Home Truths: My book for every Canadian who cares about housing

I was moved by Diana Chan McNally’s recent Maytree post about how front-line homelessness workers need to know more about policy, and how more policy workers need to listen to front-line homelessness workers. When I returned to Canada five years ago, I looked for a book written for people who were concerned about the housing crisis but didn’t necessarily know about the systems that have produced that crisis.

There are a lot of terrific scholarly books and reports that assume you know a lot and want the jargon-filled details of specific programs. There are also a lot of terrific books on how bad the current housing crisis is, without delving as much into how we got there and what we as a society can do about it. There are very few books informed by an analysis that forefronts the needs of those who need housing the most, or those who work to support them.

The most recent book I could find that provided an overview of Canadian housing policy from a popular perspective was John Sewell’s Houses and Homes, published in 1994. A lot has changed in three decades, mostly for the worse.

That’s why I wrote Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis. I’ve worked hard to make the book both comprehensive and accessible to all those who want better housing futures for Canada. After all, one in twenty Canadians have experienced homelessness in their life, and more than one in three know someone who has become homeless.

Canadian households are roughly divided into one third each renters, mortgage-holders, and homeowners without a mortgage. Only a third of both renter and mortgage holder households can meet their daily expenses without difficulty. In fact, almost six in ten mortgage holders as well as renters now find they have to draw on savings to meet expenses.

That means a majority of Canadian households are either struggling with rents that have increased to the point where it’s impossible for a minimum wage earner to afford an apartment in any city in Canada, or they are becoming economic refugees in their own country, moving far from work and family to qualify for an affordable rent or mortgage. It’s thus unsurprising that inflation and the cost of housing are the number one issues in Canada, and that the current federal government is languishing in the polls due to this.

But what are the answers, beyond three-word simplistic slogans and “magic bullets”? We’ve done so much better in the past. The Canadian government enabled up to a million homes sold for $6-7,000 between 1946 and 1960 (the equivalent of $80-90,000 today), a housing cost easily affordable to a single earner on a starting salary, through a combination of low cost land, guaranteed finance, and mass produced pre-fabricated construction.

Sweden accomplished a similar achievement – a million homes affordable for low-to-median-income households between 1965-74; and Singapore met its entire assessed housing need in its first decade after independence using similar mechanisms. In all these cases, countries were poorer per capita than Canada is today – in fact, housing for all became the basis for wealthy economies and the growth of new exports like Ikea.

In the 1970s and 1980s, nonmarket housing – public, cooperative, non-profit, supportive – accounted for up to 20 per cent of new homes in Canada. And we were building more homes, especially purpose-built rental homes, in the early 1970s than we are today, despite having doubled our population over the past half-century.

It has taken 30 to 50 years – two generations – of policy failure to get to where we are today: failure to invest in nonmarket housing as essential infrastructure; tax settings that favour speculation in housing as an investment over homes as a basic right and need; treatment of Indigenous, racialized, and people with disabilities as second-class citizens. It will take at least one generation of investment, especially in low-income housing with supports, to eradicate homelessness and ensure “housing for all.”

It will also take a generation of articulate and informed citizens to push for consistent rights-based policy that goes beyond right-left politics.

France has had 20 per cent nonmarket housing targets for municipalities since 2000 (increased to 25 per cent in 2016) through right, left, and centrist governments – and has more than doubled the proportion of homes available to low-income households. Finland has stuck to its goal of eradicating homelessness through similar political change since 1987– and has largely succeeded.

The more of us who become “housers,” advocating for better federal investments, provincial supports, and municipal approvals, the more we can develop the kind of cross-political consensus that will fix Canada’s housing crisis.

Dr. Carolyn Whitzman is an Adjunct Professor and Senior Housing Researcher at University of Toronto’s School of Cities, and the author of Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis (UBC/On Point Press, 2024).