Housing Policy Database
A repository of 103 policies worldwide, aiming to enhance understanding and identify effective housing policies that can be applied to the Canadian context.
Diverse examples of housing policies
How can we fix the housing crisis?
The housing crisis has become widespread, resulting in a diverse range of policy responses. Have all these policies been successful? What can we learn from them? Can we apply them in a Canadian context?
The Housing Policy Database is an interactive platform that aims to demonstrate a diverse range of measures that different levels of government are using in an attempt to tackle housing issues. The 103 different policies are categorized into different types of goals, objectives, typologies, and sub-typologies. They come from different cities and regions and levels of government and vary by different time frames, target groups and main players.
Canada’s Housing Crisis
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) has adopted a goal that “By 2030, everyone in Canada has a home that they can afford and that meets their needs” as renters or owners. This is the right goal. It balances ambition with specificity and has the credibility of being associated with Canada’s national housing agency. Achieving the goal will be very difficult. But, it’s doable.
While there are ongoing efforts to improve the amount of housing data collected, synthesized and shared between governments and the public, some feel there are still too many gatekeepers, and large data gaps, making it difficult to make evidence-based decisions.
Additional efforts should include a federal beneficial ownership registry, robust information on global capital flows into Canadian residential real estate, robust data about the influence of monetary policy, the mortgage market and lending on rising home prices, better information on evictions, housing discrimination and equity, secondary rental market, rigorous assessments of local housing needs, and more.
To ensure everyone in Canada can afford a home that meets their needs, Indigenous, federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal governments need to work together. All housing policies should be created with the intent of welcoming a diversity of people, incomes, quality housing forms, and tenures into all of our neighbourhoods and communities.
It is a response to existing housing policies (e.g. zoning regimes), practices and attitudes that drive urban sprawl and intentionally or unintentionally, have the effect of excluding groups of people (inc. renters, people of colour, low and middle-income people, immigrants, and families) from living in quality housing near desired jobs, amenities and family.
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