 2024 book Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis. “But the first thing that we have to let go of is the notion that there is one thing, in one term of government, at one level of government, that’s going to magically fix things, because that’s not the way change works.”  

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Multiple factors over multiple decades have led to the point where, today, less than 2 percent of renters aged 25 to 44 can afford to buy an average-priced house. (In 1971, that figure was 50 percent.) It will take myriad long-term efforts to get us out of this mess, Whitzman says. 

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So, how did we get here, and what does she think we should do? 

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The roots of the housing crisis 

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Three main factors underpin the housing crisis, says Whitzman. One, Canada is building fewer houses per year than we were in the mid-1970s, even though our population has almost doubled. Two, since 1980, we’ve constructed much fewer purpose-built rental homes. And three, in the early 1990s, construction of nonmarket housing—which includes public housing, supportive housing, cooperatives and homes built by charities—plummeted. The federal government downloaded responsibility for nonmarket housing to the provinces. Most of them punted the issue to municipalities, which don’t have the budgets to build much of it. 

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A wide range of other factors have played a role. “Social assistance rates that don’t provide enough for somebody to rent a room, let alone an apartment, [are] a big part of homelessness,” Whitzman says. Her book notes that the average Canadian assistance recipient can now afford to spend just $420 a month on shelter.  

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In addition, she notes, tenant protections in many jurisdictions are weak, making it easy to “renovict” renters and gentrify once-affordable properties.  

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Some potential solutions 

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Whitzman gives kudos to several Ottawa organizations for their efforts to create affordable housing. “We’re lucky. We have one of the best public housing authorities in Canada, Ottawa Community Housing,” she says. For example, OCH recently completed a development called the Mikinàk Community in Wateridge Village (formerly CFB Rockcliffe). Homes in the 271-unit development range from studios to three-bedroom homes, at a range of affordability levels, and include 57 accessible units.