Canada

Rethinking Canada’s Housing Affordability Challenge

Canada can build safe and adequate housing appropriate to the needs of all its households. That is, there are no physical, institutional, or financial impediments, no shortage of building supplies, construction workers, or mortgage financing to supply adequate housing for all. After the Second World War, improvements in housing finance, residential land servicing building techniques, materials, and regulations produced high-quality housing for the vast majority of Canadian households.

The inability of a country as wealthy as Canada to adequately house all its people is usually called a housing affordability problem. This vague term became common about thirty years ago when it was no longer appropriate to talk about specific problems such as the postwar housing shortage, the slum problem or the inadequate mortgage lending system – since, for the most part, these problems had been addressed. There is, however, something unsatisfactory about policy analysts’ use of housing affordability as a problem definition. Policy experts seldom debate what it means or ought to mean. Yet it is used in the media and everyday language as if it meant something specific. The term alludes to income levels and housing costs, so it seems to make sense. But policy experts ought to do better at naming the specific problem or group of problems – so as to better define solutions.