Housing has become a defining issue of Canadian politics and economics.

As Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute writes in The Globe and Mail: “We’re running out of superlatives to describe Canada’s housing crisis. And for good reason—Canadians face the highest housing costs in the G7 group of developed countries.” The affordability crisis now extends beyond Canada’s major cities—most households in Canada will not be able to buy a home in their lifetime.

For renters, it has never been more difficult to find an apartment, not to mention an affordable one. Rent prices have skyrocketed. Canadian renters paid $100 more on average a month last year, and that includes tenants living in rent-controlled apartments. The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) estimates that if affordability remains where it is today, most renters will not be able to afford rent in the future.

To meet the housing affordability needs of current and emerging households, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) projects that an additional 3.5 million new homes must be built by 2030 to achieve housing affordability. RBC further estimates that approximately 455,000 new social housing units would have to be developed from now to 2030.

Supply simply has not kept pace with demand. The solution seems self-evident = build more housing. And who is best suited to do this? Is it the private sector busily building more condos and townhouses? Is it individual households and visionary homesteaders? Or is it development partnerships with non-profit housing organisations?

How will Canada build more housing quickly and efficiently, with a consideration of who the housing is built for (accessibility), how it is designed (quality of life impact), how much it costs (affordability), and how and with what it is built (environmental impact/sustainability)?

In response, the Canada parliament has added a separate piece of legislation to Canada’s housing policy: the National Housing Strategy (NHS).

The NHS is Canada’s first long-term, comprehensive plan aimed at tackling the Canadian housing crisis, demonstrating a remarkable public investment into Canada’s housing supply. It is a 10-year, $70 billion designed to expand housing options and improve housing affordability in Canada. The federal government is getting back into social housing after decades of withdrawal.

The federal government's return to housing after years of withdrawal is an echo of the direct and active role it played back in the 1970s political era. Take the 1973 amendment to the National Housing Act (NHA), Canada’s primary federal law concerning housing in Canada. Since the first NHA in 1938, it has promoted the construction of new homes and the repair and modernization of existing homes. The 1973 amendment significantly expanded federal housing programs and offered new support for thousands of housing cooperatives and other forms of social housing. 

Some of the housing developed during this period remain in service today, still supplying housing tenure and community to Canadian households fifty years later; other housing has been converted back to market-rate housing and have joined the housing supply; and then there are developments that have run their course, closing when leadership disintegrates or maintenance costs cannot be maintained.

Every development has a story to tell, and these stories can help guide the allocation of funds and resources to meet the challenges in the Canadian housing market today.

Further, there is a rich history of Canadian political discourse on the liberalisation of the housing market versus state intervention and regulation. The question from the Thatcher-Raegan era bounces back: can the housing market really self-regulate? How ought the state intervene in the housing market?

To help meet the housing needs of hundreds of thousands diverse Canadian households, one of the solutions proposed by the current NHS is the expansion of social housing through partnerships with non-for-profit housing development agencies. Amongst the $40 billion promised to housing efforts are grants and loans to finanace new and existing housing cooperatives.

The federal government is also getting back into housing cooperatives.

Cooperative housing in Canada began as it did in many other countries, like the UK, Norway, or Sweden, as a response to the need for safer, more affordable housing tenure. The housing cooperative model was seen as an opportunity to increase resident’s decision-making power and reduce overall housing costs through sharing expenses and management. When the parliament passed the 1973 amendment to the NHA, offering fiscal and administrative support for the development of housing cooperatives, the Canadian housing cooperative industry experienced a big boom.

The Cooperative Housing Federation of Canada estimates that 61,200 housing cooperatives were developed between 1973 and 1991 (Cole). Another journalist cites data from the CMHC’s Canadian Housing Statistics: Canada built or acquired around 16,000 cooperative homes every year between 1973 and 1994—with that number sharply dropping to 1,500 homes annually from 1994 and 2016. Furthermore, my home province of British Columbia ran the housing initiative, Homes BC program, from 1986 to 1990s, and strongly supported the development of thousands of housing cooperatives in BC.
 

Broadly my research will focus on public and non-for-profit development partnerships aimed at increasing the housing supply in my home province of British Columbia (BC). In particular, I will focus my research on housing cooperatives developed under the pro- social housing policies of the 1973 NHA that remain in operation today. I will use the following questions to guide my research:
 

1. How has the Canadian government’s investment in housing cooperatives via the 1973 National Housing Act impacted Canadian households’ access to secure and affordable housing?

2. What can housing cooperatives developed under the 1973 National Housing Act tell us about policy potential of the current National Housing Strategy (2017) in Canada?

3. How are housing cooperatives situated within the greater context of Canadian housing policy, both past and present?​
    

To conduct my resarch, I will identify housing cooperatives established through the 1973 National Housing Act that are still in operation in British Columbia today and I will conduct interviews with cooperative board members and residents and expert level interviews with policy makers, provincial housing staff, academics, and more.