Fixing Canada's Housing Crisis with Carolyn Whitzman

Uncommons with Nate Erskine-Smith

Nate and Carolyn Whitzman talk about her recent book Home Truths, Canada's housing needs, and different historical and international approaches that should inform how we build market, non-market, and supportive housing. Carolyn is a housing and social policy researcher, an expert advisor to UBC's Housing Assessment Resource Tools, a senior housing researcher at U of T's School of Cities. She is also the author of Home Truths, Fixing Canada's Housing Crisis.

How many homes do we need to build? How should we go about building them? And who should we be serving?

Transcript:

Nate:Welcome to Uncommons. I'm Nate Erskine-Smith. For those of you who are tuning in more recently, I'm the Member of Parliament for Beaches-East York. And this Uncommons podcast is a series of interviews with experts in their respective fields with colleagues of mine in parliament really focused on Canadian politics and policy in relation to that politics.

And today I'm joined by Carolyn Whitzman. She is an expert in housing policy, one of the most important issues at all levels of government that need to be addressed in a comprehensive, serious way. You'll hear all politicians sort of trip over themselves with different housing plans.

And the question for Carolyn is, how many homes do we need to build? How should we go about building them? And who should we be serving? And how are we going to get out of this housing crisis that this country faces and that all regions face in their own respective ways?

Now, Carolyn is a housing and social policy researcher. She's an expert advisor to UBC's housing assessment resource tools. She's a senior housing researcher at U of T's School of Cities. And most importantly, having just read her book, she is the author of Home Truths, Fixing Canada's Housing Crisis.

Nate:Carolyn, thanks for joining me.

Caroyln:Great to join you, Nate.

Nate:So you came highly recommended to me by virtue of Mark Richardson, who's a constituent and an advocate on housing and someone I, you know, anything he says on housing is to be believed.

And he's, you know, he highly recommended your book, Home Truths, but he also suggested you as a podcast guest. So I really, really appreciate the time. And much of your work, you know, your main work, other than being an expert in all things housing, but a core expertise that you have is really on the needs assessment in terms of what the housing market in Canada needs in particular in different regions. And there are different needs.

There are market needs, there are non-market needs, there's deeply affordable needs for people who are experiencing homelessness.

And so how would you break down, you know, if you've got Sean Fraser coming to you and saying, what are the needs assessments? How would you break down the needs assessments on housing in this country?

Caroyln:Well, funny you should say that because Sean's office and housing and infrastructure has come to me. So I did some work with a project called the Housing Assessment Resource Tools Project based at UBC that was funded by the CMHC that did what the CMHC used to do and unfortunately no longer does, which is look at housing need by income categories.

Canada has been doing that since 1944 during World War II when a report by a relatively conservative economist named Curtis said that for low-income people, probably some form of public housing was going to be necessary to meet their needs.

For middle-income people, there needed to be a lot more purpose-built rental housing, he said that in 1944. And he also said in 1944 that there needed to be some way to control rent increases and he suggested cooperative housing. And then for higher-income people, definitely scale up while located home ownership.

To some extent the Canadian government listened. Between 1944 and 1960, there were about a million homes enabled through government land financing design replication that were for moderate-income starter households.

In those days it was mostly one-earner households, like a man at home and a woman, sorry, a woman at home and a man at work. And the homes were two to three bedrooms between $7,000 and $8,000. So pretty remarkably that's like $80,000 to $90,000 in today's terms.

Nate:That would be nice.

Carolyn:Yeah, wouldn't it be nice? Once they were sold, they lost our affordability.

So since then, and certainly in the 1970s and 1980s when the federal government was building, well again enabling, about one in five homes to be built by public housing, cooperative housing, other non-profit housing, that housing was affordable to what they called low- and moderate-income households, so the lowest two quintiles of household income. Home ownership was easily affordable to moderate in most places and middle-income households.

So there's always been some housing needs, but there wasn't widespread homelessness. There wasn't the kinds of craziness that you see today where new rental housing isn't affordable to middle-income earners, where new homeowners are limited to the highest quintile, like the highest 20% of population.

So we simply use the same kinds of categories, also the kinds of categories that are used in the U.S. and other countries. Low income, moderate income, median income, and then higher income.

Unfortunately with provincial social assistance rates being what they are, we have to add a very low income, which is like 20% of median income, and really isn't enough to afford a room let alone an apartment. But yeah, that's the way we look at housing need.

Nate:But then, so let's be maybe, that's at a high level for how we look, how we analyze it,

and then when we look at the Canadian context today, so you talk about the Curtis Report

post-war and on my reading of, I found your historical examples very interesting, international

examples interesting too, which we'll get to, but this was one of the most interesting

ones because here you have the Curtis Report proposing annual targets that you say is effectively the equivalent of 4 million homes over 10 years. But then they break this down into a particular categories.

Then you've got, you know, two years ago, two and a bit of years ago, you had CMHC issued a report to say we effectively need 5.8 million homes by 2030. So 2.3 million in business as usual. And then you've got this 3.5 million additional homes required. And that's impossible for us to achieve based upon the current trajectory at all levels of government, frankly, but especially at the provincial level.

And so when you look at the needs assessment today, so Curtis Report has 4 million over

10 years, what do we need today? Is CMHC right?

It's 5.8 million, although they don't break it down into these different categories, or should we be more specific to say, as you do, it's 200,000 new or renovated deeply affordable supportive homes over 10 years, and then you've got different categories for market and non-market.

Carolyn:Well, I think it's important to prioritize people whose lives are literally being shortened because of lack of housing. So I think that ending homelessness should be a priority. And there's no doubt that we can't end homelessness without a new generation of low-cost housing.

So I wouldn't disagree that we need 6,000 new homes. I did a report last year for the Office of the Federal Housing Advocate that argued that we need 3 million new and acquired homes for low-income people alone at rents of about $1,000 a month or less, certainly less if you're on social assistance.

So the deed is pretty large. We have to recognize the fact that it's taken 30 to 50 years of inaction, particularly federal inaction, but also the Fed's downloaded to provinces, and as you say, provinces have done an extremely poor job to get there.

And I think that what we see from countries that work, like France and Finland, Austria, is that they think in terms of like 30-year infrastructure categories, just like any other infrastructure. If we were to have a really viable public transit system, we'd need to start thinking in terms of what are we going to do over the next 30 years.

Similarly, I think we need to look at a kind of 30-year time span when it comes to housing, and I think we need to look once again at that rule of thirds, which is a rule that's used in a lot of, in Germany and again in France and Finland, Denmark, about a third of it needs to be pretty deeply affordable low-income housing, about a third of it needs to be moderate-income rental, but with renter rights to ensure that the rents don't go up precipitously, and about a third of it needs to be for home ownership.

Nate:You mentioned a 30-year window a few times there, and it strikes me that we need more honesty in our politics in that there's no quick solution to most of these challenges. That it's, you know, in your telling of the story, which I think is exactly right, this is decades in the making, and it will be decades in undoing this challenge and in addressing this as fulsome as we should.

Now, that's not to say, you're right, we should prioritize people whose lives are being shortened by a lack of housing. There's some things we can do immediately to get more rapid housing built and really drive at that in a shorter window of time.

But when you look at non-market housing, when you look at the market housing we need to build, no politician should stand at the microphone and say, we're going to build the homes we need without really overhauling how we do things and understanding that these homes are not going to get built tomorrow, that this is putting down track, policy track, to make sure homes get built in the next five years, in the next 10 years and beyond.

Carolyn:Absolutely. And I think it's really important to start off with some aspirational goals. Like, for

instance, it was 1987 when Finland said, we're going to end homelessness, and this is how we're going to do it. France in 2000 said 20% of all housing should be non-market, in other words, public cooperative, non-profit.

And in both Finland and France, there's been federal government changes as well as changes at the municipal level, etc. And those goals have remained the same through right wing and left wing governments.

It does worry me, Nate, when politicians, I won't name any names, use sort of three word slogans, and that's going to somehow change things in the term of the government.

Nate:I will will homes into existence by rhyming.

Carolyn:So, you know, it takes building up systems, including good information systems to monitor and track how well we're doing and course correct. And that's something kind of basic that's been missing from federal policy as well.

There's one report that says there's 655,000 non-market homes. Another report two years later says that there's 980,000 non-market homes and those weren't built in two years. So, you know, what is our current housing stock? How are our policies working to create certain kinds of housing, housing for people with disabilities or housing for seniors?

Student housing need wasn't even included in the last few censuses. So, we don't really know how many students need housing at what cost and where. These are all examples of things that would be in a real national housing strategy.

Nate:That seems to me like the basics, right? Like you measure why I want to start the

conversation with a needs assessment, because if you don't start with that, then you're not working in a serious direction to any end goal.

But I was also struck by your book just and you mentioned a couple of international examples and I'll say again, I want to get there, but I want to start the historical examples because part of us we live in this Overton window and we've had the federal government, not this federal government, but previous federal governments walk away from their responsibilities on housing.

As you say, the story is a story of downloading responsibilities. There's been some uploading of responsibilities back through the last two national housing strategies as far as it goes, but we could talk about whether there ought to be more of that even and I think there probably should be more fiscal firepower when I look at the international examples and what's spent in France and Germany and other countries.

But I was also struck by the historical ability to build in this country. And this is one thing that jumped out, but I'd also be curious what when you were writing this book, like what really jumped out is you as, so we're building fewer homes now than we were in the mid 1970s when the population was half what it is now. I found that absolutely shocking.

I also found it shocking if new home construction had stayed at 1970s levels, we'd have an additional 6 to 7 million homes, meaning we'd be where we should be.

Carolyn:Yeah, yeah. So what happened? And I think a couple of things happened. One is, and this happened in a couple of countries. It happened in Sweden too.

Sweden said, we'll build a million homes in a country of 8 million, which is pretty impressive. And they did. And then they had a slight surplus of homes. They had some vacancies.

And instead of going, yay, vacancies, tenants have a choice. They went, oh my God, vacancies,

what are we doing? There was also a change of government, of course. So they course corrected.

Part of it is that a good housing system includes about 4 to 8% vacancies, just because people move,there's vacancies in between people moving. You want people to have a choice. We know that vacancies help bring rents down in sort of...

Nate:And standards up, right?

Carolyn:And standards up using classic supply and demand. So we want to see some vacancies. We don't want to have a zero vacancy system. That's number one.

Number two is just this increasing belief in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And it came from both the right and the left to distrust government.

I think Robert Moses, the chief planner of New York City for decades has a lot to answer for because people started looking at this big, heavy-handed planning and said, we don't want anything of it.

And so activists in central cities said, we don't want our heritage knocked down, which I completely understand, but then created such restrictive zoning that only very rich households can live in the majority of well-located neighborhoods in Toronto, for instance.

But from the right as well, there was this belief that the market can solve all problems, including the problem of housing for low-income people. And there's never been any proof that that particular contention is true. Whereas there's plenty of evidence that the needs of low-cost, low-income people can only be met through a kind of social perspective.

Just like if you said, hey, you have to pay the real costs of healthcare. Well, 20% of you won't be able to, and that's too bad for you. Or everyone needs to pay the real cost of primary education. Well, sorry, many of you will have to remain illiterate.

So housing is a basic need, a basic social determinant of health, just as education and healthcare is. And although housing is unlike healthcare and education in that the majority of it is provided by the private sector, just like food, there does need to be some consideration for the fact that everybody needs housing, just like they need healthcare and education and food.

Nate:There's a lot there. And really, I think I was on the road a lot last year for an ultimately unsuccessful bid on the provincial leadership side. But I talked about housing a lot because it was, I think it's got to be the overriding focus for all levels of government, but especially provincial governments as it relates to zoning reform.

And the line I would use, and I believe in this, I think this is how to articulate it at a high level that governments need to get out of the way on the market side so homes can be built and governments have to get back in the game in a serious way on getting social housing built and public housing built. And at a high level, those are the two objectives.

Now, let's start with, there's a lot in what you said on both fronts, but let's start with market housing.

You've got a tragic situation where you've got a doubling of home prices, but wages have only increased by 7% over the last five, six years. You've set out a target on this front in your own analysis to say we need 2 million homes with affordable monthly rents.

So that's our goal. And to get there, part of this is ending exclusionary zoning. And then every level of government has role to play.

The federal government has the Housing Accelerator Fund, which is one of the programs I quite like, although I know it's subject to maybe getting cut under the next government.

Carolyn:I do too. I just wish that there was the same kind of conditional funding with provinces. I mean, it seems like the federal government has gone, yeah, let's bully some municipalities and I have no problem with that, or let's provide targets to municipalities.

Nate:I'm okay with the firm sort of like carrots and sticks. And in this case, yeah, it's a combination of the two.

Carolyn:It is.

Nate:And we should be firm with municipalities that don't do their jobs on any restrictive zoning. But when a province can end it with the stroke of a pen across the board, surely we should be even more forceful with provincial governments.

Carolyn:Well, let me give the example of supportive housing. So the federal government announced

the Rapid Housing Initiative, which in many ways has been the most successful national housing strategy program, although it came along as a COVID era additional.

Nate:It's the only program I really like talking about, other than the half, the Housing Accelerator Fund, because I can see real results. I can see Toronto, for example, working to change their zoning rules and other municipalities across the province and country, frankly.

The Rapid Housing is the only other piece. And there was a housing accelerator or a housing innovation fund, affordable housing innovation fund that was sort of a precursor to it. That's the only program I really point to to show like that's results oriented. There are real outcomes I can point to of homes that have been built where there are people that have moved out of the shelter system that are living in these homes. And, you know, people can debate it, but I see it as a broad success.

Carolyn:I'm in furious agreement. It met and exceeded targets. The only problem was that in many cases it was supportive housing or housing with supports. And those supports can't be provided by the federal government.

Nate:I know.

Carolyn:It's worth of the provincial responsibility. And I think there was a little bit of wishful thinking that the provinces would come along, but in many cases, and Ontario is one of them, they just didn't come along.

So what would it be like if the federal government said, okay, as part of our health transfer dollars, we're going to transfer money directly into the health and social support services that we know are necessary in order to keep people with mental and physical health needs housed and we'll just claw it out of the health transfer payment.

I think that would be fair. It's still going to the people who need it the most through municipalities, but it would have the impact of showing that these targets are serious and also hopefully pointing provinces towards genuine plans to end homelessness. And the province has so many levers that could help prevent and end homelessness.

It has landlord-tenant relations and eviction protection. It has health and social services, which are an essential part of housing for people with disabilities, older people, et cetera. So the province can't wash its hands of the kind of housing policy that the federal government and municipalities are talking about.

They are the laggard in terms of the three levels of government, as far as I'm concerned.

Nate:Do you think, so I have an example locally of 60 units built modular housing. It was through the Affordable Housing Innovation Fund, that's how I even know it exists, but the precursor to sort of rapid housing.

And I think of it as a success. It was some local opposition. It was challenging to get through some of those conversations. There's probably a bit more legwork that could have been done to make sure that it's all single units and it could have been probably, there are demographics to serve that drive this and I do understand that, but I do think in some of these cases, some of the literature I've read suggests that having some mix of single and family units can be helpful in the longer term.

I've read some stuff from John Sewell and others. So I don't know, maybe some of that could have been part of the mix in a way to respond to local concerns, but overall it's been a success.

And yet the city puts up the parking lot, the feds bring in the capital dollars, it gets built and the missing partner of the table on the wraparound ongoing supports is the province of Ontario.

So we fill this locally with a particular project, but it happens everywhere. And you're right. I do think we need to be more forceful on the provincial side. So then what does that look to you?

You did in your book suggest a couple of different things. You have a different idea that you propose there, but one piece is around requiring infrastructure dollars. So you have more, you're pushing provinces to add more density in transit oriented areas and you tie federal infrastructure dollars.

The half is obviously an example of using some federal dollars to try and change dynamics. We've got now a version of this where there's billions of dollars in loans available to provinces that opt into sort of the BC model, BC bills and doing things in a better way.

If you're advising the housing minister on this front, how much more forceful can we be at the federal level around addressing NIMBYism, do you think?

Caroyln:Well, I think the big cure to NIMBYism is a lot more front-end work when it comes to community planning.

There's some really good work that's been done by a group called Renovate the Public Hearing, NBC. It's a black-clad group out of Simon Fraser and they use citizen juries, for instance, which are randomly chosen individuals in a community. Actually, Mark was part of one many years ago in Toronto out by Jennifer Keesmaat and they make kind of high-level decisions around planning.

Usually people, just everyday people off the street, given all the facts and all the evidence, will make pretty good decisions. But I don't think that residents should be asked to make decisions about every single development. I think there needs to be a lot more enabling environment quite radically, I suppose.

I think that four stories as of right with unlimited units would allow a whole new generation of small apartment buildings.

Nate:That seems the minimum, by the way, so this is something that, you know, the half pushes and other changes have been proposed by other municipal leaders are on four stories as of right. Sorry, four units.

Carolyn:It's not four units, it's four stories.

Nate:Okay, so four stories would be more radical, but it's certainly less radical though than, the example I love from your book was Japan, which has incredibly permissive zoning rules that is rightly focused their zoning permissions on nuisances and real nuisances that affect quality of life, and not just they keep certain people out of this community and keep my property values up.

Carolyn:And that's about mix as well. That's about having small grocery stores next to homes, next to trial care centers, next to high schools or whatever.

So I think a lot of the land use zoning is infamously two-dimensional. Like it says, this is what the land use will bein this particular area. And that's really problematic in terms of the kind of walkable communities that many of us are talking about as well as transit-oriented communities.

Of course,the minimum heights would need to be greater near transit stations and even bus stops, I'd argue, but certainly that sort of baseline that would allow, they'd allow multiplexes, they'd allow people to build granny flats and give the main house to one of their kids or two of their kids if the kids subdivided or whatever.

I think that that's sort of the retail change that needs to happen. There's sort of the wholesale change, which are big new developments on government land or near transit stations, et cetera.

But the sort of retail change is really important. A lot of neighborhoods in Toronto, and I know you live in Toronto, have lower densities than they did 30 years ago. They have smaller households, more single-person households, et cetera. So the built form needs to, you know, we need to have a lot more flexible housing to make a long story short.

And even if in the best case scenario, non-market housing was 20% of all housing, 80% would still be provided by the private sector. It's really hard for homeowners to say, hey, I'm going to subdivide into three units.

The municipal government makes it difficult through approvals and development taxes. Finance providers say, what's your experience as a developer? You know, so I think we need a far more enabling environment to make the kind of changes we need.

Nate:Well, my last comment I would say on the market side is, and density, and in general, and encouraging density. It does strike me, one other tool that the feds could potentially use is when we, one thing is, you know, okay, tying infrastructure dollars to density around transit. That seems like no brainer stuff.

But there's also when the mayor of Norfolk County comes to me and says, we need real investments in wastewater. Well, great. Federal investments on the infrastructure side tied to some action on density. And I think different municipalities will have different needs.

And similarly, some municipalities may balk to go, well, if we add so much density, well, how do we manage the healthcare capacity in these areas, the school capacity in these areas, the childcare capacity in these areas.

And so there are infrastructure related needs to adding density and the feds and the province are in a much better position to write those large checks to make that happen.

Anyway, so I think there's, you know, maybe housing accelerator fund, but just pushed to, you know, the next level even. So it's not just dollars related housing, but it's dollars related infrastructure more broadly.

Okay, but on the, you mentioned non-market and I do want to spend a good amount of time on that, because I actually think that is the missing piece. We can talk about market housing forever, but you rightly know in your book that, you know, market housing is not going to get us out of the crisis that we're in, especially for so many people who can never imagine owning a home right now, given where home prices are at and how much they've run away from wages.

And I want you to talk a little bit about, for those who maybe don't get through, who don't get to your book, the examples, you mentioned France, you mentioned, there's a range of different examples in your book though, focus on non-market housing. We used to do this in Canada in a more serious way.

What are some of the things we should be doing that other countries do in this space? What would be your top three, four or five hit lists of, you know, France does this and Denmark does this, and if Canada really wanted to re-energize, writing big checks is one of it, but if Canada really wanted to re-energize the space, what's your hit list?

Carolyn:

Well, one of them is something I'm working on today, actually, in response to a request from the federal government, which is, what's the capacity of developers across Canada to create large-scale developments on government land? So, there are some really exciting large-scale developments.

In Vancouver alone, there's SINOC, which is a Squamish-led development that's going to produce 6,000 apartments, very well located next to Burrard Bridge, as well as Jericho Lands, which again is Canada Lands Company plus three First Nations. Those are the kinds of large-scale development that can really show a way forward.

And if you look at St. Lawrence neighborhood, people used to come from all over the world to look at St. Lawrence neighborhood. What an amazing development that was, 50 years old now, and 4,000 homes, a third each, public housing, cooperative housing, condos, again the rule of thirds.

It was considered such a radical idea to have schools at the bottom and grocery stores at the bottom and a church and a pub and a restaurant and everything at the bottom, but it really works knit along that linear park. It's still a really lovely neighborhood, and it was a game-changer.

At that time, talking about families living in eight-story buildings was considered, you know, crazy radical stuff, but it worked. So, we need about 100 more St. Lawrence neighborhoods, and then we need a lot of small-scale enablers such as, as I say, four-story buildings that I was recently on the housing industry task force, and there's so many innovative prefabricated housing producers, and they said all we need is a certain level of guaranteed demand.

We'll build the factories, we'll hire the people, and of course you get a much more diverse labor force working for factories than you might in construction industries.

The construction industry right now is an aging population with a high level of retirements expected, so we need prefab housing.

Prefab housing can be awesome. What would it be like if the federal government did a guaranteed order of, I don't know, 200,000 homes a year, most ambitiously. Okay, let's call it 50,000, be a little bit less ambitious.

We know already that modular student housing works in Quebec. UTILE builds affordable student homes really cheaply using modular. We know that the Rapid Housing Initiative was on the back of a kind of four-story special with the ground floor being community services and the social workers, and three stories of housing above it.

So, we have those kinds of models that will work nationally, and if you did that sort of a pre-order, you could really build up Canada's prefab industry in a really exciting way. It's really important for the north where construction seasons are slow.

You know, it ticks so many boxes.

Nate:Yeah, it really does. I like that idea a lot.

Well, and one thing that struck me, I mentioned Denmark. One thing that struck me was, but before we get to Denmark, actually the stat from France struck me, and people should know, so France produces 110,000 non-market homes a year, more in one year than the total number of non-market homes created in Canada over the last 24 years.

Like, that blew my brain. Like, I just like, what are we even doing here? If France is doing that and we're doing this, like, whoa, what are we even doing here?

Carolyn:It's really important to emphasize how beautiful many of those homes are. I mean, I don't know whether you've been to Paris recently, but I was in Paris.

Nate:Not recently, no. Paris. I got kids. It's hard to travel these days.

Carolyn:Oh, but you know, you can just offer them a chocolate croissant.

Anyhow, so Cazane de Relay, which is on a former military barracks, and it is, it's got student housing, it's got family housing, but it's knitted around in the former, like, Chondemar, the former military parade ground, this beautiful park that has cafes in it.

And it's in a very ritzy part of Paris near a subway line, and people love it, because it's an adaptive reuse of space with a beautiful park in the middle of it. Again, you can make beautiful, socially inclined, environmentally sound architecture, and it's nothing to be ashamed of.

Nate:Yeah, of course, yeah.

Carolyn:For a long time, I mean, people think of the original version of Regent Park, and they think about these very dire projects.

But, you know, think about St. Lawrence neighborhood. Think about in Ottawa, Beaver Barracks, which again, has this beautiful set of community gardens in the middle of it, and district heating, and all kinds of cool stuff. We can make beautiful things.

Nate:I mentioned France just because it's such a frustrating comparison that they are building so much more. But Denmark, I found an interesting example because it's a practical sort of solution-oriented example.

It's not just, this, France is doing way more than Canada, sorry, Canada. But Denmark's National Building Fund provides 45-year mortgages, 30 years to pay off the building costs, and then 15 years to fund the next new project.

Other countries have just, if you compare CMHC financing for non-market versus what these other countries are doing, I mean, other countries are just way lower cost and longer-term financing. And that seems like, I don't know, it seems like low-hanging fruit to me. I don't know how much pushback there is from CMHC, but if we can't do that, then we're not going to solve this problem at all.

Carolyn:Well, that's the secret sauce. That was the secret sauce in the 1970s and 1980s when up to 20% of new homes were non-market. It was 40-year mortgages at 2% at the time, when crime was 6%.

So it is a challenge, or let's put it this way, it's not CMHC as much as it is the finance ministers who tend not to love that.

But you can get to the point, it's not just Denmark, it's Austria and France as well, where you have a revolving loan fund and it refreshes itself.

And that goes back to our earlier conversation of the need for thinking long-term. Infrastructure financing is always long-term and the payback from infrastructure financing is always long-term.

Nate:I want to get to a conversation, sort of conclude with addressing homelessness, but before we get there, just on the protecting renters. We've promised a bill of rights for tenants and that's obviously in some ways tough because the federal jurisdiction is going to require, again, sort of a carrot-stick approach, although interesting again to note the historical example of national rent control, I think it was in the 1940s, but regardless.

Carolyn:1940s and 1941 and 1975.

Okay, so even more recent than that. You know Pierre, said in 1975, thou shalt have rent control and all the provinces said, okay.

Nate:Interesting. And even where we have some rent control, obviously Ontario is a classic example where you've got rent control while the unit is lived in and then there's such a massive disincentive to keep the unit up or to respond to tenant concerns because, oh, if the tenant leaves, shrug my shoulders, I actually make more money because I can now, the rent control disappears.

Carolyn:It's a huge incentive for evictions and it was brought in, that exemption vacancy control was brought in by conservative government.

Nate:Does not surprise me on that front. So on the protecting renters front, there's a window here at least with the tenants bill of rights, although maybe a short life left in this parliament, but there is a window there.

I think there's probably a window to collaborate with the NDP on something like that or the Bloc on something like that to really get something done. So there's at least some space to maybe fulfill on the implementation side.

Beyond that space or maybe even in that space, what would you want to see in Canada on renter protections?

Carolyn:I'm doing some work right now with an investor group called SHARE, S-H-A-R-E, that is on ESG guidelines for investors in housing. And I think it's really important, we now have environmental guidelines for investment in housing, but we don't yet have social guidelines on investment.

And I sometimes think that soft-suasion is as important as we've been talking about the bully function of federal government. I think it is really that I've seen ESG guidelines have a huge impact on investors.

I think that unions, to give one specific example, are uncomfortable with the fact that several of their pension funds invest in and actually have entirely owned REITs who evict current and former union members. I think that's an uncomfortable place to be.

So I think that investor guidelines are really important and they would be a world first if they were developed in Canada. So that's kind of exciting.

What else is needed in terms of tenant rights? Look, countries in Europe, including countries that are majority renter and richer than Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, they tend to have longer leases and tend to have far harder roads towards eviction.

So it's partly, absolutely rent, some level of rent negotiation. What Denmark does, one of the things I love about Denmark, is it has, it funds tenant unions and the tenant unions negotiate sort of the landlord.

Nate:Better bargaining power.

Carolyn:It's a bargaining situation and there is an emphasis on fair cost-based rent increases each year, which seems like a fair and transparent process, but also longer leases is part of the trick. I think that you want to create a situation where you can live for a long time as a renter, invest in other forms of requirement savings other than homes.

But right now, definitely being a renter is a second class situation and that leads a lot of people to get into really, really scary debt in order to become homeowners. And that's not necessarily a good situation as well, or living very far away from your work or having to move away from where your family is.

Nate:Well, it speaks to, and maybe we should have started here instead of finishing here, but it speaks to what are the twin goals in some ways, like what is a home and to deliver for someone that sense of home and shelter and safety.

You have a rundown of different things that have to be considered here. But I think what I would want from a policy lens is at a minimum, you want sure there's some semblance of affordability, and you want to make sure that there's security of tenure, that you want to make sure that people, whether they're a tenant, tenants shouldn't be at such a disadvantage here that they don't have security of tenure, that there isn't that stability in their lives and they can't invest in their property in the same way.

They can't know that they're going to be near this school and near this workplace, as you say. That is such an essential part of a home that goes, I think, under discussed in our politics in a really big way.

I also, just to finish with on a rent supplement side, you don't have to comment on it because I don't want to get to homelessness in the sort of three minutes you got left, but this stuck out to me too.

So France, Germany, and Denmark all spend 0.7% of their GDP on just rent supplements. Canada spends less on all housing related expenditures combined. Anyway, your book broke my brain in a number of different ways.

Okay, so to finish with homelessness and addressing homelessness, because you've talked about rapid housing, you've talked about industrial, if the government of Canada committed to 50,000 modular units a year or something like that, we know where we could direct them at a minimum, which is to replace encampments with homes.

And we now have Premier in Ontario, at least, who's talking about, he hasn't done it yet, but talking about, you know, send me a letter of mayors calling for the use of the notwithstanding clause as if you should replace encampments using the notwithstanding clause instead of just building homes.

It's like in support of housing. And so on the homelessness front, this is a problem that needs to be resolved in a compassionate, evidence-based way. And that is the hope. And I hope it doesn't get, it's being weaponized in our politics in a big way. And I hope we can push back against that.

And so to do that, but to do that successfully, are we looking at just a broad expansion of the rapid housing program, committing to that industrial building, the modular units, and then hopefully really aggressively pushing the provinces, as you say, on the supportive housing front, knowing that, you know, a housing first approach is the answer?

Carolyn:That would help a lot. I mean, Canada, under the Harper government, funded the largest international experiment in housing first, which is simply providing homeless people with a permanent home with the supports that they need. And it worked.

You know, it was 3000 people. The rates of people losing their homes was very low. The rates of people staying home and having better health and economic outcomes was huge.

But you can't have housing first without having the housing comma first. That's what the films say. So that's what we need. We need a whole new generation of low-cost housing and many cases with supports that people need because such a high number of people who are homeless have various forms of disability.

And if they don't have severe physical and mental health issues before they become homeless, they sure get them very quickly once they become homeless. So what we need to do, it's so self-evident when it comes to housing, when it comes to homelessness.

And it doesn't just make moral sense. It makes economic sense.

Nate:That's the part that bothers me, by the way. It's so frustrating in our politics.

I speak to people like the, you know, small business owners who go, this is affecting my ability to earn an income. People are not coming to downtown London in Ontario as much as they were before because we have a homelessness challenge.

You've got parks that parents go, that park is supposed to be so my kid can play in that green space, not for an encampment. And you kind of pull your hair out and go, why can't we just build supportive homes?

Carolyn:Hospital emergency rooms aren't made to, you know, it's not of efficient use of hospital emergency rooms to get 200 visits a year.

Nate:Exactly.

Carolyn:You know, so it makes so much sense. I don't understand why at some basic level, why every province doesn't have a plan to end homelessness. It's a shame and it's also dumb.

I mean, it's dumb on so many levels. So yeah, I mean, you know, I agree with you. I was reading Jane Philpott’s book on Health For All, and I was going, yeah, the answers are pretty darn simple when it comes to health. Why don't we just do it?

You know, and to me, the answers are pretty simple when it comes to housing. Why don't we just do it? You know, so I guess this book's Home Truths is intended to say to people, I know it looks really complex and it is, but the answers aren't that hard to figure out. It's not rocket science.

Nate:Yeah. My takeaway was very much that, and this is the last data point that I throw at listeners from your book, but this one really stuck out. You talk about housing first approach in Finland and how the Finnish consider it.

Over a period from 1985 to 2016, they went from over 2,100 shelter beds to 52. And then how do they do that?

Well, they're cutting emergency shelter beds.

How? Because they're increasing supportive housing from 127 to over 1,300. And they're replacing what is a reactive emergency response, which is a more expensive response, frankly.

They're replacing that with a long-term housing first approach through supportive housing and non-market housing. And again, it seems obvious.

The challenge, of course, is we should have started doing this a decade ago, two decades ago yesterday. And I'm not dismissive of the rapid housing program. I'm not dismissive of the housing accelerator fund. I'm not dismissive of the loans and the grants that are going towards and the new co-op fund. I don't want to be dismissive of all that. We're going in the right direction.

It does seem, though, that the scale of the direction we're heading in the right direction, the scale is just not where it needs to be to get us to where we need to get in 30 years.

Carolyn:Yep. We've done some really good pilot programs, and now it's time to scale it up and have some real targets. And it's been a pleasure talking policy wonk stuff with you, Nate.

Nate:Well, that's what this is for. And I do appreciate the book. I'm glad Mark suggested that you'd be a guest because it prompted me to read your book. And I'm a much better advocate on housing for having done so.

Carolyn:Well, thank you, Mark.

Nate:I say that regularly on the housing file. Anyway, thanks, Carolyn, for your time.

Carolyn:Thank you, Nate. Take care. Bye-bye.

Nate:Thanks for joining me on this episode of Uncommons. I hope you found, yes, it was a

deeper dive in policy, but I hope you found some of those stats interesting. They were eye-popping to me, frankly.

I do think we have a certain Overton window in our politics sometimes, including on housing, and understanding historical examples, understanding what happens in other countries can be incredibly informative in helping to shift that window and delivering greater ambition, especially on such an important file.

With that, if you have suggestions for guests or future topics, you can reach me at info at beynate.ca. You can reach me online, of course, on an increasingly variety of platforms. I'm on Bluesky now, but you can reach me at beynate on all those channels. And otherwise, otherwise, until next time.

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