"Wait Until 2060": Canada's Housing Plan for Young People

Canada's Federal Housing Advocate says it could take until 2060 for all Canadians to have access to an affordable home. Is that just a realistic target? And is it reasonable to ask an entire generation to give up on their homeownership dreams for the next 3.5 decades?

This week on DemograFix, Mike and Cara dive into the idea of “housing triage”: should governments focus on ending homelessness first, then tackle affordable housing for low-income Canadians, and only later address the middle-class housing crisis? Or is that a false choice?

They discuss:
-Why some advocates think housing should be solved in stages.
-Whether building more market-rate homes actually helps reduce homelessness.
-What a 2060 affordability target means for young Canadians trying to build a life.
-The politics of falling home prices—and why governments avoid the conversation.
-Whether Canada can solve the housing crisis without asking a generation to wait decades for a home.

Can we afford to prioritize one housing crisis over another? Or does solving the housing shortage mean tackling them all at once?

#Housing #CanadaHousing #HousingCrisis #RealEstate #AffordableHousing #Homeownership #CanadianPolitics #HousingPolicy #MissingMiddlePodcast

Chapters:

00:00 Housing Triage: Who Should Be Helped First?

00:01 What Is the Federal Housing Advocate?

00:03 Why the Report Says Housing Won't Be Affordable Until 2060

00:05 Should Young Canadians Accept a Lifetime of Unaffordability?

00:07 The Flaw in Treating Housing Like a Zero-Sum Game

00:09 Why Building More Homes Helps Reduce Homelessness

00:11 Can Canada Solve the Housing Crisis Within a Decade?

00:13 Why Governments Keep Missing Housing Targets

00:14 The Politics of Lower Home Prices

00:17 What Happens If Young Canadians Give Up on Canada?

Hosted by Mike Moffatt & Cara Stern & Sabrina Maddeaux

Produced by Meredith Martin

Funded by the Neptis Foundation https://neptis.org/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

When someone is critically injured, doctors should see them first in the ER before seeing the guy who just came in with a broken arm, right? Well, can the same be said about housing? Demographics hosted by Mike Moffat and Kara Stern. There's some tension between housing advocates who see the crisis as a situation that requires triage and others who think we can attack all sides at once. Homelessness, social housing, and middle class market rate housing.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Specifically, when governments are spending billions of tax dollars to work on solving the housing crisis, where is that money best spent? That's what we were thinking about reading a recent report from the Office of the Federal Housing Advocate.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

Here's what they recommended. One, end homelessness by 2040. And they describe that as functional zero homelessness. Two, end housing need among very low and low-income renters by 2050. And three, ensure that all Canadians have access to an adequate home they can afford by 2060. Mike, I know you're itching to talk about those targets, but let's start with this. What is the federal housing advocate and what are the goals?

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Yeah, so the role of the federal housing advocate is set out in the federal government's National Housing Strategy Act. And this was a landmark housing policy that was set out in Justin Trudeau's first term of prime minister. And you read through the act, and section 13 of that act lays out all of the responsibilities of the advocate. It basically creates the position. And they have this pretty broad mandate to provide advice, conduct research, you know, that kind of thing. The advocate is housed at the office of the federal housing advocate and is paid for by the federal government. The position or the person who holds a position is chosen by the housing minister. And they say serve a three-year term, which can be renewed once. And since I'm sure we'll get comments on this and feel free to leave some in the comments section, I've never applied to be the federal housing advocate. I have no interest in being the federal housing advocate. And, you know, I think the housing advocate is doing a good job giving her mandate. So anything I say here is not sour grapes or me auditioning for a position. I think she's doing a fine job.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

But we know you do the job well. We're just happy you're staying here. Do governments tend to follow their advice?

SPEAKER_00 2:18

Yeah, I would say they have in the design of federal housing programs. And I think there's a fair bit of value in the research that's produced or commissioned by the office. So I think the advocate's getting results, but if they're not, then you know, I say we abolish the position. Like literally, the advocate has one job, which is to provide advice, to advocate. And the position comes with a federal government salary in the range of $150,000 to $180,000. So it is really important that they provide value for money.

SPEAKER_01 2:47

So 2060 is a target for solving the housing crisis for people who end up with market rate housing. And that, of course, is the majority of people. So I get this is a big goal. The report suggests basically doubling our supply of homes to reach affordability. And I understand that will take time because, like, even if you like airdropped homes into unused land or underused lands, like it's still going to take time to put in the infrastructure needed to support those homes, plus the time it takes to train the laborers we need, get all the materials we need to double our housing supply. So even though I hear 2060 and my I go, what? No, that's horrible. But at the same time, I'm like, I do understand where they got this number from.

SPEAKER_00 3:24

Well, they don't really explain that 2060 number, but I, you know, we can certainly say that yes, it will take a while. And I would say, in fairness to the report, that doubling of housing start goal doesn't come for the report itself, but it actually comes from the Liberal Party platform during the last election via the CMHC or their interpretation of a CMHC report. But you know, with recent reductions to immigration and non-permanent resident programs, doubling housing starts by 2035 might not even be necessary anymore. But you know, we do have to make sure that we build uh not just enough housing, but the right type of housing. And that's going to be a challenge. And governments can always reduce demand further by pairing back immigration or non-permanent resident programs if they need to. So there's no reason why we have to stick to this trajectory, this doubling of housing starts in order to, you know, meet middle class housing need. So I would question some of the underlying assumptions that went into this 2060 estimate. Again, with the caveat that those assumptions aren't coming from the federal housing advocates' office uh themselves.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

I totally get it. If you are trying to double housing supply in this country, I can't imagine what a big project that would be. But obviously, there's a big problem if you're telling people they have to wait three and a half decades to get affordable housing. Like that's basically an entire person's career. I was thinking about that number, and I'm like, that's past the point that people in high school will even be able to have kids. So if they're waiting for a home before starting a family, like just give up now, unless you can't access capital from family because it's so far away. I do understand though that this report prioritized market rate homeowners last. Like they were trying to solve the problems progressively. So it followed this idea of the triage system for housing where you solve the homelessness problem first, then you help low-income families, and finally everyone else who really should be able to afford market rate homes that maybe need less government intervention or less government dollars going towards that.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Yeah, and I I could certainly understand the logic. So though I think the idea of telling somebody in grade nine that they won't be able to afford a home until they're 50, which is what the math is here, is really problematic and really troubling. But that aside, I also find the length that some folks will take this triage argument to be is absolutely absurd. You know, in my mind, it's like asking, okay, what's more important, healthcare or education, and saying, let's say we pick healthcare and say, okay, until the healthcare system is fixed, we're going to abolish higher education, we're going to get rid of the schools, we're going to take all the money that we put into the education system, put it into healthcare. And then once we all agree that healthcare is fixed, maybe we can start to open the schools again. And then even if we do that, let's say we pick healthcare, we go, okay, well, what's the most important healthcare issue? And you know, we could look at mortality rates or whatever, and go, okay, cancer. Okay, then let's put 100% of our research and healthcare dollars into cancer and let's drop everything else, only train doctors to be cancer specialists, only do research on cancer, so you know, celiac disease, diabetes, whatever else. You're not getting a dollar until we cure cancer. And then we ask ourselves, okay, but which cancer? Well, given that lung cancer kills more Canadians than any others, let's put all of our research dollars into that. So pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, testicular cancer, you know, nothing for you. Let's shut it all down and let's definitely shut down any health research funding for something that isn't fatal. You know, it's just a ridiculous position. Now, I absolutely agree that we absolutely need to make sure that we get value for money. But what matters is where marginal dollars go and how effective those dollars are, not this absurd development of hyperprioritization where we put all our eggs in one basket because we deem that basket to be the most important one.

SPEAKER_01 7:16

Well, to be fair, all of those cancers can kill you. Whereas there's obviously a huge difference in how dire the situation is between someone who's homeless and living on the streets and someone who's stuck in a rental when they prefer home ownership.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

Yeah. Well, I would say again, there's a couple of things to keep in mind. The first, if more ownership housing gets built, that frees up rental units, that creates vacancy chains, that makes housing more affordable, which reduces homelessness. So they're not unrelated problems. They're they don't come at the expense of each other. That solving middle class housing crisis helps with the homelessness issue. But, you know, let's go back to the triage idea. There's also a big difference between someone who is homeless and someone who is struggling to pay their tuition. We cancel all supports for higher education until we solve homelessness. You know, I hear this from you know the same politicians say, okay, we've got we've got to put our money into homelessness, and then, you know, they're spending our money on soccer tournaments and you know, renaming Dundas Square and what have you. If you're going to use that argument, you know, be consistent about it. But but nobody ever is. Because there's this implicit assumption that they're making here that the opportunity cost is between one housing program and another housing program. So if you put money into, say, reducing development charges, that has to come at the expense of anti-homelessness programs. But that's not how government spending works. Governments do shift the proportion they spend in one area relative to another all the time. So if we cancel a housing program and say, okay, you know what, we uh we don't want to reduce development charges, we're not gonna put more dollars into that. That money doesn't suddenly magically go into anti-homelessness programs. My bet is it would be far more likely to go into something like old age security than social housing.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

These housing crises are intertwined, though. So it's not like if you're trying to solve low-income housing problems, that would obviously have an impact on market rate housing because there's so much overlap in the way that you would attack these problems. And of course, the problem is when you're trying to solve one and you that comes at the expense of another, like when city councils implement so-called inclusionary zoning where they push the cost of social housing on buyers of market rate homes, then you kind of get zero sum there. But ideally, a lot of the solutions overlap. Like there's zoning issues, building hood issues, and you if you fix that early, it'll help across the board.

SPEAKER_00 9:39

Yeah, absolutely. And that's I think the frustrating thing about this kind of triage argument is that like 90% of the solutions are the same, right? There's no social housing building code, there's no social housing zoning, there's no social housing sewers and social housing electricians and and so on. That if you kind of fix one part of the housing system, it it applies everywhere. And you know, ultimately, we need to build more homes. That, you know, in any system with scarcity, money is always going to win. Always. So if there aren't enough homes to go around, families with money are always going to outbid families without money. And you're gonna have homelessness regardless of how many social programs you have, because money always outbids not having money.

SPEAKER_01 10:22

That's fair. And I do think a big part of the expanded problems with homelessness that we've seen, they kind of grew in tandem with home prices as they've gotten out of reach. But for low income and social housing units, couldn't the government just earmark them for people with the lowest income so that we it doesn't have people with more money outbidding them?

SPEAKER_00 10:41

Well, you still have mass homelessness because you're still gonna have somebody at the wrong side of that the cutoff for deeply affordable housing. You know, if you have a hundred families who need these types of homes and only five spots, you can allocate those five spots however you want. You can give them to the poorest or the tallest, or you could hold a draft lottery like the NHL. At the end of the day, you're still gonna have five families who win and 95 who lose. And you know, the the mechanism doesn't change that. So overall, we need to build enough homes. Otherwise, money is always going to bid out money. And you're right that maybe they're not outbidding the exceptionally poor, they're just outbidding the very poor instead. The outcome is still largely the same.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

Honestly, though, though, even though I get upset when I think about 2060 being the government's goal, if they did take that on as their goal, there's part of me that thinks like maybe that's realistic. And Canadians who don't have access to generational wealth should accept that and plan their lives accordingly instead of like holding up hope that the government will fix it for them soon enough that it makes sense for them to dedicate their lives to living in Canada.

SPEAKER_00 11:46

I don't think 2060 is more realistic at all. That in fact, I think if we don't solve it anytime soon, we just we just won't. We'll never get around to it. But I would absolutely agree with I think that your premise that I would you know advise young people to consider their options. You know, I would not tell somebody in grade nine, go, oh no, they're gonna they're gonna they're gonna fix this and they'll do it soon. So you don't need to worry about that. You know, I think that's that's unrealistic. And I do have a lot of time for the idea that we need to be realistic in our targets. I definitely support having targets. And I agree, like we've already blown through so many of our housing targets, climate targets, what have you. So I'm with the housing advocate, you know, on the need to have targets and that those targets should be realistic, you know, full agreement there. But you know, then it becomes a question of okay, what is realistic? And I think it we can absolutely solve this but before 2060. You know, we've already seen the federal government massively reduce the demand for housing through changes to immigration programs and non-permanent resident programs, such as international students, but we still need to increase home building. You know, there's so much pent-up demand in the system, there's so many folks in their 20s, early 30s, you know, still living in mom dad's basement, living on the couch. We need more homes, and particularly we need more family-sized homes. And that is going to require governments to make a series of tough decisions. How we fund infrastructure, you know, our land use decisions, and so on. We need to make it much cheaper and easier to build the kinds of homes that the families want and need. So, you know, I don't want to discount how challenging this will be, but I do think it's absolutely doable to fix this in roughly a decade or so.

SPEAKER_01 13:25

I love your optimism for a decade. Like that seems like a very lofty goal. And I hope you're right. But honestly, I've heard governments announce program after program promising to solve housing. And I think, well, the big one that comes to mind for me is five years ago when Doug Ford was promising 1.5 million homes by 2031. So we're now halfway there from when they set that goal and we're nowhere near that target. And I think we're actually worse off than we were at the time. And I remember when it home building started slow and the housing minister at the time said something like, Don't worry, we're we're building up our capacity and eventually it'll pick up. You know, the second half of the decade, we're gonna be building like wild, and it we're gonna make that target. And that never happened. And now it seems like the Ontario government is just ignoring that target instead of admitting failure. So I don't have a lot of hope. I get a little bit frustrated when I think about these goals that have just like I've never seen them hit any of their goals on housing since I started covering this. It doesn't seem like any of them have made it. But even if it is possible to build enough homes to solve the middle class housing crisis before 2060, is it possible to do it without tanking home prices, which was something that I think we've seen the government is not super keen to have happen?

SPEAKER_00 14:32

Yeah, or or or even talk about. Now, I actually think that's probably where where the challenge is here. There is a political challenge more than an economic one. And be clear, like governments should not be in the business of trying to impact the price of resale homes. Particularly, they shouldn't be in the business of trying to prevent them from falling. You know, we talk a lot about well, well, housing is an investment. Okay, well, if housing is an investment, you know, investments fall, investments go down. You know, if uh anybody thinks otherwise, you're welcome to buy my shares of uh Coleco and Atari off of me. You know, this happens all the time. We gotta allow asset prices to go down. But what governments should be doing is focusing on reducing the cost of building new homes that meet the needs of families. And those new homes may look different than homes did 30 or 50 years ago. You know, you might have more multiplexes, fewer single detach, that kind of thing. So, you know, I don't think it's as simple as just saying, okay, you know, let's just do build homes that look exactly like they did in the 1980s and let's just, you know, build three, four X times them. Like, I think this looks different. And if we do build more homes, that's absolutely going to impact the uh value of existing homes, but it's gonna do so in complex ways. It's not as simple as saying, okay, all home prices are gonna go down 10 or 20 or 30 percent. So, for example, let's say the city of Toronto made it really easy to build family-friendly infill multiplexes. That would put a lot of downward pressure on high-rise rents and condo prices. As you can imagine, a young family, young couple who lives in one of those would sell those and you know, go move into a multiplexes. It would also probably reduce the number of families who move to a place like Brantford or Woodstock. You would reduce that kind of drive until you qualify traffic. That's going to reduce the price of homes there. But on the other hand, it could actually increase the value of single detached homes in Toronto, uh, particularly in more urban areas, because the land under them would become really valuable because you would be able to tear down a smaller home or renovate a smaller home and turn it into a four plexus, a sixplex, or eight plaxes. So this new versus resale relationship is complex and it's not the case that you know, if you start building more homes, the price of all other homes falls, but many of them would. And you know, that is a uh political challenge, to be sure.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

And we we should be okay with it. I love what you're saying about this uh housing should be more of an investment in that way. I'm like, well, is it sad when you first say it? I'm like, oh no, we don't want it to be more of an investment. Isn't the whole thing is we want people to treat it as a place to live. But no, I get what you're saying that like prices need to be able to come down. They need to be able to move around with the market. Like that is that is what it means to be an investment. And new supplies, like it's so important because if someone is in the middle class and they're priced out of owning a home, they're going to be forced to rent even if they don't want to, if it doesn't make sense for their family. And that means they're taking up a rental unit from someone who may need it more. And given the lack of family-sized rentals, especially, I keep thinking like then people who who are lower income and really need that won't have access to it. They're being taken up by people who really should be able to afford market rate homes and buy if they want to. That creates less turnover in the rental market. It makes the whole situation worse for everyone else.

SPEAKER_00 17:53

It really is an issue, and we absolutely need to be concerned about those experiencing homelessness or at risk of experiencing homelessness. But that said, I'm quite shocked by how cavalier some advocates are with the needs of young middle class Canadians. If Canada is seen as increasingly hostile to their needs, those folks are gonna leave, or perhaps those young middle class Canadians were are going to stay, but they're gonna want to burn the system down. So this idea as a country, we can somehow simply tell young people, yeah, we've priced you out of ever having a middle class life, but we'll fix things for your grandkids and that will all be okay. It's simply baffling to me. I just don't get where they're coming from.

SPEAKER_01 18:34

Yeah, it's really scary to think that we're gonna lose like everyone who has any other option of living anywhere else. And they will go where where they're able to start their careers, where they're able to have the life they want. So yeah, I don't think we want to make that our goal. And I don't think we want to signal to people that that's our goal because I don't know that governments would want to follow that. Like if they think about the long-term consequences of that, that is a big problem. But I get why politicians don't want to see change, because it could mean hurting the asset value of some of the most reliable voters, but it is creating big problems in our country. So I hope we get some actual targets from governments that they actually intend to follow through on so people can at least make informed decisions about where to put down their roots. Thank you so much for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin and our editor is Sean Foreman.

SPEAKER_00 19:21

If you have any thoughts or questions about defunct 1980s tech companies, please send us an email to missing middle podcast at gmail.com.

SPEAKER_01 19:28

And we'll see you next time.