The solution to Canada’s affordable housing shortage is hiding in plain sight, as an array of non-market models are already producing secure, stable homes set to remain affordable in perpetuity — from community, or social housing providers to non-equity co-operatives and public housing agencies.

The latter have been especially successful at creating high quality homes low- and moderate income Canadians can afford. However, running public agencies that build and operate non-market homes requires significant investment, a bitter pill to swallow for politicians with a penchant for tax cuts. 

In Alberta, Attainable Homes is one possible solution — it’s a wholly-owned subsidiary of the City of Calgary, that is demonstrating the advantages public entities have in producing housing protected from market speculation.

Earlier this year, 70 households moved into 1010 Downtown West, Attainable Homes’ first rental project, a six-storey rental building located steps from a light rail station in downtown Calgary, the Bow River, and the trendy Kensington district.

While the average monthly rent for an apartment built in the last decade exceeds $2,000 in Calgary, tenants at 1010 Downtown West pay an average of $1,280 per month for a one-bedroom apartment, and $1,660 for a two-bedroom, amounts well within the reach of Calgary households making between $31,200 and $77,000.

Building this project came with a $26.5 million price tag, or about as much as the estimated cost of a similarly sized rental building in Calgary’s Beltline, where the monthly asking rent for a one-bedroom apartment is set to start at $1,625 — $43 more than the city’s average rental rate for similar apartments.

Jaydan Tait, president and CEO of Attainable Homes, says that the reason his agency can offer moderate rental rates while remaining financially sustainable goes well beyond the building’s operation on a mixed-market model.

Because Attainable Homes strives to maximize affordability, rather than returns, the savings obtained from acquiring land at a low cost and finding efficiencies in the planning and development processes are always transferred to tenants.

Its status as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the City of Calgary, also grants Attainable Homes access to a credit line that enables the agency to carry out the pre-development work needed to apply to government loans and grants, an option rarely available to other non-profit housing providers.

“We use council’s affordability mandate as a tool to get land, money, and certainty, but the system is not set up to offer those things automatically,” Tait says. “Everything related to the business of providing affordable housing is hard, complicated, and risky — there’s a reason why we don’t have enough of it.”

Currently, there are more than 3,000 households in Attainable Homes’ waiting list for a rental home.

In the 90s, the feds downloaded housing to the provinces

More than three decades ago, the onus of protecting the right to housing of lower income Canadians drifted away from governments and onto non-profit organizations, as the private market was expected to meet the needs of the country’s middle class.

But neither the market nor the non-profit sector have been able to fill the gap left by the federal government in the early 1990s, when Ottawa offloaded the responsibility of housing onto provincial governments, and the construction of non-market housing stalled.

Today, non-market housing represents less than four per cent of the country’s housing stock, and more than four million households in Canada live in a home that’s too small, too unstable, too deteriorated, too expensive, or all of the above.

The creation of a new federal agency, Build Canada Homes (BCH), signals a return of the federal government to the non-market space, but according to some, the new agency’s capacity to uphold the right to housing — which establishes all Canadians have equitable access to secure, affordable, habitable, accessible housing located near public services and amenities — remains limited.

“Build Canada Homes will seek to build and finance affordable homes that reflects what households at various income levels can reasonably afford in their local area, reflecting the realities of different regions across Canada and across the income spectrum,” a spokesperson of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada (HICC) said in an email statement. 

But rather than directly funding the construction of publicly-owned non-market housing, the new agency aims to attract private capital to invest in non-market housing via loans, equity investments, contributions and guarantees, depending on the project. In addition, BCH seeks to partner up with private developers to deliver homes moderate income earners can afford in mixed-market projects, a model where a portion of the units are leased below-market rates, while the others remain in the speculative rental market, ensuring a project stays financially sustainable and doesn’t require additional contributions from the public coffers.

Creating tax incentives to attract large foreign investors to real estate development isn’t off the table, the Globe and Mail reported recently.

While there is merit in exploring additional ways to solve Canada’s relentless crisis, many of the challenges facing community housing providers to meaningfully mitigate the affordable housing shortage remain unaddressed.

According to Ray Sullivan, executive director of the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association, access to outcome oriented grants, pre-development funding to cover the cost of feasibility studies and  preliminary designs, low-interest loans, and community bonds could help the sector scale up and build the homes Canadians need.

“There’s a lot of resiliency in having a larger operation,” he says, adding that “creating new non-market housing is expensive, but funding it is the solution — there’s no magic way out of this crisis.”

A recent analysis suggests that, to double the share of non-market homes over the next decade, the federal government should invest an annual $40 billion, or roughly 28 times more per year than the amount allocated to Build Canada Homes in the 2025 budget.

‘A lot of money has gone to private developers’

Although BCH introduces a consistent definition of affordable housing, a major omission in Canada’s National Housing Strategy, launched in 2017, the new agency hasn’t determined housing supply targets by affordability level, which raises questions about its effectiveness on creating the three million homes low- and moderate income Canadians need.

Despite having invested roughly $74 billion to support the construction of more than half a million rental units across the country over the course of eight years, the National Housing Strategy has been slow to deliver homes low- and moderate income Canadians can actually afford.

The latest rental market report produced by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), found that rents for tenants renewing their lease have continued to rise across the country, while new leases on turnover recorded minor declines.

“One of the problems with the programs in the National Housing Strategy is that a lot of the money has gone to private developers, and hasn’t actually produced housing that meet the needs of people who aren’t served by the market,” says Yutaka Dirks, a senior policy advisor with the Canadian Centre for Housing Rights, echoing the findings of a 2022 report prepared by Blueprint ADE and the Wellesley Institute for the National Housing Council.

Moreover, Dirks says, in an increasingly financialized context “there is more pressure to produce larger percentages of profit as a return, at a greater speed and intensity.”

To break even, rental housing should produce enough revenue to cover the capital cost of construction and maintenance, alongside operations and financing costs. But to be a viable business, rental projects should also turn a profit for landlords and shareholders, which typically ranges between five and 10 per cent, depending on the market value of a property and the revenue it generates.

In this context, Marie-Josée Houle, Canada’s Federal Housing Advocate, suggests BCH introduce safeguards that limit shareholder returns, curb financialization and protect the right to housing of all tenants.

“The priority would be about ensuring there’s quality housing available to those most in need; that tenants have protections from forced evictions, and that their human rights are prioritized over profits.”

In a statement, a spokesperson of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada said that Build Canada Homes’ Investment Policy Framework, which defines the evaluation criteria for submitted proposals, is that safeguard, as it ensures that projects supported by the agency are financially viable and sustainable while they also deliver homes whose rent doesn’t exceed a third of the local median household income before taxes, an amount significantly higher than the earnings of renters in all major municipalities.

“Our aim is to build an investment approach that balances financial sustainability with social impact,” the statement reads. “Prioritizing affordability and community benefit over excessive returns.”

There are no parameters defining “excessive returns” in BCH’s investment framework.

Ana Bailāo, CEO of Build Canada Homes, was not available for an interview.

No limit to how high a landlord can raise the rent

The shortcomings of a system that’s long prioritized the bottom-line of landlords and investors over the right to housing are on full display in Alberta, where a lack of rent caps and vacancy controls — often touted as the reason the prairie province has succeeded in attracting private capital to the rental market — severely undermine the stability of tenants, regardless of supply.

Despite a record 73,300 purpose-built rentals constructed in Alberta since 2017, and a healthy vacancy rate of 4.3 per cent, the average rental rate for occupied units rose to $1,557 in October, 2025; a roughly 40 per cent increase relative to 2018.

Seemingly, expanding the rental stock at the same rate as the population grows, isn’t enough for the market to deliver affordability relative to the median renter household in Alberta, whose annual income ranges between $69,300 and $59,600.

Because fewer than one in 30 homes in Alberta are non-market, a share that has dwindled  since 2017 despite the creation of federal grants and low-cost loan programs, Alberta renters have little choice.

When a landlord jacks up rents to meet their financial obligations, tenants are forced to either find a way to produce the amount their landlord demands — get a second, or a third job, cut on groceries and leisure — or simply find a cheaper place to live, which often involves moving into a run-down unit in an inconvenient location.

The solution to this problem is evident; as shown by Attainable Homes, by taking the drive for outsized profits out of rents, community housing providers in the non-profit and public sectors are better positioned to protect the right of tenants to access secure, stable, affordable housing than corporate landlords.

“Non-market housing has a direct relationship with the people who live there,” says Houle, the Federal Housing Advocate. “So there’s better protections around security of tenure because the purpose is to provide homes that are affordable in perpetuity.”

BCH’s investment frameworks requires homes remain affordable, relative to local median household incomes, for at least two decades.

“When it comes to public investment, it’s up to all Canadians to hold governments into account that taxpayers’ money leads to a public good.”

Go deeper into our reporting on Canada’s housing crisis. Check out our interview with Leilani Farha, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, on our podcast, In Bed with the Elephant: