REGINA — How to address the host of issues surrounding the housing supply in Canada was a key focus of Carolyn Whitzman’s presentation in Regina this week.
Whitzman was keynote speaker at the fifth annual Reaching Home Homelessness Conference presented by Namerind Housing Corporation in Regina on Wednesday. She is a senior housing researcher at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities and has several publications on the whole housing issue, including the book Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis.
Her presentation included a host of facts and figures on the current situation and how Canada got there. Whitzman spoke particularly about the current gap in housing availability, particularly for those in the lower income brackets.
“I think one of the things that I talked about today is that we’re building fewer homes than we were in the early 1970s,” said Whitzman.
“But even more to the point, we were building about 14 per cent non-market housing — that’s public housing, co-op housing, community housing, supportive housing in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and now we’re only building about two or three percent of those much-needed types of homes.”
That makes for a difficult situation for those individuals in cities across Canada — even in Regina where housing and rent is lower than major cities elsewhere.
“Absolutely,” said Whitzman. “There isn’t a city in Canada, including Regina, where a single person earning minimum wage can afford a one-bedroom apartment, let alone a two-bedroom apartment if they’re a single mom. So it’s a problem across Canada, including Regina, Saskatchewan.”
Whitzman said she talked in her book and during her presentation about the failures at all three levels of government.
“But the bottom line is that we need to take a serious look at who needs what housing, where and at what cost, and start filling in the gaps, which…have to do with a lot of low-income people having very few options to start with. And then the problem is spread to moderate and middle-income people as well, where home ownership is three times as expensive as what middle-income people can afford.”
Whitzman points to a gap in what the free market has been able to provide and what the need is.
“For about three decades, when we relied solely on the market, we had two kinds of products, some increasingly large houses that were becoming increasingly less affordable for ownership, and then a lot of very small apartments, but what we need are two three-bedroom flats, duplexes, triplexes, small apartment buildings across the whole city, and especially near jobs and services.”
The lack of housing near jobs and services is identified as a particular issue.
“Yeah, that’s absolutely it, and that’s something that the federal government has taken on just over the last couple of years, and the Housing Accelerator Fund and municipalities are starting to respond — maybe not quickly enough, and maybe not comprehensively enough. But it’s also an issue of the kind of building codes that will enable apartments with big units in them, and that requires some changes to the building code to allow, for instance, small elevators to make them accessible. So the bottom line is we need to start out with not just overall supply targets, but targets that are linked to the size of households, what households can afford to pay, and then sort of work our way backwards to the kind of financing, the kind of regulations, the kind of construction that’s going to enable us to meet those targets.”
As for potential ways to address the situation she points to Namerind, hosts of the Regina event, as offering one such path.
“My visit has been hosted by Namerind, and Namerind is an Indigenous-owned organization that offers a way forward. They’re creating housing, they’re providing homelessness services, and they’re also providing social enterprises to help keep people employed.”
Whitzman is hopeful that with more talk and focus on the housing situation that solutions will get done, but says it is taking time.
“I think we’re starting to learn from (what) works slowly. I’d like it to happen a little bit more quickly. I’d like to see even more leadership from the federal government, but also from provincial governments. Federal and provincial governments have more money and power than municipal governments, and I’d like to see to start with a goal of ending homelessness within a generation — and we don’t even have that yet.”
