The current state of housing in Canada is an outcome of public policy decisions that have evolved since World War II (WWII). These decisions have largely conformed to international policy norms shared by many advanced Western economies with similar housing systems: primarily privatized housing stock that is predominantly owned followed by private rental stock and finally a residual social housing sector. The latter are often termed ‘non-equity’ or ‘non-market’ housing approaches.
In each period since WWII, governments have had a role in the private housing market and in non-market housing. However, beliefs about how the housing system and stock ought to be financed, built, maintained and situated have changed. In Canada, changes have been inherited by provincial and municipal governments through devolution of legal responsibility and financing for social housing during the 1990s and into the 2000s. The outcomes are experienced at the core of day to day life for individuals and communities including affordability strain, under-serviced neighbourhoods and stalled labour force mobility due to limited access to good jobs. Most visibly on Canada’s city streets, the rise of homelessness from barely detectable before the 1980s to being named a ‘national disaster’ by Canadian municipalities in 1998 has been linked to the most recent shift in policy (Carroll, 2000, Hulchanski, 2004, Laird, 2007). Housing policy shapes the range of our choices, or lack of them, in where and how we live, and a nation’s infrastructure must be planned and built accordingly. Accordingly, housing is a critical area of public policy.
There is no question that in the short-term, the current global economic crisis changes things for public policy. This is most abruptly felt with the unexpected return of federal money to social and affordable housing flowing over 2009-2010. Governments are pressed to respond to high unemployment figures and falling consumer demand. The public understands this, and the once steadfast promise of a balanced budget (made by all leading federal political parties, to be sure) has been replaced by deficit spending that enjoys more public support than any one federal party (Angus Reid, 2009). Whether this situation provokes change for the better is up to the public. Past recessions have either brought more of the same, or forks in the road.
The global financial crisis and recession of 2008-09 has particular relevance to housing policy because it is an outcome of the housing affordability problem (originating primarily in the United States) and it calls for change in how we confront housing affordability. Stimulus spending is a short-term response. How will we respond into 2011 and beyond? Let us begin with a context for this argument in the crisis itself.
