National Housing Accord – a strategy to end Canada’s rental housing crisis?

5 Key Takeaways

A roundup of the most compelling ideas, themes and quotes from this candid conversation

1. The need for a national blueprint.

According to Dr. Michael Brooks, chief executive at REALPAC, the work of the National Housing Accord began with the question, “What would a blueprint for housing reform in Canada look like?”

To address the rental housing shortage, a roundtable of fifteen private and non-profit housing sector experts gathered to chart a blueprint for systems reform. They focused on enabling all types of supply to house a growing population and restore rental housing affordability—market-rate, affordable, co-operative, non-profit, supportive, and otherwise.

See the The National Housing Accord: A Multi-Sector Approach to Ending Canada’s Rental Housing Crisis for more details on this promising blueprint for an industrial housing strategy.

2. First and foremost, homelessness is a housing system-level problem.

Tim Richter, founder of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, states, “homelessness is the product of high rental costs and low availability,” and not mental illness or addiction as commonly believed. He calls for the need to think about housing as a complex system. When the market segment of the rental spectrum fails to provide secure housing, the burden is left to non-market housing with displacement pressures on those in the most precarious housing situations.

With vastly over 250,000 Canadians expected to experience homelessness this year, Tim says he doesn’t have the luxury of being ideological and will work with anyone willing to help move the housing system in the right direction. Dr. Michael Brooks says, “if I can help solve the homelessness and affordable housing problem, then the market housing problem will solve itself.”

3. Addressing six bottlenecks.

The roundtable identifies six bottlenecks to building more housing: a lack of coordination, a shortage of inputs from labour to materials, high costs, low productivity, inability to get timely approvals, and the insufficient construction of non-market housing.

Dr. Mike Moffat, Senior Director of Policy and Innovation at the Smart Prosperity Institute, states that any purpose-built rental supply side solution must address these six bottlenecks. See the Accord for eight recommendations that propose how to overcome each obstacle, and two recommendations that call for the creation and reformation of funding programs to prevent the displacement of those at risk of homelessness.

4. A broad-tent approach.

Dr. Carolyn Whitzman, a housing and social policy consultant, frames the current housing crisis as an ongoing thirty– to fifty–year supply deficit—the consequences of decades-old political choices around non-market housing. Since political alignment between all three levels of government is rare, she calls for a broad–tent approach based on simple principles, using a universal language associated with targets that can be led by the federal government and picked up by provinces and municipalities. For Carolyn, “the Accord is the start of that consensus-based process that can have political viability,” persisting beyond the tenure of any single political administration. 

5. Solutions are available through inter-departmental coordination.

Mike points out that the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation can’t solve housing affordability on its own, despite housing now being under Infrastructure, because they are limited by their specific policy levers. He calls for an-all-of government approach which requires leadership from the centre. “If we look at what needs to happen, or even the points in the Accord, it actually stretches over about eight or nine different ministries.” Mike describes an interlinked set of federal departmental interests that could be aligned in a national industrial strategy to end the rental housing crisis.