Rabble: Concrete steps to tackle the affordable housing crisis

Fighting for affordable housing will require investment in non-market housing.

It seems to be unsolvable. One of the most pressing issues for most Canadians is the cost of housing. Rents and house prices have skyrocketed in recent years. Few young families can afford to buy a home, while renovictions and rental costs have put many others in jeopardy. Despite what Pierre Poilievre says, this crisis is not unique to Canada. It exists across the G20 countries as speculation and commodification of housing reaches historic new levels.

There are answers to this crisis, but they require a serious commitment to two things that have been out of favour for decades – controlling landlords and building permanently affordable non-market housing.

It’s not the first time that housing costs have created a crisis. In the 1970’s similar pressures were being felt as prices outstripped incomes. In response, people mobilized and demanded action from governments at all levels. Rent controls were won.Ontario imposed a 50 per cent tax on speculator profits. A national program was created to invest in non-profit, co-operative or municipal housing. Tens of thousands of affordable units were built.

But there was a real difference between permanently affordable and public subsidies that are gobbled up by the dynamics of market speculation. In 1975 I worked as an apprentice carpenter near the Malvern “Home Ownership Made Easy” housing project in Scarborough. The houses sold for half the price of a typical suburban home, because the land was publicly owned. People could not resell the property for ten years, but after that the entire subdivision slowly became part of the regular housing market. Today those houses are just as unaffordable as any other in Toronto.

In contrast, in the same year the Labour Council Development Foundation was building its first co-operative housing projects. Five decades later, those units are still fully affordable for the families that live there, as are non-profit projects across the country. Tragically, austerity politics brought an end to those programs in the mid 1990’s, and only recently has the federal government dedicated serious funding to non-market housing.

Instead, there have been a patchwork of ineffective programs, including subsidies given to developers and private landlords for projects where there is little control on prices or rents. Few politicians have been willing to demand accountability to ensure long-term affordable units from these subsidies, while homelessness had become a painful reality in every part of this country.

The only real alternative to an out-of-control housing market is robust investment in non-market housing.

Millions of Canadians are, and always will be, renters. If we had continued the programs that were scrapped in the 1990’s, there would be hundreds of thousands more affordable units providing decent housing for people from all walks of life. They are permanently affordable because the properties cannot be flipped for profit or personal gain.

ACORN Canada is one of the most effective organizations fighting for affordable rents and decent housing. With members in communities across the country, ACORN has developed a full range of policies to address the crisis. Their demands include:

• Fund social housing to ensure that low-income people have access to affordable homes.
• Ensure that any public money given to private developers is used to create housing for people who are in core housing need.
• Create a fund so that co-ops, non-profits, land trust organizations, and tenants can acquire at-risk apartment buildings on sale.
• Stop financialized landlords from buying more affordable housing.
• Regulate banks, CMHC and public pension funds to stop financing corporate landlords who purchase with the intent to increase rents and displace people.
• Mandate rent control in all provinces to disincentivize landlords from evicting long-term tenants and help maintain the units.
• Plug the tax loophole in the Income Tax Act that gives massive tax exemptions to Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs)

Taken together, these would make a tremendous difference to so many families who are struggling to put a roof over their head. But it’s a matter of political will. As famed American abolitionist Frederick Douglass reminds us – “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will”.

It is time to challenge the logic of relying on the market to solve the housing crisis. Developers and their political allies continue to demand access to more land, including getting public land at fire sale prices. Instead the priority should be that public land is only used for permanently affordable non-market housing.

A public interest priority is essential to address the power dynamics of this crisis. There needs to be a mass movement built behind the kinds of policies that ACORN and others are putting forward, just as another generation of Canadians did in decades past. The right to affordable housing is a fundamental feature of any society that claims to care about social justice. But it won’t happen without a movement.

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Article by John Cartwright for Rabble