Canada should build a million affordable homes for low- and middle-income households in a “nation-building” project that devotes 1% of the country’s GDP to non-market housing, while setting a high green standard for new construction under the new Build Canada Homes program, according to two separate advocacy pushes released last week.

“If the Canadian government can commit 5% of GDP to the military to appease the U.S. president, surely our federal government should be open to committing 1% of GDP to directly benefit millions of Canadians for decades to come,” a coalition of private developers, non-profit housing providers, and community sector leaders declared in a five-page letter to Housing Minister Gregor Robertson, coordinated by the Alliance for a Liveable Ontario (ALO)`.

The government could hit the target of a million affordable homes by embedding non-market community housing in all new developments, creating purpose-built non-market developments, and motivating philanthropies to invest in affordable housing, the signatories said in a release.

“We wholeheartedly support the federal government stepping in to spur much-needed affordable housing construction,” a group of 111 businesses, tradespeople, and climate organizations said [pdf] in an open letter to Robertson and Prime Minister Mark Carney released by Stand.earth.

But “we would like to see these new homes use the most modern technologies for heating and cooling air and water,” they added. “Rather than building these homes with antiquated oil or gas heating, residents of Canada would greatly benefit from homes that come equipped with high-efficiency electric heat pumps or other low-carbon alternatives like high-efficiency direct electric or geothermal district heating.”

The ALO letter said about three million Canadian households need homes that cost less than $1,000 per month, yet a recent report found the country has only about 600,000 non-market units—3.5% of the residential building stock, compared to an average of 7% across the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). “A nation-building project that focuses on creating homes that are affordable to low- and middle-income Canadians will have huge positive benefits to Canada’s economy and help millions of Canadians who are victims of the housing crisis,” the letter stated.

Alliance Coordinator Franz Hartmann said he hoped Carney and Robertson would see the million-homes plan as a way to build Canada strong while maintaining jobs in the construction industry.

“It would ensure jobs, and most important, it would create the housing we need,” he told The Energy Mix last week. “The biggest, highest-priority need is for affordable housing,” and after a 30+-year experiment of trying to get the private sector to step up, “that’s frankly only going to come from non-market housing.”

As a starting point, he said Ottawa should buy up the current inventory of unsold condominium units and hand them over to be rented out as affordable apartments. “They would show up as an asset on the federal balance sheet, and they would say to non-profit housing providers, ‘you’re running these. They’re essentially controlled by you, and you keep the rents affordable.’” The move would help private developers reduce their stock of unsold condos, even if they didn’t sell at previous market rates.

Hartmann said the private developers who signed the ALO letter “understand the need to get affordable housing built, and that the actions we’ve proposed are the ones that are going to get us there.” But they also see a sound business case in a plan that creates reliable demand for 15 to 20% of the units in any new development they build.

“What’s in it for them is that there’s demand for their services,” he explained.

He said the Alliance deliberately steered clear of any explicit argument for energy-efficient or zero-carbon new housing. “We’re setting the table for those discussions to happen,” he told The Mix. “All of these discussions about creating carbon-neutral buildings are academic unless there’s money in the [federal] budget to build this stuff.”

In the Stand.earth release, climate campaigner Lana Goldberg said a low-carbon standard for Build Canada Homes projects would be a matter of consistency.

“What the government does with the left hand should be consistent with what it’s trying to do with the right hand,” she said. “Yes, we desperately need to build new affordable homes. We’ve also made commitments to tackle the climate crisis. Fortunately we can do both at the same time, but only if the federal government can act as a coherent unit.” 

[The Alliance for a Liveable Ontario is an initiative of the Small Change Fund, as is Energy Mix Productions’ Climate News for Climate Solutions project.]