We’ve arrived at arguably the best moment to invest in affordable housing in over a generation. Will we seize it?

Posted on October 1, 2025 in Debates

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TheStar.com – Opinion
Oct. 1, 2025.   By John Lorinc, Contributor

During the frothiest — and now past — moments of the housing bubble, investors large and small were snapping up thousands of older, private rental apartments, making some nominal repairs and renovicting low-rent tenants to make space for more profitable ones.

In some cases, the buyers were individuals converting rooming houses into a single-family residence. In many others, the buyers were larger players — well-capitalized REITs or property managers backed by institutional investors — and the targets were smaller apartment buildings in older but gentrifying neighbourhoods.

One study, cited in a 2024 article in the Canadian Journal of Urban Research, estimated that between 2011 and 2016, 322,000 apartments considered affordable for lower-income households across Canada were lost this way, with only a trickle of new comparably priced units coming onto the market. Those numbers certainly rose in the past decade, and came to include much taller apartment buildings — e.g., 145 St. George Street, at 12 storeys or 25 Mary Street, at 25 — that condo developers wanted to tear down and replace.

The study’s authors, the University of Waterloo’s Martine August and Joe Daniels, of the University of British Columbia, argue that governments at all levels, including Ottawa, should get into the business of buying up these kinds of apartments, removing them from the speculative market and putting them in the hands of co-ops, affordable housing providers and land trusts in perpetuity.

This message seems to have reached the ear of Prime Minister Carney, whose $13 billion housing strategy includes a $1.5 billion “Canada Rental Protection Fund” to “help protect existing affordable rental housing” and “support the community housing sector in acquiring at-risk rental apartment buildings, ensuring they remain affordable over the long term.”

Well, not exactly.

As a Housing Infrastructure and Communities Canada (HICC) spokesperson confirmed for me, that $1.5 billion was actually allocated in the 2024 budget, and the federal government stopped taking applications last May. The only change is that the program is being moved out of Canada Mortgage and Housing and handed over to the new Build Canada Homes secretariat.

It cannot be said too often and too loudly that we’ve arrived at arguably the best moment to invest in affordable housing in well over a generation. The condo boom went boom. Real estate prices have plunged. Rents are down (good news for tenants, bad news for corporate landlords). And that rush on small apartments by giant investment funds has abated.

But this moment won’t last long, so reforms, such as definancializing some low-rent privately-owned apartments, has to happen quickly before the market begins producing green shoots. August and Daniels say as much, and stress that such investments generate more bang for the buck because they focus on existing buildings rather than constructing new ones.

What remains to be seen with this program is whether the federal government will be seized of the urgency of this window or merely erect another bureaucratic obstacle.

Case in point: there are already five rental acquisition programs operating in Canada — in Toronto, Montreal, B.C., Vancouver and Nova Scotia.

Toronto’s “multi-unit residential acquisition program” (MURA) dates back to 2021, and has invested $165 million in over 1,000 units to date. The city works with non-profits to identify potential properties that have come on the market. It will contribute up to $200,000 per unit for eligible apartment buildings and $150,000 per unit for rooming houses. The buildings acquired through MURA have ranged in size from five apartments to 82.

Common sense would dictate that any new federal initiative would avoid duplicating existing local or provincial programs to minimize funding lost to paperwork. The HICC spokesperson told me there are as of yet no further details on how the Canada Rental Protection Fund will operate. Yet time is of the essence, which means that Build Homes and its new CEO Ana Bailão can’t get tripped up by the politics of severing the program from CMHC.

Then there’s the quantum — $1.5 billion of already-announced funding. That sum is hardly encouraging. Surveying best practice in the world of rental acquisition policies, August and Daniels argue that the federal government should commit about $4.5 billion per year over several years in order to properly rebalance — their term is de-commodify — a rapacious apartment sector that became the plaything of giant fund companies and REIT investors.

I see little to indicate that Carney’s Liberals want to add to the $1.5 billion already on the government’s books. Context matters a lot here: while we’re going to spend over $100 billion a year on defence outlays to meet our Trump-dictated NATO obligations, Canadians continue to place housing at the top of the list of their worst cost-of-living headaches. Those steep monthly rents, it’s worth saying, represent dollars not spent on all sorts of goods and services provided by Canadians, from food to entertainment to travel to education.

To repeat: we’re in an affordable housing interregnum for the ages, and Carney is gesturing in the right direction. Too bad he’s also revealing our traditional impulse to nickel-and-dime on the investments that will make a massive difference in the lives of working Canadians.

John Lorinc is a Toronto journalist and author of “No Jews Live Here” (2024).

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/weve-arrived-at-arguably-the-best-moment-to-invest-in-affordable-housing-in-over-a/article_ea78f796-b6b6-4aff-8569-eee3c03eac74.html?source=newsletter&utm_content=a12&utm_source=ts_nl&utm_medium=email&utm_email=0C810E7AE4E7C3CEB3816076F6F9881B&utm_campaign=top_22333

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