Housing expert Steve Pomeroy at McMaster has just released a report that quantifies what’s needed to provide affordable housing for everyone. We need a double double—not two creams and two sugars in our coffee, but to double the existing supply of non-profit and co-op housing and then double it again. That’s what’s needed to eliminate core housing need, the federal government’s main measure of housing need.
About 1.7 million Canadian house holds are in core need. However, core housing need significantly underestimates how many people struggle with poor and/or unaffordable housing. The real total is likely twice (double) 1.7 million.
Doubling and then doubling again the number of non-profit and co-op units would bring the supply of non-profit and co-op units to 20 per cent of all housing in Canada.
A weird thing about Canadian housing statistics is that there no agreed-upon estimate of the number of non-market units in the country. Pomeroy did a fair bit of work to estimate a total of about 780,490 units or 4.4 per cent of all housing units. In the 1960s to the 1990s, Canada built, with government funding, about 600,000 units in 30 years or about 20,000 a year. We could double the current number of units if we built 50,000 units a year for 15 years, Pomeroy calculated. The second doubling would require 100,000 units a year for 15 years.