The Housing Crisis Is Solvable

The magnitude of the housing shortage is huge and the problems chronic, but the housing crisis is solvable.

Throughout British Columbia (BC) and Canada, the housing crisis is marked by high rents and prices, a scarcity of homes, displacement, homelessness, and the quiet exclusion of people from entire neighborhoods.

While a boon to some, high housing costs are a millstone weighing on many households, a drag on the economy, and a barrier to progress in a range of other policy areas including poverty, affordability, climate action, and childcare.

The crisis is multifaceted, but three key areas of action stand out as fundamental to address it:

• Nonmarket housing: a major expansion of public investment is needed.
• Overall housing supply: tackling a severe shortage of homes including market housing.
• City-level roadblocks: ending apartment bans and other municipal barriers to housing.

We have seen a flurry of housing policy from different levels of government in recent years that aims to address precisely these issues. Yet there’s less to this flurry of activity than meets the eye. Reforms target the right levers — nonmarket housing, more supply, and zoning reform — but fall short in scale and implementation.

With the right policies in place, real progress could be made relatively rapidly.

While market housing supply is important, the market alone cannot solve the housing crisis. It is essential to significantly increase public investment in nonmarket housing to meet the needs of the people worst affected by the housing crisis, including those with low and modest incomes and racialized and indigenous communities.

For decades, Canada has underinvested in public, nonprofit, and co-op housing.

The result is that today only about 3.5 percent of the country’s housing stock is social housing, which is half the OECD average. While there’s been some reinvestment in recent years — both federally and provincially — it’s nowhere near the scale that’s needed…