Canadians know that housing in this country is in crisis mode. A recent study covering the two most expensive real estate markets in Canada — the BC Lower Mainland and Greater Toronto Hamilton Area — found that over 4 in 5 respondents were concerned about housing affordability, with over 50% naming it as a “top five” concern. Canada’s housing prices and rents continue to reach new ceilings, though some progressive advocates have pushed back against calling this disastrous moment a “crisis” – this is Canada’s housing market working as designed.
Carolyn Whitzman, housing expert at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, looks at cases where public policy, oriented towards affordability and not profitability, takes off-the-shelf examples for an alternative vision. In her latest book Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis (UBC Press, 2024), Whitzman accounts for Canada’s real success on housing affordability throughout the earlier twentieth century until the 1980s when funding and leadership pulled back and the symptoms of this crisis began to show. By demonstrating what has been done in Canada, and what can be done around the world, Whitzman finds opportunities for hope in outlining a path towards housing for all across Canada.
Moving beyond a typical “NUMTOTian” idealization of European-style 15-minute cities, Whitzman takes a wider tour of housing fixes, taking Japan and Singapore as examples of high-density success stories applicable to Canada’s major cities. She also draws illustrative examples from Latin America of “by Indigenous, for Indigenous” housing, finding corollaries in the Sen̓áḵw development in Vancouver that address housing insecurity led by Indigenous People and other marginalized communities. In the face of harsh realities, Home Truths presents these examples optimistically and realistically, originating from the plainspoken argument that, “everyone deserves a home. Full stop.”
Canadians will still find points of pride throughout Whitzman’s book — more for our history of ideas than for our follow-through. The prescient Curtis Report, developed during the Second World War, set the stage for Canada’s post-war housing economy, proposed a “rule of thirds” approach to household affordability, which, as Whitzman reminds us, applies just as well to the present moment:
- the top third could afford to purchase new homes;
- the middle third required affordable rentals, including nonprofit cooperatives;
- the lowest third required public housing, including operating subsidies.
The report also laid out the plan for the construction and proliferation of affordable “victory homes” across the country, which was highly successful in creating the supply needed to house the Baby Boom generation. However, without continued support for the lower two-thirds of affordability categories, these privatized properties built as a public initiative became consolidated by the affluent. Whitzman highlights how a Toronto home that may have sold for $6,000 or $7,000 in the late 1940s under this government programming — roughly $80,000 in today’s dollars — could be sold a second time in 1959 for $19,000. In 2021, the same unrenovated house could have sold for $2.1 million.
Home Truths admittedly reflects its author’s biases — an author who admits to being a child of Montreal’s famed and envied commitment to urbanism. But Whitzman is also not afraid to call out her fellow boomers for blatant hypocrisy when it comes to the housing crisis. “If you’re a boomer who bought your first home in your twenties or thirties between 1965 and 1985, congratulations!” She continues: “You’re sitting on huge unearned wealth that’s blocking your child or grandchild from finding an affordable home near you.” Beyond yelling at her neighbours, Whitzman also points to the more insidious emergence of Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), whose financialization of affordable housing has been well documented. She also points to the worrying trend of Canadian pension funds directly investing in REITs, so that public servants and private sector workers become intrinsically intertwined to housing profiteering from the use of homes as financial assets first, instead of an affordable place to live.
Whitzman’s plain-spoken, compassionate attitude towards housing contrasts and conflicts with the dire present moment she observes in Canada. Home Truths asks its reader to wrestle with this conflict, to get angry and informed about where Canada has gone wrong on housing, and how it can correct its course. Though Whitzman is unwilling to present innovative, untested, original solutions, and offers no silver bullets, Home Truths succeeds in pulling the best ideas from around the world. Taken together, it is a roadmap for an alternative vision for housing in Canada where everyone can afford a home. It stands as an informative and practical primer on Canada’s housing crisis: how we got here and how we might get out of it.
Read Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis by Carolyn Whitzman, now available from UBC Press.
