If cities can't solve the housing crisis, provinces and feds should step in: housing expert

The Current19:26Tackling housing as costs skyrocket

As household budgets buckle under the weight of rent and mortgage payments, housing advocate Murtaza Haider says municipalities have a responsibility to be part of the solution to the ongoing housing crisis. 

And if they don't, the real estate management professor suggests provincial and federal governments need to make them.

The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation estimates that Canada needs to build an extra 3.5 million new units by the end of the decade in order to supply affordable housing to the people who need it. 

Federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser says that some of their programs are already making a difference.  

"Policies may have some lag before they take effect, but it doesn't have to be years and years," Fraser told Matt Galloway on The Current Friday morning.  

"My sense is, we're starting to see progress already with the Housing Accelerator Fund, having cities change the way they're going to build homes. I think over the next two or three years, you're going to see progress. But it will take longer than that to restore a level of affordability that existed decades ago." 

But Haider says those programs aren't enough. Haider is a professor of real estate management at Toronto Metropolitan University and director of school's Urban Analytics Institute. He spoke to Matt Galloway about possible solutions. Here's part of their conversation.

We've seen the federal government make a number of announcements on housing.... How big of a difference will they actually make in addressing the crisis that people are facing coast to coast to coast?

Well, I think, in the short term, there will be very little difference that they'll be able to make. But ... these problems are five decades in making. So it would take some time to address these. I think the minister was right in saying that there is no silver bullet. However, those steps that they are taking now, they could have taken them five, eight years earlier and they didn't. 

So my concern is that, while I'm very appreciative of the fact that they are taking the steps in the right direction, I'm also concerned about the fact that they have taken too long to take these steps. And those steps still are not large enough leaps to make a meaningful difference. 

If you look at the challenge, it's amazing — the six million, approximately, new homes to be built between now and 2030. At the current rate of construction, we will not be anywhere near that.

What would make a meaningful difference? Is there any way to accelerate that?

I think that is something that we have to realize, that it has to be a wartime effort.

The senior tiers of government, the province and the feds, may have to take away some of the local government jurisdiction on the supply of land that would act as a barrier to growing or densify neighbourhoods.

I mean, you mentioned Mississauga, they voted down fourplexes just recently, that you can't have four units built at a place where there was one unit. And then you have other places that do not allow construction at the urban periphery. 

So you can't densify, [and] you can't build on green fields. You're in the case of impossible urbanism where neither densification nor green field development is possible. 

If you let the municipalities and others who do not see the scale of this challenge more visibly, then again, those tiers of governments like the province or the feds, they may have to step in and say: OK, new construction needs land, labour and capital. We are providing capital, we can increase the labour supply. But that still has to come from municipalities. 

So we need to make sure that all these three elements and more are provided for to double the rate of construction. 

Just to be clear, you [would want to] override municipal jurisdiction?

Under the Canadian Constitution, municipalities are creatures of provinces. So it goes back to the province. The provincial governments can legislate to account for land development and and and zoning regulations. 

You think that that's something that the provinces are going to have to consider?

I like the fact that we can be collaborative between the three tiers of government rather than taking away jurisdictions from cities or municipal governments. But someone at the city has to wake up and realize that this is as much a local challenge as it is a national challenge. 

People are leaving not Canada, but cities. When somebody says, I can't afford a home in the city, the municipality should realize that people are leaving you, not the country, and they have to do something more at the local level.

Is there anything that can be done in a more expedited way? Are there solutions that we should be thinking about, because this is going to be a long-term issue?

Yes. I mean, the thing the city of Toronto did, they are allowing unrelated individuals to be able to rent together, and facilitating renting of unused portions of homes where it [was] not prevented in the past. 

We need to get more capacity out of the existing stock in the short run. That's the only way possible to see a relief in two to three years because construction would easily take two to three years just to go through the approvals.

We need to look at the existing stock in every city and see what policies will facilitate more people occupying the same stock. And that could be a starting point for short-term relief.

Are you confident that we will take those moves that will help people in the immediate timeframe?

No, I'm not confident. I've seen this housing crisis worsen since 1972. And the minister was saying that housing was affordable 20 years ago. Housing was not affordable 20 years ago. Housing wasn't affordable in the 1960s. 

So we have seen things worsen over time, but it was never an affordable situation. And what we need to do is to realize that we didn't build as many homes as others did all around us. G7 countries and others, they've built more homes than us and we still are reluctant to admit this reality.

Produced by Julie Crysler, Kate Cornick, Paul MacInnis, and Brianna Gosse. Q&A edited for length and clarity