You can’t afford a house. Your rent is high and climbing fast. You feel poorer than you did a decade ago. You think about leaving town but when you check the listings you find unaffordability has spread beyond the cities — you look at the suburbs and the regional municipalities and discover you’ve been priced out there too.

And still, you’re one of the lucky ones.

You could be one of the millions of Canadians living in inadequate, unaffordable, or unsuitable housing. Or worse, you could be among the hundreds of thousands being pushed into homelessness by skyrocketing rents and the rising cost of living.

Some version of this phenomenon has affected countries across the world, each with varying degrees of intensity, but there is something unique about how quickly housing costs have risen and continue to rise, here in Canada.

This crisis is commonly attributed to a housing supply incapable of accommodating a growing population. But this commonsense analysis doesn’t hold up: Canadian housing costs are well above our global peers despite similar population-to-housing ratios. The cause of the housing crisis is not supply and demand, but rather the capture of our housing stock by a predaceous investor class.

The details are shocking. In some provinces investors own close to half of all housing stock. Almost 10 per cent of our nation’s houses — 1.3 million homes — are sitting empty, accumulating in value for re-sale. More than 235,000 residences are listed on short-term rental platforms like Airbnb, representing 4.9 per cent of the country’s long-term rentals. Large financial firms own 20 to 30 per cent of Canada’s purpose-built rentals. In Edmonton — a province without rent controls — 48 per cent of rentals are held by financialized entities, up from 1.6 per cent 30 years ago; the lion’s share of which is owned by two companies appropriately called Main Street and Boardwalk. 

Our homes are no longer homes; they’ve been turned into investment vehicles for speculators of all shapes and sizes who are doing what investors do — artificially pumping the value of their assets and extracting increasingly exorbitant rents.

The only way to restore housing affordability is to decommodify the places we live. Unfortunately, the federal government has decided to do the opposite. 

The 2024 federal budget makes it clear that the Liberal party does not acknowledge any connection between the housing crisis and financialization. They will not be taking on the real estate investment trusts (REITs). They will not challenge the small and large investors that have turned housing in this country into a Ponzi scheme. They will not crack down on short-term rentals. Instead, they plan to funnel more money to private developers through low-and no-interest loans with the stated goal of building new housing, and the unstated goal of handing over an even greater share of the housing market to speculators and the investor class.

We know their $53 billion plan to add 3.87 million homes to the market will not alleviate the affordability crisis. We know this because building new homes by and for the private sector has been the plan since 2017 when the $72 billion National Housing Strategy was first launched, and the crisis has only deepened since then.

Audits of the National Housing Strategy in 2019 and 2021 found that the effect of these federal home-building schemes has been marginal at best. In fact, the Parliamentary Budget Office has shown that despite all the money being spent, the work is not getting done. Only five per cent of new builds and 7.5 per cent of repair and renewal projects have been completed, and of the projects that have been completed very few meet the needs of low-income families (as low as four per cent in one funding stream). Overall there has been a net decrease in funding for low-income households under the NHS and no evidence that the strategy will impact those who need help the most.

The takeaway is this: the small amount of residential infrastructure the NHS has been able to develop is largely incapable of addressing the nation’s affordability crisis in any meaningful sense.

These disappointing results are due to the fact that the majority of the money ($26 billion Rental Construction Finance Initiative, as well as the $13 billion National Housing Co-Investment Fund) is being deployed through the private sector and, in practice, amounts to a massive wealth transfer from Canadian citizens to developers and real estate investors. 

The NHS’s failure undermines the credibility of market-based supply-oriented solutions and serves as a strong indication that the government’s 2024 investments will have similarly lackluster results. 

These concerns are shared by economists who are beginning to question the premise of the government’s narrow focus on supply-oriented solutions; Doug Porter, chief economist for the Bank of Montreal, noted that Canada’s per capita supply of housing isn’t out of line with our nation’s peers on the global stage, “yet, somehow, our average home prices are (roughly) 60 per cent higher on average than in the US, with essentially the same level of supply per capita. Yes, we should do all we can to encourage supply; but clearly there is more at work here than that.”

Supply alone will not solve this crisis. 3.8 million homes will do nothing to increase affordability if they end up in the hands of individuals and firms trying to pad their investment portfolios. Perversely, these supply-oriented solutions could end up backfiring, exacerbating the affordability crisis by increasing the share of the housing market held by speculators and strengthening local housing oligopolies.

This country cannot build its way out of a financialized and increasingly monopolized housing market. It is time to stop throwing good money after bad; we must adopt a human rights based approach to housing.

A group of high-profile NGOs have compiled an ‘Intersectional Feminist Housing Agenda’ with specific policy proposals for Canadian lawmakers to do just that. There’s some wonkery in here, but the basic message is pretty simple: build more non-market housing, provide more income supports, and legislate more tenant protections. These are good ideas, but they dance around the core of the issue: a national response to this crisis must focus on the decommodification of existing housing.

Central to any effective solution to this crisis are questions of ownership. We must look at who owns the nation’s housing stock and why. We need to invest in co-ops, councils, and other alternative ownership models. We need to update and maintain existing public housing infrastructure, ensure these homes are safe and dignified places to live with rent based on income, not wildly inflated market rates. We need to (re-)introduce rent control, increase taxes on second — and third — homes to disincentivize private speculators, and forbid financial institutions from hoarding housing stock.

But the quickest and most effective method for restoring housing affordability would be to transform already financialized housing stock into non-market housing. This would return 20 to 30 per cent of the nation’s purpose-built rentals to affordability, forcing private landlords to compete. This could be accomplished either by imposing high taxes on the REITs, purchasing their assets, or seizing their properties through expropriation. However, when Trudeau had the opportunity to do just that, he backed away, bending to the hard push from industry lobbyists.

Five years ago housing was enshrined in law as a human right. The time has come to live out the spirit of that legislation, even if that means challenging the interests of speculators, landlords, and finance capital.