Access to housing is a fundamental human right in Canada, yet roughly 1.7 million households do not have an affordable or safe place to live.
The situation has been described as a "crisis," but using that word is misleading, according to Carleton University's Jessica Parish, a researcher in the School of Public Policy and Administration. That's because "crisis" implies that a challenge was unforeseeable and doesn't persist for long, whereas the barriers to suitable housing circa 2026 were predictable and can be seen as the outcome of a neoliberal economy that's working as intended.
The financialization of housing treating the places where we live increasingly like monetary assets is the core of the problem, says Parish. To her, the proliferation of "financial actors and instruments" in the housing sector is the main reason why so many people cannot afford to either rent or buy a home.
"Lots of indicators show us the ways in which our housing system is failing so many different people in different ways," says Parish.
"There are some fairly straightforward solutions. They won't fix everything, but they would make things better pretty quickly."
Carleton University researcher Jessica Parish (photo by Brenna Mackay)
The Case for Rent Control
One of the indicators that Parish looks to is the rental housing wage calculated by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives the hourly income one needs to earn to afford rent in cities across the country.
The most recent figures, for 2024, were $48.94 and $44.80 per hour in Vancouver and Toronto, two most expensive cities, and $36.85 in Ottawa. Considering that one's rent should be less than 30 per cent of their pre-tax income to meet the conventional affordability benchmark, this index paints a troubling picture when actual wages are considered.
"Rising housing costs are only part of this story," says Parish.
"Declining real wages are another significant factor, as is the expansion of household debt, which is regressively distributed. Just like the lack of access to adequate housing, female-headed, racialized and newcomer households face labour market discrimination, higher borrowing costs and higher debt-to-income ratios. We need to start seeing these connections."
The encroachment of financial landlords, including private equity funds, pension funds and real estate investment trusts, or REITs, into the residential rental market has exacerbated this precarity. REITs are companies that own income-producing properties. Since they were allowed to operate in Canada in the mid-1990s, they have been purchasing apartment buildings and increasing rent to maximize profits for shareholders a concerning trend in a country where one-third of all households are renters, a measure that's rising.
Provincial rules stipulate how much landlords can raise rents, but if a tenant leaves a unit, those limits go out the window. In Ontario, this policy is known as "vacancy decontrol" and it doesn't even apply to all households. In 2018, the province passed legislation to exempt rentals going onto the market for the first time from any rent control. These policies have led to massive rent inflation while also incentivizing "renovictions" landlords evicting tenants to do repairs and then increasing the rent, sometimes dramatically.
This is why Parish says that more effective rent control is the logical first step toward affordable housing. A variety of regulatory mechanisms could be deployed, such as the federal government tying the money it transfers to provinces for housing to their rent control policies.
How to Build at Scale
Last fall, with an initial investment of $13 billion, the federal government launched Build Canada Homes (BCH), a new agency tasked with kickstarting the construction of thousands of affordable units.
To Parish, the acknowledgement that "the private market alone cannot provide affordable housing options" is welcome. However, the design of BCH has yet to be finalized, and the disbursement of funds is premised on the ability to attract investment partners, so it's not clear whether the agency can deliver the millions of permanently affordable homes that Canada needs.
Her research, some of which was conducted in the U.K., explores the role of ESG (environmental, social and governance) investing in real estate. It shows that even corporate landlords that present themselves as socially conscious and are backed by "patient" pension capital balk at the idea of legislated rent controls.
"This shows that we can't fix the affordability problem through market incentives, ESG linked or otherwise," Parish says.
"We need government leadership both in terms of investment, to build affordable housing at scale, and regulation, to keep it affordable in perpetuity. And we need to show solidarity with tenants who are becoming increasingly organized. After all, landlords and real estate entities routinely lobby for their interests."
