It’s on old cliché that when you fail to plan, you plan to fail. In the early 1990s, the federal government scrapped its national housing strategy and largely got out of the business of funding affordable housing and rental units.
Today, we’re living with that failure. Census data released last month shows almost half of North Shore renters are paying more than they can afford. And the North Shore Homelessness Task Force published a report this fall finding 736 unique individuals registered for services, seven times more than previously thought.
We welcome the return of a national housing strategy, announced this week by the feds. Over 10 years, it’s expected to put up $40 billion aimed at ensuring vulnerable people like seniors, Indigenous people, single moms and veterans have access to safe, affordable homes. For this we offer nothing but praise.
But much of the money is back loaded in to later years of the plan, and experts say the strategy is still vague and reliant on matching funds from the provinces.
It also doesn’t do much for the middle class that Justin Trudeau campaigned to be the saviour of. Now they too find their incomes no longer enough to afford decent shelter in Canada’s largest cities. We still would like to see more aggressive controls on foreign capital distorting our housing market and incentives for the creation of rental housing. Vacancy rates are frozen below one per cent.
All in all, we’re pleased to see the government taking action. We only wish it had come sooner. Just imagine how much more we could have gotten for these billions of dollars if we addressed this problem years ago when land and construction costs were a fraction of what they are now.
