Oh, logement abordable. I thought you said “l'eau potable”. I'm happy to talk about that too, but we can talk about logement instead. I can talk about both of them, if you like.
The challenge, of course, in Calgary is that we're not seeing the same problems that we're seeing in places like Vancouver and Toronto, where the market rate of housing has become completely unattainable, but we're on the same path, and so we see a situation where as the price of homes increases, people end up having to rent for longer before they get into home ownership. When people are renting for longer, the market rate of rent increases, which means that people are seeking subsidized housing for longer. People who are working are seeking subsidized housing for longer, which of course means that those who are homeless and seeking subsidized housing can't get in, and the homeless shelters get clogged up.
A real housing strategy needs to approach all of these. Mr. Legge, in addition to being the president of the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, is also the chair of an organization called Attainable Homes Calgary, which is all about moving people from renting into home ownership, people who are working but who have modest income. In addition, one of my big policy failures is increasing the market's allowance for housing in secondary suites in Calgary, a market solution. But really, we have not had a good focus on that bottom level of government or non-profit-supported housing, and so we have two simultaneous problems here. The first is that the houses from the last big building boom of affordable housing in the 1960s and 1970s are getting very old, and governments of all stripes have not been investing in the required life-cycle maintenance.
Here in Calgary, as people move out of those, I am searching for money to renovate them. Otherwise, I have to take them off the market. So we need a real focus on renovating and upgrading the existing housing stock along with building new units, and we have to look at multiple ways of developing those new units at a lower price. We're looking at innovative ideas. I'm working with an organization right now called Homes for Heroes for homeless vets. It is looking at micro housing and temporary housing for these vets, but really we need the money to prime the pump to both build those units and repair the existing ones. Fundamentally, if we can't do that, then when I'm trying to attract Amazon.... Its workers are not going to live in affordable housing but some of those people are going to need rental units, and if the rental units are clogged up, we won't be able to get them. We really have to have supply releases across the spectrum.