With homelessness rising, condo values rapidly declining and many Canadians’ financial health tied tightly to the housing market, the shortcomings of our system are impossible to ignore, writes Jessica Barrett.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Jessica Barrett is the author of No Place Like Home: The Missing Key to Our Housing Crisis.
If there’s one thing Canadians can reliably expect from our housing market as we approach the spring, it’s plenty of drama.
No matter which group the market ends up favouring – those in search of a home or those looking to offload one – the high costs and high stakes of Canadian real estate are guaranteed to stir up the kind of suspense typical of a bingeworthy TV show. By its very nature, our market-based housing system is adversarial. It pits buyers against sellers and renters against landlords in a battle for fairness and fortune. That our system produces winners and losers has become a perverse but accepted norm in our society; it’s just the way it works.
By virtually any other measure, however, it doesn’t work very well at all.
The past few decades of – until fairly recently – climbing home prices, and particularly the meteoric spike surrounding the pandemic, have made the shortcomings of our system impossible to ignore. Homelessness is up; cities are scattered with encampments; and hospitals, public libraries and transit stations are refuges for people with nowhere else to go.
But even the well-being of those in less vulnerable positions has become so tied to the housing market that there is no way it can swing that does not threaten to dash the hopes, dreams and financial health of a substantial portion of Canadians.
Take the rapid decline in condo values that has occurred in Vancouver and Toronto, among other cities, over the past 18 months. While the market “correction” has been heralded as a long-overdue relief for buyers and renters, it’s also left the owners – many of them “mom-and-pop” investors seduced by the promise of easy money – facing disillusionment at best, financial catastrophe at worst. Meanwhile, the downturn in those markets still hasn’t made a majority of housing anywhere near affordable for people who truly need it (though it has shocked developers into pulling back on projects, potentially ensuring a housing shortage down the road).
That we leave the fundamental human right to housing almost entirely up to the whims of the market isn’t just woefully inefficient at sheltering Canadians, it has frayed our social fabric. The various factions pitted against one another in the unforgiving arena of Canadian real estate are not abstractions. The vast majority are people.
The myth of homeownership as an investment is wreaking untold damage
Our system pits parents against children, old against young, neighbour against neighbour, established Canadians against newcomers. With this as the framework surrounding the foundation of our lives – our homes – it’s no wonder we’ve entered an era where we are more economically, socially and politically divided than ever.
Solving our housing crisis, as well as these other pressing issues, requires bridging these divides. To do so, we need to let go of a belief that has become a core tenet of Canadian values: the idea that our houses aren’t just places to live, they are also vehicles for making us money.
But how do you get people to let go of an idea that’s become as Canadian as maple syrup and ice hockey? You start with an honest accounting of how we got here in the first place.
In his appeal to Canadians ahead of last year’s federal election, Prime Minister Mark Carney and the Liberal Party of Canada offered a solution to the country’s housing crisis rooted in the past. “Canada has solved a housing crisis before, and we can do it again,” said the campaign material, citing the starter home building boom following the Second World War when market housing was allegedly accessible and affordable for all.
Prime Minister Mark Carney tours an affordable housing rental building with Minister of Housing and Infrastructure Gregor Robertson in Vancouver, B.C., on Feb. 18.Jennifer Gauthier/Reuters
This framing is historical fiction.
Even as the postwar years saw the rapid expansion of Canadian cities and cemented the ideal of the white-picket fence in our psyches, a substantial portion of our population remained underserved by the housing market. The introduction of government-backed mortgages, a newfangled financial product at the time, was meant to make home ownership available to the masses and spur private home construction. But as early as the 1950s, population growth was already outpacing supply and government financing was falling short of enabling a majority to access it.
Rather than pivoting to produce housing that was genuinely affordable for people earning average incomes, successive governments doubled down, allowing banks to sell mortgages, reducing required down payments and using public money to create a labyrinth of loan and subsidy programs Canadians could access to meet the ever-increasing cost of housing by piling on personal debt. The reward for all this financial risk was that, for some, there would be a handy profit in the end. However, as many Canadian homeowners, myself included, have found, any gains in the value of one home tend to get eaten up by the purchase of the next because this system ensures the financial value of residential properties can only ever trend up.
Our current housing crisis is not an aberration to be remedied with policies intended to return us to a hypothetically functional market. It is the function of the market: the inevitable outcome of a system that places profits ahead of people.
If Mr. Carney’s Liberals, or any other government, truly wanted to return us to a time when housing was more accessible to more Canadians, they’d look to resurrect the policies of the 1970s and 1980s. This is when substantial, consistent investment in non-profit housing led to the creation of hundreds of thousands of desirable and affordable homes many Canadians still live in today. According to a Parliamentary Budget Officer report, this period, known to some scholars as the “golden age” of social housing, produced 87 per cent of the affordable housing still available in Canada as of 2023. Among them, our housing co-operatives which are home to a quarter-million people and remain wildly in demand.
Condo and office towers line Vancouver's downtown skyline in July, 2025. Vancouver and Toronto have seen a rapid decline in condo values over the past 18 months.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
A return to a robust non-profit housing sector wouldn’t just create affordable housing that lasts for generations, it would also produce more of the kinds of homes Canadians increasingly crave: communities where we are connected with our neighbours, not in competition with them; where diverse housing forms at a variety of price points allow extended families and social networks to remain geographically intact; communities that support us at every stage of life, allowing older residents to age in place while making room for new generations to put down roots.
This calls for a new approach to social housing, with an expanded understanding of what it is, and who it’s for. Generally, we’ve come to regard non-profit housing through the lens of stigma – suitable and necessary only for those who can’t afford anything else. But the benefits of social housing apply across the income spectrum. Economically diverse, mixed-income communities are more socially cohesive, economically resilient, healthier and more climate-friendly than other types of neighbourhoods. They are also more pleasant places to live, with access to a greater variety of services, better amenities and more opportunities to meet people who might be very different from us. The presence of social housing can even protect private property values nearby.
These advantages are widely recognized in Europe, where middle, or even upper-middle class households commonly live in social housing alongside lower-income groups. But Canada is also full of examples of these socially and economically mixed communities – if you know where to look.
The historic St. Lawrence Market in downtown Toronto is in the midst of a neighbourhood with a wide range of commercial and residential buildings, including non-profit and co-op housing.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
The fact that most social housing is visually indistinguishable from surrounding market-based development speaks to how well they blend into the Canadian landscape. It’s only from the inside that the difference is noticeable, mostly in overwhelmingly positive ways. Residents in co-ops, for example, don’t just enjoy housing costs that can be a third, or less, of the going market rate, they develop a unique sense of familiarity and community with their neighbours that is a natural byproduct of collective ownership, governance and maintenance.
Community land trusts, a newer concept in the Canadian context, bring residents and other stakeholders together to preserve affordability and livability in perpetuity. This goes beyond the realm of housing to include arts venues and cultural spaces, childcare centres and affordable commercial real estate available to local entrepreneurs – aspects that keep our communities vibrant, interesting and economically viable.
Co-housing is a collection of private households pooling their own money to produce multi-family developments that encourage strong neighbourly relationships through thoughtful design. This model holds massive potential to reimagine our neighbourhoods and redirect some of the private housing wealth our system has produced back toward the common good. Imagine if the elderly owners of large, and largely empty, suburban homes were encouraged to contribute their land wealth toward creating places to downsize within their communities as well as genuinely affordable entry points for the next generation. It’s likely the knee-jerk opposition to density and development in these neighbourhoods would begin to dissipate if people could trust the changes they are being asked to endure were a direct response to community need rather than opportunistic reactions to market economics.
These solutions to our housing crisis exist across the country, but they are largely unknown, regarded by governments as fringe and experimental, receiving only a tiny fraction of the resources and attention we put toward market development. It’s time to change that narrative.
For decades, we have been sold a story many of us would like to believe is true: that it is possible for our homes to generate large profits and also support the kind of socially cohesive, stable, and vibrant communities where most of us want to live. Decades of evidence has shown this is simply not the case. Time will tell if we will ever be brave enough to elect leaders and enact policies that are grounded in this reality. But if we did, we might find ourselves with a version of home more precious than we ever could have imagined.