Housing Availability & Affordability.
There is a shameful, ongoing, severe shortage of affordable housing available. This is true not just for those that need supportive assistance, but it is also true for those who are fully employed, with good jobs, but are facing skyrocketing housing prices, with accompanying higher property taxes, which keep home ownership out of reach. These issues are close cousins to poverty, but have distinct different root causes which have also been neglected.
In the 2019 federal election, the Liberal's plan was to co-invest with homebuyers purchasing a home, which would be repaid to the government when the home is sold. The government would also get their percentage of profit relative to any increase in the home's value. The Conservative's plan was to allow mortgages to be extended over a longer period of time, lowering your monthly payment but increasing overall cost to homeownership, while making more profits for money lenders. Both of these plans would temporarily allow more people to compete for the same housing supply, increasing the cost of their purchases even more. This would allow the more well-off to purchase with increased burden, and would place further barriers for others already struggling to enter the market - worsening the problem overall.
Increasing the flow of new home builds from the suppliers, directly to those who, wish to live in them, and curtailing the purchase of new homes by investment corporations that resell them at higher prices (or hold them as commodities and limit supply thereby making profits for them at would-be homeowners expense) are remedy steps we must take to stop the ludicrous rate of price increases. Increasing the number of affordable homes that new build projects must include is also a piece of solving the problem. Our homes could now be built 72% more efficient, using less energy to heat or cool, making the cost of operating a home more affordable.
We will fight to
Implement a National Housing Strategy to provide every Canadian with a place to call home.
Create a culturally sensitive Housing First approach to provide immediate support for those experiencing chronic homelessness.
Invest in the co-operative housing sector to invigorate the new, affordable housing market and sustain existing co-ops facing liquidation.
Have one-in-five new builds be affordable housing.
Stop the commodification of housing for profits by those that neither build nor live in new housing supplies.
Promote strengthened building codes that will greatly reduce the costs associated to operating a home and other buildings.
What you can do
Speak to your local, provincial and federal elected representatives to inform them of your support for the housing first initiative in mutual efforts to address mental health and drug addiction factors.
Push our elected members to legislate that 20% of all new home builds must be affordable homes, and to enact legislation that penalizes, through taxation, and makes it unprofitable for the speculative commodification of housing.
Speak up to have our homes and business structures built to the standards of modern, existing technologies, to eliminate the majority of costs associated to heating and cooling them.
