Good morning. Bonjour. Kwe.
I apologize that I can't be present in person to talk to you about this very important topic.
I'm here in Ottawa on Algonquin Anishinabe territory. I say that because whenever we talk about housing, it's important to remember that indigenous people are disproportionately represented among people who are in housing need, in housing precarity and without housing. We owe indigenous peoples a great debt and that includes a debt of housing justice.
CHRA is the national voice of community housing. Our members are non-profit, co-op and public housing providers, and also provincial and territorial governments, service agencies and advocacy organizations. We are seized with this housing crisis. Your work on this topic has shown that we are in an affordable housing crisis, but the question is why? This is not a temporary or short-term phenomenon, but has been building for decades, and it starts with the undersupply of non-market community housing. As a percentage of overall housing supply, Canada has about half the community housing stock of the OECD average. In fact, it’s even proportionately slightly less than in the United States.
We started down this track 30 years ago, when the federal government withdrew from community housing. We were on track to beat the OECD average, but now we have fallen far behind, and the current crisis is the consequence. An adequate supply of community housing acts as a stabilizing force in the housing market, so we need to focus on the long-term goal of doubling the supply of non-market community housing. I don’t think you’re hearing this for the first time. It was a strong recommendation from Scotiabank a year ago. It was also a recommendation from the National Housing Accord, a group of private sector, academic and community housing experts, and there is growing consensus that this is the target we have to reach. The priority, as we do this, has to be a fully funded for-indigenous, by-indigenous housing strategy. Budget 2023 committed $4 billion over seven years for urban, rural and northern indigenous housing, but the government’s own National Housing Council has estimated the need at $6.3 billion per year. I can assure you that there remains a strong consensus among the broader community housing sector that this is priority number one.
How do we scale up community housing? First, we need stable, predictable funding and financing from the federal government. When interest rates go up, projects can only afford a smaller loan, so grants and contributions are needed to fill those gaps, yet as we saw interest rates go up in 2023, we saw federal grants and contributions go down, making new development projects unviable. We need to restore and increase capital funding under the national housing strategy. This includes predevelopment funding. It costs a couple of hundred thousand dollars to get a project to a shovel-ready application stage. If you were to go to CMHC’s website right now and look up “predevelopment seed funding”, it says that the application portal is closed until further notice and it has said that for many months. Predevelopment funding has to be reliably available all year long as a funded program.
Significantly, we need land. There is a large inventory of federal land that can be made available for non-market community housing, but it is limited by a very small budget under the federal lands initiative. Blow that program up and unlock the potential of federal land by switching to a model of one-dollar, 100-year leases to non-profits, co-ops and community land trusts.
New development takes time and, while we need to increase the pace of building new community housing, there is also an option that can have a quick turnaround and a near immediate impact: acquisitions. For every one affordable home created under the national housing strategy, we are losing 11 affordable rents in the private market. We are actually falling behind. We need to invest in a national acquisitions fund to help non-profits, co-ops and land trusts acquire existing rental properties, protect tenancies and stabilize rents.
All this costs money. Housing is expensive, that’s actually the problem we’re trying to solve, so it's going to take money to solve it, but I have good news for you: Investing in community housing is non-inflationary and has a significant positive impact on economic productivity.
My colleague Mr. Cimon also explained it well.
We released an analysis about 10 weeks ago, prepared by Deloitte Canada, that shows that an increase in the market share of community housing by just 1.5% will improve productivity by a massive 5.7% to 9.3%, and add a non-inflationary boost of $67 billion to $136 billion to the economy. I want to be clear. This isn’t the economic impact from construction activity, but an improvement to economic efficiency from having a greater supply of community housing, so increasing the supply of community housing increases productivity, which improves quality of life, which benefits everyone in Canada.
Thank you very much. Merci. Meegwetch.