00:06:56.920So, um, get some, uh, it can be a really, uh, a boon to a community.
00:07:05.100i i agree and that's that's why i wanted you to describe all the different sort of options of it
00:07:11.340because i grew up thinking that that was government housing you know what i mean where there was a lot
00:07:15.560of crime you know what i mean again i lived very close to it so it's like that's what kind of i
00:07:20.120associated with it and that's my own ignorance not having been exposed to much else or really
00:07:23.720looking into it um until recent years and then reading your book and and and getting these
00:07:28.740concepts in much more detail but probably one of the most crazy stats that i saw in your book and
00:07:36.400then i dug into more resources through ai and cmhc and all these sources that you can find stuff on
00:07:41.880canadian housing data that the average price of a home in 2005 was 237 000 and then in 2026 early
00:07:52.3802026 the data is that recent it's uh 661 000 now the price of a home so yeah it's closer to 800
00:08:01.740000 now actually yeah depending on depending on the city these are averages but the term that i
00:08:07.260the term that i loved in your book was unearned windfall that was represented by many of the
00:08:13.340boomers and people who were able to buy houses you know i mean even in the early 2000s to now
00:08:17.660but um there's like how exactly how did we get here i mean where how did where i know this is
00:08:25.500a very sort of this is a very loaded question but how did we get here and i want to get to talk
00:08:31.260about some of the solutions as well for some of the people that are listening to think they're
00:08:35.020never going to be able to afford a home but there are some solutions on the way but most importantly
00:08:38.940like what in your opinion brought us here and sort of how do we begin to steer out of this
00:08:43.100Well, it is a series of decisions that were made really over the last 50 years. So one of those decisions was in 1972, when the capital gains tax was introduced to give a property, sorry, an exemption to folks when they sold their property.
00:09:09.000and i was actually just talking about that with someone in 1972 the average life expectancy for
00:09:16.120men was 70 years and the average life expectancy for women was 75 years so the notion was you'd
00:09:22.440sell your house you'd live in some retirement community and then you'd conveniently die0.90
00:09:28.360you'd smoke a lot or whatever and you die um you know not long after you um became an empty nester0.63
00:09:35.400retired and um uh and and sold your house and you would be able to live on the proceeds of
00:09:43.560the house and that's part of the reason why your the money that you made wasn't um taxed
00:09:51.960now it's great theory um right now fortunately people live a lot longer the average life
00:09:59.000expectancy for women is 80. the average life sorry the average life expectancy for men is
00:10:04.68080 the average life expectancy for women is 85 so a lot of people are kind of locked into their homes
00:10:16.280even if they're still living in a three or four bedroom house that isn't even accessible anymore
00:10:21.400and they don't use half the rooms because there aren't affordable homes to move to there aren't
00:10:29.720affordable rental homes to move to and all too many seniors and i'm a boomer and i'm not quite
00:10:35.960a senior yet but i'm pretty close um i i am concerned i was i lived through my mother living
00:10:47.660to 92 and by the time she paid for assisted living for a few years and then long-term care
00:10:54.500for the last couple of years of her life she'd blown through any money that she had saved through
00:11:00.160selling our house and not getting capital gains tax exemption and um you know we had to support
00:11:07.320her which was fine for us were relatively well to do but can be a problem if you aren't reliant
00:11:14.440on either the bank of your kids or the bank of mom and dad to buy a new house so we confused
00:11:20.960housing as an essential place to live with housing as a great retirement investment.
00:11:29.380And particularly over the last 20 years, there are, you know, there were returns of 20 and 30 percent
00:11:37.360of buying up apartment buildings and spiffing them up and evicting the tenants who were there
00:11:46.240and doubling or tripling the rent. Rents have doubled in the last 10 years or so. There's also
00:11:53.660been a lot of money made by people buying and selling houses and flipping them, or buying a
00:12:01.080piece of land and flipping it a couple of times before it was developed. Another long-standing
00:12:06.540issues starting in the 1970s is that zoning became a lot more restrictive. I grew up in a
00:12:16.420triplex and then a duplex in Montreal with a single mom who had no problem affording
00:12:25.460rental and eventually, as I say, became a homeowner. And at that time, tenure was much more
00:12:34.360secure for renters and rents were a lot lower so you could save money you could go on vacations
00:12:41.480you could do a lot of the things that are part of a really great life but the more that housing
00:12:48.040became treated as something to make money with and the less that housing became treated as something
00:12:55.080that was essential need um the more trouble we got into so i mean we've been focusing a lot on
00:13:01.960the last few years COVID and post COVID because that's when rents and house prices have gone up
00:13:07.560most ridiculously but even by the late ooze who are talking about 2008 in the 1980s housing was
00:13:16.280at the international metrics of affordability which is the median house price was three times
00:13:22.120the many median household income by 2000 that relationship had broken and now in Toronto
00:13:30.840the average house price is 10 times what the median household income is in Vancouver it's 12
00:13:39.360times what the median household income is which means that only very wealthy people
00:13:44.100can afford to certainly buy a first house and generally move
00:13:49.200yeah one of the other stats that was pretty troubling for me was that one in three new
00:13:58.340or first-time homebuyers are using the bank of mom and dad as i think it was put basically to
00:14:04.880payment and it in i'll just there's an endless number of stats here i could rhyme off forever
00:14:10.280but at the risk of trying not to bore everyone um the average amount for a toronto home that
00:14:17.220was gifted was 130 000 to help the first-time homebuyers so that is more than double um the
00:14:25.760average medium home income in canada so we're talking we're essentially we've essentially
00:14:29.840moved to almost for lack of a better term a caste system where you're basically born into
00:14:35.280a family that's able to afford property ownership or not um that's absolutely true i mean we're
00:14:41.360we're in a situation of inherited wealth which is not is at odds with um canada's values of
00:14:51.760opportunity for everyone and it's particularly harsh on people who have been historically
00:15:00.800excluded from the homeownership market. Indigenous people are much less likely to have owned a home
00:15:08.800say 40 years ago. Black-led families are a lot less likely to have owned a home 40 years ago
00:15:15.840and the trick now is did your family own a home 40 years ago and can have they managed to get0.98
00:15:23.520enough cash that they can let you have a home and i mean there are all kinds of implications
00:15:30.240of the housing crisis but one of the really important implications or the most uh disturbing
00:15:36.160implications is that move towards uh inherited wealth as opposed to you know a meritocracy
00:15:42.960if students can't afford to live near where their vocational training or
00:15:51.600chosen university courses let's say medicine they can't study medicine they
00:15:56.960can't study building if if you if you don't have the help of the bank of mom
00:16:05.700and dad you may be locked out from homeownership forever but increasingly
00:16:10.560you're also locked out of secure tenure forever because again the the system of protection for
00:16:19.960renters was so much stronger in the 1970s than it is today. Three percent of renter households
00:16:28.380were evicted last year and that is unacceptably high. Yeah that's the another another wild stat
00:16:37.580in a in a similar vein that you mentioned in your book is when airbnb came to canada there were 25
00:16:46.620hosts identified as having hundreds of listings of homes that they owned for rental many of them
00:16:53.900were making over 1 million dollars per year from the as as profit from the the properties that
00:17:00.460they owned and by 2018 uh 20 to 40 something thousand rental units have been removed from
00:17:06.460the market so just further you know what i mean reducing supply as these are just become airbnb
00:17:11.980properties it's like it's it's like these problems keep compounding one after another
00:17:16.700um like where do you see this going like is this going to get worse before it gets better
00:17:23.740i do fear it's going to get worse there was a 50 increase in homelessness in ontario
00:17:30.300between 2018 and 2024 and then it's only increased in 2025 um we don't have the results of the 2026
00:17:40.940census yet but the parliamentary budget officer has said that housing need which are quick and
00:17:47.740unaffordable housing who can't afford an adequate alternative in their in their area is going to
00:17:54.300increased from 1.7 million households which is already they buy it's about 12
00:18:00.720percent of households in Canada to 2.7 or 2.8 million so we're you know I don't
00:18:09.120use the word crisis lately the title of my book is home truths fixing Canada's
00:18:15.720housing crisis I'm not using the term crisis lately we are in a crisis and it
00:18:20.940does require really substantive measures to address it or else we're going to you know
00:18:33.180have a generation we already have a generation that just aren't able to have the standard of
00:18:40.940livings that their parents had yeah that's a that's definitely an issue that's i think top
00:18:45.980of mind for a lot of folks who are anywhere around my age or younger um one one the the models that
00:18:51.660were seem to be working in europe and in asia and other parts of the world like vienna for instance
00:18:57.260um trickle up housing economics using tenant participation in the design uh to to get feedback
00:19:04.140and and not only have them involved in the in the process but offer it's in my interpretation was it
00:19:10.860it puts dignity into the environment you know what i mean of the person living there given
00:19:15.260that they have some say in how it's going to go which has a bunch of pragmatic benefits as well
00:19:19.580can you explain just sort of briefly how the vienna models work or maybe places like singapore that
00:19:24.940have figured this out a lot better than we have yeah so i mean singapore is a really interesting
00:19:31.420example because when it won independence in 64 from britain uh it had the housing stock was in
00:19:39.820terrible shape and the decision was made that the first priority was going to be adequate housing
00:19:45.820for everyone so it has a model where singapore owns the land it has a big housing development
00:19:53.020corporation which doesn't mean that the government of singapore does all the building it means it
00:19:57.820contracts with builders um and uh 80 percent of the housing is public housing and i'm putting
00:20:06.460public housing in air quotes because the land underneath it is owned by uh the government but
00:20:14.620it's also ownership housing so um they built condos ranging in size from one to four bedrooms
00:20:21.660most of them being family-sized condominiums singapore that's very small land area so the
00:20:26.780only way that you can get everyone in there is uh through high-rise housing uh and um
00:20:32.620they're sold for prices today between 100,000 and 400,000 so in some ways it's the kind of system
00:20:44.200that Canada might bridle at because it's quite government-controlled at the same time it's
00:20:52.860incredibly cheap and you can get loans from the government if you can't afford you know
00:20:57.760hundred thousand dollars as I say there's sort of a level of government
00:21:02.800control which is hard to imagine in Canada and yet there is the example of
00:21:09.100Whistler which is has the same kind of use can buy it for a certain price but
00:21:15.860you also have to sell it basically at the same price plus inflation and about
00:21:21.52050% of the housing in that resort municipality is owned by the government of Whistler. It's both
00:21:28.880ownership and rental housing for the people who work there. And the reason why it is what it is
00:21:35.100is because it was impossible to attract people to work in the ski resort without offering some kind
00:21:41.660of decent housing. And housing is far more than decent. It's actually really lovely housing.
00:21:47.560So that model can work in Canada. The model in Vienna is simply for 100 years, they have been building non-market housing, mostly public housing, but also companies that are private companies, but their profit is limited to 5% per year, built a large part of the housing.
00:22:11.680And not only are rents super low in that housing, which is about 60% of the housing in Vienna, private rental and even private ownership is also super low because there's choices available.
00:22:28.500So it is possible in the real world to see systems where housing is affordable, where cities are super livable, because if you aren't spending 50 or 70 percent of your income on housing, you can spend it on dinners out and culture and going on vacation and even investing in retirement funds that don't involve evicting people.
00:22:58.500So it sounds like there are small pockets of Canada, like you said, Whistler that are able to make this work. Why is it not being adopted on a larger scale? Is it just the fact that there's too much of the electorate based is counting on this as their nest egg to derail this train that's kind of already set on its tracks? In your opinion, why do you think this model that obviously works elsewhere is not being applied here?
00:23:24.440Well, I think there's two reasons. One is, as you've already said, there are, you know, a lot of older homeowners who've paid off their mortgage who very much benefit from that system. I mean, I'm one of them. And it's, you know, there's not that many people who say, please get my taxes.
00:23:44.100But also, I think that there's belief that a certain kind of housing is the only way to live, you know, like homeownership or single family houses, despite, you know, many examples of very livable communities like Montreal, where I grew up, where multiclexes are the norm.
00:24:08.480so there's a lot of opposition whenever people suggest a triplex or a six flex or whatever a
00:24:14.560small apartment building because they go oh that's going to bring down property values
00:24:18.500ignoring the nimby the nimby people that you mentioned a lot of the nimby folks yeah um which
00:24:24.600you know ignores the fact that if you want a place for your kids to move out in or a cheap place for0.81
00:24:30.620you to uh live in once um you know longer need a large house that's how those things happen um and
00:24:38.100there is no evidence in fact there's kind of counter evidence that the kind
00:24:43.200of investment that new multiplex development brings and the kind of foot
00:24:47.600traffic etc is good for a community your school won't close you have a better
00:24:52.440argument for more public transit you have stores more able to reach customers
00:25:02.940etc so I am a fan of greater densities definitely and simpler zoning and quicker approvals the
00:25:12.900majority of housing in Canada will always be market housing so there's only two things that
00:25:19.860you can do really or two categories of things one of them is throw everything at making market
00:25:27.100housing cheaper through allowing more intensive use of land through lower
00:25:33.940development fees through various other mechanisms and the market market housing
00:25:44.740has never been able to serve the needs of lower income people so you do need a
00:25:49.000critical mass I would suggest 20% of housing that is not part of the market
00:25:54.160sector to serve the needs of low and moderate income Canadians at the moment we've got a system
00:26:00.080where literally the majority of Canadians low and moderate but also median income Canadians
00:26:06.000aren't having their housing need met so clearly we need a new or improved system
00:26:13.680you touched on something really interesting there to do with the bureaucracy of the machine
00:26:18.160that is being fueled by all these um surveys and zoning fees and and this site survey and this and
00:26:26.240it can it ranges from the from the statistics i was able to find in your book and outside was
00:26:31.04010 to 30 percent of the cost of a house can be eaten up by bureaucratic fees which when you're
00:26:37.640looking at a 900 000 house you're looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars of of essentially
00:26:43.020like great government waste bureaucracy added to it's not necessarily waste brian i'm just
00:26:48.460going to jump in and say someone has to pay for libraries and schools and parks and a lot of
00:26:56.860public goods but the problem is that the um responsibility for that absolutely essential
00:27:04.460infrastructure roads and water and sewer and public transit has all been downloaded to
00:27:11.180municipalities we get 10 cents on the tax dollar so what do municipalities do
00:27:17.000their choice their choice is either raise property taxes and property taxes
00:27:22.340are really unpopular partly because they arrive in a lump sum they don't
00:27:26.840anonymously come on your bill like a sales tax work off your paycheck like a
00:27:31.940income tax really visible or they put the charges on new development saying
00:27:42.260growth should pay for growth there's two problems with that one is that growth is
00:27:47.360paying not only for new infrastructure but also maintaining existing
00:27:52.040infrastructure which benefits the people who are already there and you're
00:27:57.440punishing a future generation so to speak the new renter the new buyer um at the expense of the
00:28:05.440often more comfortable established um homeowner or even established renter so it's an unfair tax
00:28:15.360it's regressive tax um it's also um you know having really large impacts on the affordability
00:28:23.680of housing absolutely yeah um i'm probably not using the right verbiage you know what i mean
00:28:29.520when i hear 30 of a home is is wrapped up in in governmental fees like my mind goes to waste
00:28:34.640right away because i just assume that they're not reinvesting it in libraries and they're not
00:28:38.960reinvesting it in public parks and you know what i mean upgrading existing it just it seems like
00:28:43.520there's a black hole or a void of where the money often goes and it doesn't seem to be benefiting
00:28:48.320the people uh like it should i think if all that money was going where it should go we'd probably
00:28:53.440all have flying cars and our own doctors at this point but obviously obviously we're not quite there
00:28:59.120yet um well i mean the the place where i would agree that there's a lot of waste is that i mean
00:29:08.000i had a meeting today about two new definitions of what affordable housing is to add to the other
00:29:16.400six definitions of what affordable housing is it's used by the same level of government which
00:29:21.840is federal government and that's not even counting provincial definitions or municipal definitions
00:29:27.920and we really need a clear way to um establish shared definitions shared targets between the
00:29:36.880three levels of government they all have a role federal government should be financing
00:29:42.480infrastructure because it has most tax dollars. Provinces should be making sure that everyone has
00:29:49.600a decent income and protecting tenants from being evicted without cause and providing adequate
00:30:00.320health and social services for the people who need them. Municipalities should be doing approvals
00:30:06.720a lot faster and should have a much much much more simplified approach towards the right housing in
00:30:15.680the right places so all levels of government are failing and one of the ways that they're failing
00:30:23.280is that they can't even define the problem the same way which is really outrageous to me that's
00:30:31.600not that's not shocking and i i would definitely agree that all levels of government are failing
00:30:37.040so we're on the same page with that one i don't know if you saw the uh the comment by the mp
00:30:42.960housing minister i think it was about two weeks ago gregor robertson who said that um
00:30:48.480the housing unaffordability can be blamed on the iran war i i know i i i did hear something about
00:30:56.880that and again i think that there are some uh pr things that need to happen i mean certainly
00:31:05.120it doesn't make things better but the pro as i suggest there's a whole bunch of reasons
00:31:12.000some going back many many years three decades five decades that go that have worked towards
00:31:17.360housing and affordability and you know the straight-of-home use being uh blocked up is
00:31:25.040not having an immediate impact on housing affordability it's having an impact at the
00:31:30.400gas block definitely yeah i i would agree um something that's about three weeks or a month
00:31:36.000old now i don't think has an effect on the house price of 2025 or anything for that so i i just
00:31:42.000thought it was comically dumb that someone at that level is you know what i mean just scapegoating
00:31:45.920here to try to deflect um but one of the things that i thought in your book that was really
00:31:50.560interesting that i i'm kind of all i'm definitely agreeing with you here is the canada post model
00:31:56.800with um these and not necessarily you know i mean it doesn't have to be canada post insert whatever
00:32:01.200other organization but the fact that you you identified this 500 plus hub um postal service
00:32:07.920that you know what i mean could serve as sort of a focal point with building the community
00:32:12.320up and around it can you explain that a little bit yeah absolutely i mean housing
00:32:17.360building has been built on top of libraries, on top of fire halls, which is fairly outrageous
00:32:24.060to be on top of health centers, on top of schools. I could go on. So any place in certainly a busy
00:32:31.340city, but even in a rural area where you see a one-story government building, you're looking
00:32:37.760at lazy land. You're looking at something that could, well, let's take the example of a relatively
00:32:43.900small town like Egansville which is on the road to Algonquin Park from Ottawa. It has about 5,000
00:32:51.500people and the people who need adequate affordable housing could so easily be served by one building
00:33:01.700on top of a well-located but underused post office. So this is an idea that I've been trying
00:33:08.600shop around uh since 2022 so four years now and um everyone thinks it's a great idea but no one's
00:33:17.640doing anything about it i will say that the federal government's gotten a lot smarter about
00:33:24.560use of its land and many municipalities have gotten a lot better about use of their land
00:33:30.000um provinces particularly Ontario are still not thinking that way which is a shame uh but um that's
00:33:40.320one simple thing one simple way to help um uh housing affordability particularly since as I
00:33:48.060say in my book um there are post offices in every small every northern every indigenous community
00:33:56.620in canada owned by canada post that could easily meet the housing needs of a small community if
00:34:03.900redeveloped in the right way and a lot of the you know i'm not talking about 19th century
00:34:09.020the heritage buildings here i'm talking about things that were built with large parking lots
00:34:13.420around them uh in the 50s 60s 70s that could that need to be redeveloped to make a long story short
00:34:20.460you know um but uh i still find that um governments talk a lot about the housing crisis but aren't
00:34:31.820sort of picking up on some simple things that make a big difference yeah i i agree with all of that
00:34:38.460um i i thought it was a really cool model and i i even in the time that and i i know in your book
00:34:42.860you mentioned you lived in parkdale which i thought was really neat because that's an
00:34:46.140the first neighborhood that i moved to after i graduated university so i was sort of uh i had
00:34:51.580first-hand exposure to some of the things that you were talking about of the of the way that that
00:34:55.900how that um neighborhood of toronto had kind of grown over the years and and been subject to a
00:35:02.060lot of the same issues or benefits of what you mentioned in the book and i was it just helped
00:35:07.100me relate to your story a lot better and i thought that was really neat um another thing that i
00:35:11.260thought was really interesting idea was your construction job idea offering accommodation
00:35:17.820to the folks that are building the homes and giving them um i believe it was discounted housing
00:35:22.940or extremely affordable housing for the people that are coming up in the trades can be trained
00:35:27.820to build homes and then sort of offered homes in the process i thought that was another good
00:35:32.460idea i think i'm butchering it a little bit so maybe you can help no no i think you're i think
00:35:35.900you're right on Ryan I mean in the 1970s and 1980s in the heyday of non-market
00:35:44.760housing there were a lot of union built co-ops and a lot of affordable housing
00:35:53.180that was built specifically to meet the needs of workers sometimes in remote
00:35:59.660areas like mining areas but often in places like Toronto where you need a lot
00:36:05.300of airport workers so you build housing for the airport workers close to the
00:36:10.280airport kind of thing so none of these solutions are like magic bullets or
00:36:17.120silver bullets or whatever but all of them can and should be supported because
00:36:22.880everyone agrees that we need more affordable yeah it's it's very the
00:36:32.120construction training idea is very similar to what goes on in the military when you're sent
00:36:36.120off to a base to go through training or you get a posting and then there's different levels of
00:36:42.480housing offered depending on the size of your family or what part of your career you're at
00:36:46.220like if you're still a student or if you're specializing or you're posted to that base and
00:36:50.620you've got now many years that you're going to be there and they and they essentially give you
00:36:53.880affordable housing the problem with i i would say they wouldn't give you affordable housing i say
00:36:59.140give you housing because the problem in the military that i can speak to from experience
00:37:03.060is that some of these many of these houses that are being offered to soldiers are very run down
00:37:09.140and dilapidated like i would use the term squalor for some of the things that i've been exposed to
00:37:13.620personally um and i don't think anyone's joining the military thinking that they're moving into
00:37:18.100the ritz i don't think that's the case but i i think that there should be a baseline level of
00:37:24.180dignity that's attached to being in the military and being a soldier sailor airman woman um and
00:37:30.980you know what i mean i don't think that what we're doing now specifically at dnd
00:37:35.780um is the right thing and i think there needs to be a major overhaul on the way that they provide
00:37:41.060housing to to the military because it's definitely broken and not working um thank you so much again
00:37:48.260for being here today i i think i'm probably gonna have to reach out to you again to get i have
00:37:52.740another page of notes here that I think I'm gonna get thrown out of the coffee
00:37:57.660shop soon but let me say that I furiously agree Brian as I mentioned
00:38:03.180there's a lot of folks in my family who are in the services particularly in the
00:38:08.680Navy and the state of the housing is absolutely appalling one of my hopes is
00:38:17.100is that with the increased investment in D&D,
00:38:22.280there might be the opportunity for a new generation of housing
00:38:26.440that's not only for the people who are serving,
00:38:29.460and it should be primarily for the people who are serving in the military,
00:38:33.700but also for the surrounding community.
00:38:37.920So I think my son's fond dream would be to serve out of Esquimalt,
00:38:47.100And I would love to see an organization such as Habitat for Humanity, for instance, partner with DND to create affordable housing at the base, which could also serve a rapidly growing marketplace that desperately needs affordable family housing.
00:39:08.980So, you know, there's our possibilities are only constrained by the kind of structures that we have now that clearly aren't working.
00:39:23.020So, you know, if I have any kind of closing note on this chapter, it is let's think big and let's think about what we can do in the next few years in order not to ruin it for another generation.