Canada’s National Housing Council has just released a report with a title that is hardly a headline grabber: Analysis of Affordable Housing Supply Created by Unilateral National Housing Strategy Programs: A Research Report. The contents of the report, however, should be taken seriously.
The report examines three programs that are part of Canada’s National Housing Strategy. All three programs aim to increase the number of affordable rental housing units in Canada. The report looks at how well the programs meet the needs of people who have severe housing stress in Canada.
Core Housing Need is used to measure housing stress in Canada1. There were 1.7 million households in Core Housing Need in 2016.
Each of the three programs has a different definition of affordability. This creates a challenge for making cross-program comparisons, which are needed to assess the impacts of the programs for people who are homeless and the people who are in Core Housing Need. The report’s authors have ably managed this challenge.
The authors estimate that for every 100 households in Core Housing Need, at best the National Housing Strategy has added two new rental housing units. The people least likely to benefit from the homes that have been built are female headed single parent households and single people with very low incomes2.
The report identifies ways to strengthen existing programs and aspects of the right to adequate housing that have been overlooked in the National Housing Strategy.
In making the report public, the National Housing Council is sharing important information with Canadians, including the people who are not benefiting from the National Housing Strategy, even though they are in Core Housing Need. The lack of progress is not down to individual failure – it is the National Housing Strategy and its programs that are at fault.
Readers outside Canada who are engaged in right to adequate housing mandates may find the report and its methodology helpful. It will also be worthwhile to follow the work of the National Housing Council going forward.
You can access the full report at National Housing Council: Analysis of Affordable Housing Supply Created by Unilateral National Housing Strategy Programs: A Research Report
Footnotes
- Core Housing Need consists of four scales. The scales are: affordability, building condition, and the fit between the number of occupants and the number of rooms (suitability). The fourth scale — whether there is alternative housing available at an affordable price — comes into play when there is need in one or more of the other three. The scales are established by Statistics Canada. The measures are collected and reported at five year intervals as part of the national census. You can read the official definition here: Core Housing Need
- The report also supports the findings of the federal government’s Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, which concluded that, based on the commitments so far, the National Housing Strategy is not on track to achieve its goal of lifting 530,000 households out of Core Housing Need. See Federal Program Spending on Housing Affordability and Federal Program Spending on Housing Affordability in 2021
