Our Crumbling Foundation: How We Solve Canada's Housing Crisis - Couverture souple

Craigie, Gregor

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1039009387 ISBN 13 : 9781039009387

Editeur : Random House of Canada, 2024

Synopsis

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
FINALIST FOR THE BALSILLIE PRIZE FOR PUBLIC POLICY

An urgent and illuminating examination of the unrelenting housing crisis Canadians find ourselves facing, by Balsillie Prize finalist and CBC Radio host Gregor Craigie, Our Crumbling Foundation offers real-life solutions from around the world and hope for new housing innovation in the face of seemingly impossible obstacles.

Canada is experiencing a housing shortage. Although house prices in major Canadian cities appear to have topped out in early 2023, new housing isn’t coming onto the market quickly enough. Rising interest rates have only tightened the pressure on buyers, and renters, too, as rising mortgage rates cost landlords more, which are passed along to tenants in rent increases. Even with the recent federal budget commitment to bring more housing online by 2030, there will still be a shortfall of 3.5 million homes by 2030.

Gregor Craigie is a CBC journalist in Victoria, one of the highest-priced housing markets in the country. On his daily radio show On The Island he's been talking for over 15 years to local experts and to those across the country about housing. Craigie has travelled to many of the places he profiles in the book, and in his interviews with Canadians he presents the human face of the shortfall as he speaks with renters, owners and homeless people, exploring their varying predicaments and perspectives. He then shows, through comparable profiles of people across the globe, how other North American and international jurisdictions (Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, Helsinki, Singapore, Ireland, to name a few) are housing their citizens better, faster and with determination—solutions that could be put into practice here.

With passion, knowledge and vigour, Craigie explains how Canada reached this critical impasse and will convince those who may not yet recognize how badly our entire country is in need of change. Our Crumbling Foundation provides hope for finding our way out of the crisis by recommending a number of approaches at all levels of government. The prescription for how we’re going to house ourselves, and do so equitably, requires not just a business solution, nor simply a social solution, but rather a combination of both, working hand-in-hand with all levels of government, and quickly, in order to catch up with and outpace the needs of Canadians in this ever-intensifying crisis over a basic human right.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

GREGOR CRAIGIE has been a journalist for more than 25 years at the BBC World Service, CBC Radio, CBS Radio and Public Radio International. He has hosted On The Island on CBC Radio One in Victoria, BC, since 2007. His first book, On Borrowed Time: North America’s Next Big Quake, was a finalist for both the Balsillie Prize for Public Policy and the City of Victoria Book Prize, and was a Globe and Mail Top 100 book in 2021. His first novel, Radio Jet Lag, was published in 2023.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

INTRODUCTION
Just the Beginning

Canada is caught in a housing crisis. It’s been obvious in Toronto and Vancouver for years, as the sight of homeless people on the streets became as common as news stories about record-high home prices. But in between the two extremes of multi-million-dollar homes and people with no homes at all, there’s a huge and growing segment of society whose lives are dominated by the difficult question—where will I live? Some simply give up on their dreams of buying a home. Others spend their free time looking for a better place to rent. Some have been evicted by landlords cashing in on those high prices. Others are plagued by panic attacks everytime a rental application is rejected and are terrified of ending up homeless. And for those experiencing homelessness, of course, every day is a crisis.

Stories like these aren’t new. Housing affordability in Canada has been a concern for some people for years. What is new is the scale of the problem. In 2022, Canada’s first Federal Housing Advocate, Marie-Josée Houle, put it bluntly: “housing and housing affordability is becoming more and more out of reach for most Canadians.” Many are young, employed, and well-educated. But those things don’t mean what they used to mean in Canada. The old rule that going to school and getting a good job would allow you to buy a home doesn’t apply anymore for many young Canadians. There are many reasons for this. Perhaps the most obvious is that incomes haven’t kept up with rising housing costs. Between 2001 and 2021, the average price of a single-family home in Canada more than tripled, while the cost of everything else rose only 43 percent. The result is that homes are too expensive for many Canadians. On top of that, there just aren’t enough of them. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation estimates that by the end of this decade Canada will need an extra 3.5 million homes. That’s on top of the more than 2.3 million new housing units already predicted to be built by then. But this crisis is about much more than just supply and demand. Single-family zoning, divestment from social housing, decades of low interest rates that encouraged the commodification of housing, and short-term vacation rentals have all contributed, along with many other factors. British Columbia and Toronto have recently eliminated most single-family zoning in an effort to increase the housing supply. But if Canada is going to make housing more affordable, or at least attainable, then it will need to make many more changes. That’s why I wrote this book. After reporting on this issue for more than twenty-five years, I want to see more people move into secure housing.

I’ve reported on housing and homelessness more times than I can remember. I’ve interviewed hundreds of people about this—renters, landlords, buyers, sellers, developers, real estate agents, homeless people, housing advocates, builders, building inspectors, market analysts, economists, municipal councillors, mayors, housing ministers, premiers, and prime ministers. It’s not that I’m obsessed by the issue of housing—though it has always interested me—so much as the fact that the issue has dominated life in British Columbia for as long as I’ve lived here. And it’s only got worse, both here and across a lot of the rest of the country. It took many years before it finally dawned on me exactly how big the problem is.

It may seem counterintuitive, but this epiphany came to me not at work but at home, when my wife and I received our 2021 property assessment in the mail. The number seemed to scream out at me as soon as I ripped open the envelope: $1.3 million! Our 110-year-old, ramshackle wood frame house was worth a fortune. I felt a brief moment of jubilation, and even heard the Barenaked Ladies singing in my head. If I had a million dollars . . . I’d be rich. But my momentary elation at our new-found wealth on paper was eclipsed almost immediately by a sobering realization—there is no way I could afford to buy my house today. I thought back seventeen years to when we bought our first house in Vancouver. I remembered the nagging suspicion that the $305,000 price tag would lead us to financial ruin. Little did we know it would be the best financial decision we’d ever make. Sure, we have another decade or so of mortgage payments in front of us, but we’re extremely lucky. Today, my journalist salary combined with my wife’s teacher salary simply wouldn’t be enough to buy that house, or the one I now call home. I thought of my young colleagues who won’t have the same opportunity I had, simply because they were born too late. Then I thought of my kids. How will they ever afford homes of their own? And where? If these sound like the middle-class concerns of someone who’s relatively fortunate, well, that’s because they are. I own a safe house in a beautiful city. It’s walking distance to schools, shops, and the beach. Everyone should be so lucky. And I know my kids will likely be able to rely on at least some financial help from their parents in the future—a factor that matters more and more these days, and only exacerbates intergenerational inequalities. But this book isn’t about me or my family. It’s about the millions of Canadians who are struggling with unaffordable housing, and the impact it is having on both them and the country as a whole.

This book tells the stories of Canadians who are suffering due to the lack of affordable housing in this country. It also profiles people in other countries who have benefited from changes that could work here. As a journalist, I’ve heard countless tales of struggle over the years. But in writing this book, I’ve heard many success stories too. They’ve convinced me that there is no single measure that will fix this problem. Instead, most or even all the solutions presented in this book will be needed. Of course, many measures have already been introduced in Canada, like co-op housing, which has been around for decades, and the recent two-year ban on non-Canadians buying residential properties here.

But much more is needed. It’s tempting to think we might just do nothing and wait this all out. While house prices smashed records during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, they started to drop in 2022. But make no mistake, housing is still too expensive for millions of Canadians. In fact, rising interest rates made mortgages more expensive, which effectively cancelled out any benefits to buyers of lower prices. In the third quarter of 2022, housing in Canada was more unaffordable than ever. A Royal Bank report estimated the share of the average household income needed to cover the ownership costs of an average home had risen to 62.7 percent—an all-time high. In Toronto, the average house cost 85.2 percent of pre-tax income. In Vancouver, it cost 95.8 percent. “The current decline in house prices will not save us,” Benjamin Tal, deputy chief economist at CIBC, said. “By any stretch of the imagination, this is not the end of the housing crisis. This is just the beginning.”

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Random House of Canada
• Date d'édition: 2024
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1039009387
• ISBN 13: 9781039009387
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 320
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible