“The moral case to urgently build out Canada’s anemic stock of social housing has never been stronger. … A modest start would be doubling Canada’s stock of social housing.”
The quote above is from a new report from Scotiabank, Canada’s third largest bank. If the federal government won’t listen to the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association, which recently made a similar recommendation, or the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, which urged figure about 50 per cent higher, perhaps a major bank will get through.
Doubling the number of social housing units would mean adding about 655,000 new units in a decade. That would still result in only 7 per cent of housing units in Canada being non-profit or co-operative housing and would go only partway to lifting 1.45 million households out of core housing need.
But low- and moderate-income Canadians are out of options without at least a commitment of something of that size. The federal government is committed to funding only about 160,000 new units through its National Housing Strategy. That is profoundly inadequate. Ottawa needs to invest at least four times as much as it is doing. And as the bank says, doing that would be only a “modest start” on what should be the government’s goal, ensuring that by 2030, every Canadian has a home that meets their needs and that they can afford.
You can read the report here. https://scotia.bluematrix.com/links2/pdf/0637c638-e336-47e7-9f2e-e8d3a02511ea