The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Home is Where the Housing Is

Episode Date: December 5, 2024

While there's been a lot of hand-wringing over Canada's housing crisis, no government or expert has come up with a magic bullet to fix it. Housing and social policy researcher Carolyn Whitzman has spent more than three decades examining this country's housing system. In her new book, "Home Truths: Fixing Canada's Housing Crisis," she demystifies the system and offers human-rights based, equitable ideas towards fixing it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We follow one story from the boardroom to the courtroom. And seek to understand what happens when beliefs collide. Where does freedom of religion end and freedom from discrimination begin? That's this season on Queries in Good Faith, a TVO original podcast. Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts. While there's been a lot of hand wringing over Canada's housing crisis, no government or expert has come up with a magic bullet to fix it. Housing and social policy researcher Carolyn Weitzman has spent more than three decades

examining this country's housing system. In her new book, Home Truths, Fixing Canada's Housing Crisis. She demystifies the system and offers human rights based equitable ideas towards fixing it. We have Carolyn in studio. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Jayan. All right.

So let's start off. Why did you want to put forth ideas for solving the housing crisis? But more importantly, why now? When I got back to Canada, I'd lived two decades in Australia in 2019. I was looking for a good basic text explaining who does what in Canada. And a book that I'd used a long time ago

was John Sewell's Houses and Homes, which was published in 1994. And that was really the last sort of general purpose overview of housing policy in Canada. And of course, so much has changed since 1994. So it seemed time to write something that wasn't just for policy wonks, but for everyday people who were confused, perplexed, concerned about housing and wondered what could be done. All right. You start your book off with a chapter defining what home is.

Why was that an important home base? Where to start? Yeah. Well, I think that a lot of the problems are in definitions. We don't have a clear and consistent definition of what affordable housing is. The human rights law uses this term adequate housing, which I've always found kind of inadequate in talking about home. But you know what does adequate housing mean? What does the international community measure? But then also what do we look for when we look for a home?

And there is a wonderful literature out there. So even though it's not much of a book that goes, this person says this, this person says that, I thought in terms of home, it was important to give a kind of 3D picture of what makes a good home before moving on to how can everyone enable that right to have a good home. What does that 3D picture look like? Well, to me, it's about some basic things like affordability, accessibility,

whether there's mold or other major repairs that are needed, whether you have a room to your own yourself occasionally so not overcrowding but it's also some intangible but really important things so if you look at what residents of Africa fail which was a black community in Halifax that was torn down in the 60s you you hear dignity, sense of belonging, sense of community. When you talk to people about what they, especially people who don't have secure housing, what they miss,

it's the ability to cook something occasionally, to have friends over, particularly when you don't have much money to go out. So to me, it's about comfort. It's about security, it's about belonging, and it's about dignity. All right, I want to read a little quote from a chapter. It starts off by going, I treat housing as a collective infrastructure. Their goal is to optimize individual choices within a democratic rights-based framework. Offering someone a choice between sleeping outdoors in a tent or a night's accommodation

in an overcrowded and unsafe shelter where infectious diseases run rampant is not an adequate choice. Deciding whether to rent or own one's home and where and how to live should be a real choice with multiple options. Part of the problem is that choices are still constrained by out-of-date notions. Nuclear families are the only normal households. The private sector is smarter or more efficient than the public sector. Home ownership is the only way to save money

and ensure a comfortable retirement. How have demographics changes affected housing needs? Yeah, so since the 1970s when a lot of the real key issues like the principal property exemption for the capital gains tax, I'm just giving that as one example, those changes were brought in. People live longer. So the idea that you would sell a house at say 65 when you retired, at that time the average life expectancy for men was about 70, for women it was a little under 75. Now people are living at least 10 years longer and selling a house when you retire may not be the most comfortable way or the safest way for you to have a retirement, a safe retirement, particularly if there aren't smaller places that you can

age in in your community. So there's people living longer, there's obviously a much more diverse community in Canada and a recognition of people who've been here for thousands of years, indigenous people who were not treated well in housing policy. I'd say they still aren't treated very well, a much higher proportion of homeless people, for instance, who are indigenous. People are marrying later, they're living alone more, there's more blended families, so there might be a split, and then you need two, two or three bedroom places to accommodate shared custody. So all of these changes have changed the

way that we need homes and the way that homes serve us. A lot more people are working out of their homes. A lot more grandparents are taking care of grandchildren sometimes. So there's all of these things that kind of confound the traditional mom dad two kids kind of norm. All right. I want to pick up on the notion of definitions that you had issue with. Adequate housing being one of them and sort of Canada's definition of homelessness. Yeah. They fall short for you. Tell me a little bit, sir, what is the definition for it right now and why does it fall short? Well, the definition of homelessness is fine. It not only counts people who are living on the street or living sleeping

rough and people who are in emergency shelters, is no way to live or even people in transitional housing where they have the right to live where they are for maybe two months to two years those people would be considered home was because they don't have access to a permanent home it also includes people who are couch surfing who are you know sleeping on their friend's sofas or spare bedrooms temporarily until they find a place of their own, or families that are doubling up, households that are doubling up because they can't afford an affordable home. Finland is an example that I use where across the country there is a clear consistent count every

single year. So if you make a policy intervention you can say one, two, three years later whether it's had an impact and I don't think it's a coincidence that Finland has had declining rates of homelessness most especially with people living rough in the last 20 years consistently every year Part of it is if you don't count people they don't count Data is important. That is important. We don't have a lot of that in Canada. Not really good transparent data No, all right. I want to talk a little bit about For people generally they understand that there was a housing building boom in

the 1970s but that slowed down a little bit of passing the puck. What happened? Why did we slow down? It's a bit of a perfect storm. So a bunch of things happened in the 70s. Some of them were good. There was a general feeling that we'd over relied on public housing and that we needed to develop new forms of housing that was outside the market whether it was cooperative housing or whether it was supportive housing run by

service agencies. So there was a lot more money out there for housing that was outside the market and indeed 20 and in a few years, 25% of all homes completed were not built for profit. But a couple of the other changes in the 1970s weren't that good. So one of the changes that happened was that there was a subsidy program through the tax system, I'm not going to get into the details of it because it's pretty detailed, that allowed market developers to build purpose-built rentals,

so apartment buildings of all sizes, as long as they were within a certain income band and then they could get benefits on their taxes, if and only if they invested in more purpose-built housing. And that created what we have today, which are a whole bunch of apartment buildings from the late 50s and 1960s, the early 1970s. And that started tailing off in the 1970s, that kind of security that developers need,

that they're going to be getting a certain kind of pro forma working for them, a certain kind of way of planning housing. At the same time, the capital gains tax was brought in. So that's taxing wealth in the same way that income tax taxes income. And your principal property, where you live, was excluded from that. Now, it made sense at the time. I understand why it was brought in.

The notion was, as I said, that you would use the house as your retirement savings. And then you would sell off that and live on the proceeds. But that isn't how it's worked for most Canadians. And it created the potential to use housing as an investment. So what happens if you buy a house and flip it every couple of years? What happens if there was an expectation that house prices would rise inexorably? So those are the kinds of changes that happened in the 1970s. And what you start seeing from the 1980s

onward is that before then, housing was affordable to middle income families, and in many cases, to slightly below middle income families. But it starts becoming unaffordable to middle income families from the the 1980s onwards across Canada. Now you'd need two or three times average income to afford a house across Canada, four times in Toronto, five times in Vancouver. So you start seeing after the 1990s when the federal government got out of housing policy and helping non-market housing, you start seeing the rise of homelessness. So all

of these things are decades in the making. Well let's pick up on that. How has downloading housing responsibility to the provinces and then municipalities affected the housing system? Yeah from the start of Canadian housing policy, the Dominion Housing Act, from the start of Canadian housing policy, the Dominion Housing Act, as it was called in the 1930s, there was a recognition that you wouldn't be getting adequate affordable homes for low income people just relying sheerly on market forces.

So you did have single room occupancy and rooming houses and some other sort of short term initiatives that worked within their limits. But you wouldn't be having housing for low income families with children, for instance, without some form of housing for social good as opposed to for profit. So that's sort of the, when the federal government downloaded the responsibility for housing policy to provinces,

provinces who are kind of the bad guys in my book, I mean, all three levels of government have failed, but provinces have failed most signally. Provinces like Ontario downloaded the responsibility to municipalities who don't have the revenue sources, they don't have the powers to deal adequately with housing. And at the same time, provinces started getting quite cheap about social assistance. So whereas social assistance, the housing allowance would cover a small apartment, it

doesn't even cover a room or part of a room these days. And also in the 1970s the federal government told all the provinces you have to have some form of rent regulation and preferably rent control. The provinces dutifully did that but then they started getting out of it. So by the 1990s and particularly the Harris government in Ontario in the 1990s, and particularly the Harris government in Ontario in the 1990s, renter rights really started getting eroded. All right, before we get to renter rights, I do want to have a better understanding. What could each level of government do better?

Yeah, it's not that complicated. So the federal government has the most authority, the most power, the most tax revenue. So they should be responsible for setting targets. And in some of the other countries that I talk about, there's been pretty successful target setting. They should be responsible for funding housing like infrastructure because if you don't have the infrastructure of housing, people fall through the cracks.

Provincial government, as I mentioned earlier, they're responsible for landlord-tenant relations, they're responsible for social assistance, and they're also responsible for health and social services. So, you know, keep in mind that in the 1960s, a lot of people were institutionalized. After they were deinstitutionalized, which I hope people still consider as a good thing, they still needed housing with some services. The province is responsible for that and it's fallen down. All of Canada's provinces have fallen down on those responsibilities. Municipalities are responsible for good planning and housing approvals. And again, in the 1970ss zoning got a lot more restrictive

there was a lot more preservation of single-family housing whereas that was not necessarily the host type that was going to be serving the majority of people so all three levels of government started falling down but really the buck stops at the federal government. All right. You know, when we talk about Canada, there's a lot of conversation around immigration. This is a country that's built on immigration.

There's been influx of people in and out of this country and we know that, but it seems to be a hot topic. And I'm curious, when we talk about housing crisis we are in, a lot of people like to point fingers at immigration at the moment. I'm curious to know, how does immigration and migration affect housing demand? Well, I'm a historian. So I'm going to say blaming immigrants for housing issues is nothing new. In the early part of the 20th century, the then medical officer of health said, these foreign lodging houses, they're not ideas of family and morality aren't ours.

So we have to do something about that. In many cases, it meant knocking down lodging houses, not allowing apartment buildings, etc. So sort of anti-immigrant sentiment comes out of two places. In my opinion, it comes out of a search for an easy scapegoat or an easy solution. And it also comes out of some really xenophobic and racist notions. Having said that, immigration, which is a federal government responsibility, hasn't been linked to housing targets, which I would also argue is a federal government responsibility. Until very recently, students, including international students, but also domestic students, weren't

even included in housing need estimates. So if you have 2.2 or 2.3 million students, many of whom are living away from home, whether they're domestic or foreign students, you need to figure out where they're going to be finding places to rent, or they're going to end up 14 to a room in some illegal rooming house, and that's going to be unsafe and unhealthy. So to me the issue isn't so much do we have too many immigrants. I mean Canada, 95% of Canada are immigrants, the non-Indigenous portion of Canada.

The question is, to what extent are we planning for demographic changes, immigration changes towards a goal of everyone, like, you know, who needs what housing where and at what cost. And that's where the failure has been. All right. I want to talk a little bit about the housing ladder. You had mentioned that Canada's housing ladder model is outdated. Tell me a little bit about that.

Well, if you look at countries like Germany or Austria or Denmark or Switzerland and certainly Switzerland and Austria and Germany are richer per capita than Canada. You're looking at either majority renter societies or pretty close to majority, pretty close to 50% of households rent. They have different ways to save for their retirement and clearly effective ways to save for their retirement. They have a lot more flexibility in terms of what jobs they take, etc. So the notion that home ownership is the only nirvana that you can seek, that everybody wants to be and can be a homeowner is problematic right there. Also what is on the housing continuum right now are things that just aren't adequate. So if you look at it, it includes homelessness, it includes emergency shelters, it includes

transitional housing, short-term housing. Those things aren't, you know, Canada has committed itself to progressively realizing the right to housing. Those aren't adequate housing in international definitions. So really, what we should be looking at is a situation where, whether you rent or own a home, you're able to save money. You're able to have a certain security of where you live. You're able to move if you need to or want to,

or your family changes changes or your job changes or whatever. And it shouldn't be this huge difference in what your rights are as a homeowner. Not that homeowner rights are perfect, but you know your rights as a homeowner and your rights as a tenant. All right, I want to read an excerpt that touches on a little bit of what you mentioned. It reads, renters need the right to tenure security. They need predictability to get rent increases. They need homes that are well maintained, well heated in the winter, cooled in the summer, without having to pay extra for the right to a habitable home. Most of all, they shouldn't have to subsidize homeowners through an exploitive rental system that feeds

pension funds by denying people their rights. There's a couple of things that I want to pick up on there because I'm sure a lot of people don't know about the pension funds. But how can renters be better protected? Well, I grew up as a renter. My mother was a single mother in Montreal. We were really lucky because Montreal at the time and now has this sort of plex culture where there's duplexes and triplexes. So when we lived in a place, we lived there four years, five years, seven years, and that was taken for granted that we would have long leases, that we would have a spacious two-bedroom home and that it was close to my school, close to a park, close to a grocery store, etc. That's something that everyone has a right to have, but we haven't been building those kinds of rental accommodation,

not family-sized rental accommodation, that's for sure. There's this real, with vacancy, decontrol, which is what we have in Ontario. In other words, you can jack up the rents as much as you want if there's a new tenant as opposed to a sitting tenant. There's a real incentive to get students, to get tenants to move on. And those are all things that make renting for many people a really stressful, they feel like second class citizens. And they're right, they are second class citizens.

Let's talk apartment buildings and pension fund. What's the relationship there? Well, pension funds, my goodness, I've heard the word fiduciary duty more than I'd like to. Let's have a drinking game. Right. Fiduciary duty, go on. OK. So pension funds are there to provide high returns or do charity duty more than I'd like to. Let's have a drinking game. Do charity duty. OK.

So pension funds are there to provide high returns for anyone who's saving money, including people who are saving money towards pensions. Some of the biggest pension funds in Canada are associated with unions. For instance, I was a member of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, and I still have a pension fund in CUPE. Those pension funds, in turn, either

own or invest in large real estate investment trusts who are bound to provide, that is, that their job is to provide the highest possible return. And they do that by creatively de-housing, repositioning apartment units to get higher returns, which in turn de-houses a lot of current and former union members. So in many ways, the first question that I always ask of what can people do

is, do you know where your money is going? Do you know what can people do is do you know where your money is going to know your investment money is going because most people do have some form of pension fund or other investment and in many cases just as we started looking at how pension funds were supporting oil exploration or child labor or some other thing that we might find problematic. At the moment, there's no criteria to say whether your investment funds are actively

de-housing people or the opposite would be providing secure long-term dwelling. I mean, absolutely there needs to be investment in housing. The question is, is that investment supporting the human rights of people, or is it destroying people's homes? All right, you write in your book that you have a, quote unquote, radical idea

for ending homelessness. Break that down for us. Is it as radical as we think, or is this? No, I think it's somewhat sarcastic. The idea of housing first has been around for for decades and it's been proven to work. Canada had the biggest Housing First experiment under the Harper government about 13 years ago. It was called At Home Chez Soir. And they found that indeed stable housing with regular leases at whatever price people could afford with services if

they wanted and needed services were a way to keep people housed and was so much cheaper than the alternatives which include you know tearing down encampments and then people set up tents at another place or being in emergency shelters and basically having to leave and return every day and not being able to have a safe place to store your possessions or being institutionalized either in prison or ending up in hospital. So you know recently there's a project in Toronto that is intended to pay its own way through keeping low-income people or people in distress out of emergency rooms. And certainly the research shows that a dollar spent in Housing First will create many dollars

of benefits to the governments that support it over the alternatives. I feel like this might be a loaded question. There are solutions here. You're a historian. You just mentioned solutions that have worked. We've seen it work. Why are we where we are today? And I feel like the answer is if there's a will, there's a way.

But I feel like it's a little bit more complex than that. Well, I mean, I think there's maybe a lot to what you just said. I think it is a matter of political will. So at the moment, and I think this is true of a lot of big policy questions, climate change, et cetera, it's too easy to look at another level of government. I often use the three Spider-Men pointing meme,

like to go, it's your fault. No, you know, like to go, it's your fault, no, it's your fault, no, it's your fault. And doing that kind of blathering. And I think that people are getting really tired of that blame shifting. I think that there is a strong body of evidence to what's worked in the past, what's worked in other countries. You have to be able to think big. But again, part of the sort of political trap

that we find ourselves in right now as a society is we want super quick results. And the thing is it takes, in the best case scenario, two to five years to build housing. And it takes, like it's taken 30 to 50 years to get us in the mess we're in. It's going to take 30 years to get it out of us. So whenever I hear and of course, we're hearing a lot

federally and to a certain extent provincially now. We hear municipally every municipal election. I'm going to end homelessness. I'm going to make homeownership affordable. I'm going to make home ownership affordable. I'm going to, you know, X huge goal. Great. Do you have the cojones to actually create the policies that are going to do that? If you're talking about making home ownership affordable, just to give that as an example, does that mean that you're going to create a situation where homes are a third the price of what they presently are? Are you prepared for that?

If not, how do you expect in the term of a government, three to five years, to make homeownership affordable? Are you going to somehow increase, I don't know, minimum wage or some other mechanism to triple the average income salary? I mean, like, do you think that, not to point fingers, Axe attacks is going to do it? So everybody wants three-word answers to complex problems, and they also want immediate payback. But at the same time, I think there's a lot of resentment. And I think we saw that in the US election that even though people's

incomes were going up there was that sense that for the next generation they just don't have those the potential of a safe secure home and that breeds a lot of resentment and I think a lot of Cynicism about things that clearly aren't going to work in the short term. So, you know, I think that we're, we're breeding a lot of cynicism about any kinds of solutions. I know in your book, you lay out a number of solutions. And if I give you all the power, you can tell me what you would do. But I want to, I'm more curious as an individual, you know, this is a very complex topic. I'm more curious as an individual, you know, this is a very complex topic. Yeah. It is layered, it is filled with history, it is not a simple solution.

As an individual, what can be done to help solve this? What is the role of an individual in this? Yeah, well, I already mentioned one of the things, which is where your investment funds are going if you have retirement or investment funds. Another thing that you can do is speak up. We're seeing more and more voices that are calling for affordable housing in communities where they're being resisted. So at the municipal level, you can become a yimby.

At the provincial level, we really need voices speaking up about you know just social assistance rates that absolutely condemn people to homelessness. Landlord tenant relations that are evicting people into homelessness. So there's a lot that can be done at the provincial level and at the federal level just do some targets. So one example that I use from the book is France where in the year 2000 the federal government sort of took back a lot of the powers that they'd given to the regions which are the equivalents of the provinces and they said every single municipality has to have a goal of 20% non-market housing, 20%

social housing. It could be public. It could be co-op, whatever. And we'll help. The federal government and for the national government in France helps. But if you aren't coming up with a plan that's going to lead to that goal, we're going to step in.

And they did. And since then, that's 24 years ago, it could be a left-wing government. It could be a right-wing government. It could be a middle-of-the-road government, whatever. That law has not only stayed, but become strengthened in a number of municipalities. That's 25% in Paris.

It's 30%, et cetera. Similarly, in Finland, ending homelessness isn't an overnight thing. Every single year since 1987, they have been measuring homelessness and tweaking policy towards a goal of zero homelessness. They've had right-wing governments, they've had left-wing governments, etc. So there has to be a certain commitment to infrastructure. You don't half-build a bridge and then the government changes and you go,

well, you know, here's our half built bridge. Um, there has to be a commitment to a generation of infrastructure. All right, Carolyn, we are going to leave it there. I'm going to thank you so much for a thoughtful discussion and, uh, hopefully some solutions. Thank you, Jaya.