Are We Really Trying to Solve the Housing Crisis?

Ten years ago, I wrote my first story on the housing crisis. (If you’re curious, it was about the development bonanza along Vancouver’s Cambie Corridor, still ongoing.)

Ten years later, I’m still covering the beat. How can any Vancouver reporter escape it?

You can see it in downtown alcoves, with people in sleeping bags on sheets of cardboard. You can see it in every neighbourhood, with Bobcats tearing down old apartments. You can see it in online listings, with rents and home prices soaring with every refresh. You can see it in the air, as the cranes add yet another tower to the skyline, the most luxurious of presales fetching as much as $3,100 a square foot.

You can’t avoid talking about it — not at the bar with strangers, not at the dinner table with friends and family. In this pricey city that is the epicentre of a national crisis, the topic is the literal roof, or lack of one, over our heads.

Ten years later, I have 10 years of grim numbers.

Homelessness has gotten worse in Vancouver, up from 1,600 people without a home in 2013 to 2,420 in 2023.

Actual rents in the primary market have increased by 60 per cent, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., but the average earner is only making about 36 per cent more, according to census data.

As for that coveted Vancouver house, an average property has jumped from $1.6 million to $2.6 million.

Today is National Housing Day. No, this isn’t a holiday with a Condo Claus you write letters to, asking for a home. Back in 1998, a group of Toronto activists called on governments to recognize homelessness as a national disaster. Two years later, Canada marked the first National Housing Day to raise awareness about housing issues.

Over the years, I’ve interviewed locals, advocates, experts and elected officials about the housing crisis. One of the ironies of life is that the more you learn, the more you realize there is to know.

And yet, politicians often claim they can fix things soon (only to fall short or fail). Locals are upset when a single policy doesn’t translate into cheaper rents or condos (they may be naive or starved for a miracle). Armchair analysts, particularly on X, boast they have all the answers (even when housing experts each have their own specialized fields).

I’ve picked up four lasting lessons that help keep the reporting I do in perspective. On this National Housing Day, I share them with you.

The housing crisis has a long history

Any news story you read about the housing crisis is just one scene in the bigger history of housing in Canada. Let’s rewind.

Once upon a time, the federal government took on a bigger role in the housing of Canadians.

At the end of the Second World War, it established the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. to help citizens get into home ownership. At the time, most households obtained at least part of their mortgage directly from the federal government.

But beyond homeownership, the CMHC took on a role to create a diverse supply of housing.

In the 1950s, the CMHC, with some reluctance, began building federal public housing as part of post-war reconstruction. It also partnered with provinces and cities interested in building their own.

New supply peaked in 1970, creating almost 45,000 homes that year. It was an impressive number: one in four homes built in Canada was public housing.

But paying for true public housing is an expensive undertaking. So the CMHC looked around for partners who might be interested in building affordable housing of their own if offered a little help.

To boost the supply of market rental housing, the CMHC turned to private investors. It created a number of federal loan and tax incentive programs to encourage them to build apartments, sometimes with an affordability requirement.

Outside of the market, the CMHC provided funding and grants to non-profits and new co-ops, spurred by union activism and lasting values from the Antigonish movement.

New supply peaked in 1980, with about 35,000 homes built. This too was an impressive number: more than one in five homes built in Canada was in a non-profit or co-op building.

These decades represent the heyday of affordable housing in Canada, when the federal government showed up with funding to tackle the responsibility.

But austerity was on the horizon. In 1984, Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government began slashing housing spending from the federal budget.

It would culminate in a final blow by another government, Jean Chrétien’s Liberals. In 1993, they ejected the federal government from housing responsibility entirely. Provinces would be left to fend for themselves.

Large provinces like B.C., Ontario and Quebec have tried to keep up with their own housing programs. Even cities like Vancouver have made use of their powers to boost the supply of homes missing from the market, using land use policy to compel developers to build affordable units.

In 2017, there was finally movement again on the federal front: Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government rolled out its national housing strategy. But spending remained minuscule compared to the scale of previous federal governments.

After a quarter-century of inaction, governments are still trying to make up for the relief that is needed, all the more challenging in a market that has heated up.

The housing crisis is more than a homebuying crisis

Have you heard the news?

“A new report calls Vancouver’s housing market ‘impossibly unaffordable.’”

Sure, it’s nice to have one-liners like this to refer to. But what does it mean for Vancouver to be “impossibly unaffordable”?

It has nothing to do with homelessness, renting or even buying a condo. The study, conducted by the think tank Demographia and flogged by news media every year, refers to the ability of local income earners to buy a house.

Politicians also conflate the housing crisis with property ownership. Liberal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland once called the inability of young people to own a home an “intergenerational injustice.”

The housing crisis is often referred to as a problem with the housing market.

But there is no “problem” with the housing market because it is effectively doing what markets do: generating transactions of sales and services in pursuit of profit.

The focus on the housing market neglects the fact that housing is a system, say experts.

It should be no surprise that Canada has a very uneven housing system, with governments choosing to heap on help to homebuyers and homeowners, to be lax on market regulation and to hold back on growing a non-market sector that other countries have invested in.

Over 96 per cent of Canadians rely on the market for housing, whether owning a home of their own or renting from a private landlord.

Less than four per cent live in some form of non-market housing, whether that’s public, non-profit or co-op housing.

The housing crisis will always be here for some

Sure, rising home prices have become out of whack with stagnant local incomes. Just ask any family with young people unable to purchase property at the same age their parents did.

But as Canada’s housing history reveals to us, the crisis has always been here for low-income households.

To quote David Hulchanski of the University of Toronto, who has studied housing for decades, “A housing system based on the market mechanism cannot respond to social need.”

You might argue that private landlords in Vancouver do offer housing options for low-income people in the form of single-room occupancy hotels and walk-up apartments.

But these homes are precarious. Renters face disrepair (why would a landlord make fixes they don’t have to?), bad-faith evictions (why not bring in a new tenant who will pay the market rate?) and “demovictions” in the face of redevelopment (why not sell the building if the price is right?).

It’s difficult for low-income renters — many of whom are vulnerable seniors, newcomers or have health issues — to advocate for themselves against professional landlords looking to make the highest and best use of their assets.

Also, note that Vancouver’s SRO hotels were built a century ago and walk-ups half-a-century ago. The market doesn’t push the construction of new housing for low-income people; they get the leftovers.

Low-income people will always need housing help from governments to find a place to rent. Because of this, Humphrey Carver, a scholar of social work who served as the first urban policy advisor for the CMHC, said that they represent Canada’s "ultimate housing problem."

Widespread homelessness is a result of neglecting to help this group, says Hulchanski.

If governments are serious about helping low-income people find homes, he says there are two things they can do: offer cash assistance or fund non-market housing.

The housing crisis is complicated

Look, I know this last point sounds like an excuse, but hear me out.

There is no end to the housing stories for us journalists to cover: rising homelessness, tenant rights, first-time buyers, non-market housing, development and displacement, local and foreign speculation, public policy and more.

There are also tons of experts for journalists to interview. They represent a vast array of interests with a vast array of expertise: building trades, community planning, designers, economics, engineering, finance, investment, law, policy, property development, property management, real estate, social work and more.

You can see that housing is multidimensional, and why I’m annoyed when a commenter who holds none of the expertise I’ve listed above says that a single solution that I report on isn’t going to solve the crisis.

It has been called a “wicked” problem, a term used to describe a social issue that’s complex, difficult and impossible to permanently solve. Housing can even be considered a "super wicked” problem, in which the actors trying to solve it, like governments, have actually played a part in causing it.

Carolyn Whitzman, a University of Toronto professor who recently authored the book Home Truths, has a colourful way of describing what’s to be done: a “loaded nachos” approach is needed.

“Each level of government needs to add its own ingredients to the mix to ensure success,” she often says.

These days, there is optimism in the affordable housing sector. Advocates have given the BC NDP Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon and his federal counterpart Liberal Minister Sean Fraser some credit for their respective suites of policies, but are urging them to spend even more. The longer affordable housing projects are delayed, cheap rents can’t be offered. Plus, delays mean the number of units might have to be reduced due to rising land and construction costs.

As solutions are rolled out to address the crisis, journalists can serve their audiences by signalling the philosophy behind each one to illustrate its role in that bigger housing system.

Does it fuel the market? Or try to regulate it?

Does it create housing options? And, the big question, for whom?

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The Tyee has covered housing since its inception. From 2011 to 2019, we ran the notable Housing Fix project, surfacing solutions to all dimensions of the crisis, and you can find a complete archive of the more than 170 Housing Fix stories here. We still cover housing regularly and you can read our latest coverage here.