Latest / CityTalk Canada / The Housing In Canada FAQ - part 3

Transcript

The Housing In Canada FAQ - part 3 · CityTalk Canada

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_17: I'm Mary Rowe with the Canadian Urban Institute, or CUI, and welcome to the third and final episode of City Talks Housing in Canada FAQ, featuring answers provided by many of the leading voices of our housing ecosystem who gathered at CUI's Housing Future Summit this past June.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_17: Among them were representatives from national and regional real estate developers, financial institutions, all orders of government and organizations focused on affordable non-market housing.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_17: All of them eager to hear how Canada's Minister of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities, Gregor Robertson, would answer the questions of the day.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_17: The scope and topics of conversation, including housing supply, investment strategies, and the new and improved role of government, provided a wide range of opinionated answers to our FAQs.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_16: Here's an excellent example.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_16: The market says it isn't building any new condominiums because lots are sitting empty.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_16: Why isn't there a rent-to-buy option for condos?
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_17: Tackling that one is Stephen Diamond, CEO of Real Estate Developer Diamond Corp.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_07: We're going to have to rewrite the rules of how we're going to get uh condominiums or renters and those types of buildings built.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_07: And basically, right now, the problem has been that the banks won't finance a project until you got 70 or 75% of the units pre-sold.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_07: But real buyers aren't going to wait four years for their homes.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_07: So we have to figure out a way to get those projects underway sooner.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_07: And the banks are going to have to, and the development community and the governments are going to have to come up with a way to get these projects moving with lesser requirements than that 70% of sales to get the projects moving.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_07: The other thing to keep in mind is that if you actually look at the, and there's been studies done on this, on the rents that are charged in a newly built condominium as compared to the rents in a purpose-built rental, they're actually lower.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_07: But yet the governments have decided, again, that we that in terms of rental, we should only have rental housing.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_07: Because these investors that are investing in rental housing are prepared to accept lesser rent than a large institution.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_07: So on the one hand, we have the support of rental housing by the governments, but yet they also want to keep people only to buy rental and not being able to move into a home.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_07: So we have to get the governments moving to understand that rental housing never has been and can't be the sole source of supply.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_07: When I look at the the basic philosophy of rental, what they're basically saying is we only want the largest corporations in Canada to be able to invest in rental.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_07: And by the way, we want to keep people in their set socioeconomic status and not allow them to move up.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_07: It's very, very contrary to what I would believe would be a move to a healthy economic system.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_17: You've heard lots of talk about how housing construction is stuck in old methods and not embracing the kind of innovation that can make it easier and quicker to build more homes.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_17: But Brad Carr, CEO of Matamy Homes, was eager to answer this FAQ.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_03: A new condo is the best fit for my urban lifestyle, but why do they take so long to build?
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_11: I don't agree.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_11: I think the planning environment that supports construction is incredibly inefficient.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_11: We need to accelerate the environment into which our industry responds as much as we need to uh modernize and industrialize construction.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_11: And that's coming from someone who's probably overseeing the largest investment in modern methods of construction in the country right now.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_11: And we do believe that it can have an impact.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_11: But we're betting that while we make that massive investment on the construction side, it will be responded to on the planning side.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_11: There is something broken when the paper exercise of home building takes longer than the physical construction of home building.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_17: While it may very well be a systemic problem, there are always exceptions, which is why George Cantalini, founder and CEO of Kentiro, an Edmonton-based developer, answered this question his way.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_22: They tell us what they need.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_22: We work together.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_22: We had solutions like that when you first of all have to trust each other.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_22: And I think that's one of the things that's broken all the way along the system, is that nobody is working together, coordinating, or trusting that the other person is actually being honest and truthful and wanting to get to the right solution.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_02: Doesn't Canada have a standardized building code to enable construction to work smoothly?
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_17: The primary answer to that, FAQ, is yes.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_17: It's called the National Building Code of Canada, but it's only a baseline model.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_17: And because they're allowed to, most provinces apply their own regional amendments for geographical, climate, any number of purposes.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_17: Isabel Demares represents thousands of independent contractors in her role as vice president of the Quebec Provincial Association of Construction and Housing Professionals.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_17: Here's her perspective on that question.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_27: One thing that is also a major hassle for well, I believe everywhere in Canada, but I'll give the example for Quebec, is the code, the construction code.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_27: There's a thousand hundred municipalities in Quebec, and so there's a hundred a thousand and hundred different interpretation of the code.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_27: Which means that somebody who needs who wants to do a project, maybe from one postal code to another postal code, need to redo all the work and all the professional professional work and all the mapping and the planning and then the zoning.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_27: So um a standardized uh code is is something that we actually and and actively um advocate for that hands help also off-site construction and prefab, which is really, really needed.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_27: It's pro and it's absolutely one key of the solution to bring down the cost and accelerate.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_17: There's one more significant issue impacting the supply of new housing in Canada.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_17: And Brad Carr from Atomy Homes wanted to remind us all of it by posing his own question.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_11: Ask yourself this: if we believe Canadians have four rights health care, education, food security, and shelter, why do we tax the crap out of one of them and we don't tax the other three at all?
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_11: Up until some of these recent changes, as much as 30% of the cost of a new home is taxation.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_11: And so if we believe as we move into this phase of nation building and major product projects and critical minerals and all of the things that we're saying are going to help our country, we have to look at housing as a critical input on that.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_11: Housing is infrastructure.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_11: Don't talk about housing like it's supported by infrastructure or it's an either or.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_11: Housing is infrastructure.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_17: Now, removing taxation from the housing ecosystem is a challenging idea, though I'm certain Canada's Federal Minister of Housing and Infrastructure isn't contemplating that move just yet.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_17: But you'll hear how Gregor Robertson responds to our FAQs in about 10 minutes.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_17: One topic he's sure to address is one that the many leaders assembled at CUI's Housing Future Summit discussed thoroughly.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_17: They were very keen to answer questions like this one, with Frank Ottavino, the head of real estate banking at Scotiabank, taking the first pass.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Does Canada have the necessary capital to fund solutions to the housing crisis?
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_09: To answer your questions, I think there is a lot of capital out there.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_09: And uh whether we see it in the bond market, whether we see it through CMHC, whether we see it through the insurance, uh, whether you we see it through the banks.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_09: It's about how do you find the right capital to match the right projects and development.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_09: And so, like anyone else, if you go out and you have some money wherever that money came from and you want to invest it and you say, Okay, I don't want to take any risk and put it in a GIC, you're gonna go out and you're gonna look at the different GICs, you're gonna look at the rates, you're gonna look at how long you've got to save the money for and what the rate is.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_09: And anyone who's investing capital is going to look at what's my risk-adjusted return, what's my time horizon, what's my cost of that capital, and what's what's the cost of investing in that particular investment.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_09: So when we think about housing, and and for the most part, private capital's building the homes in this country, we need someone to put their money into a piece of land for which they may not get it back.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_09: Forget a return for now, we can debate that.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_09: They might not get it back for 15 to 18 years.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_09: So we need to be able to underwrite, or an investor needs to be able to underwrite their money being deployed with some form of consistency and predictability.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_09: If you think about all the amazing programs we have today, build Canada, build Ontario, all the things we might have.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_09: I don't know if any of them existed 10 years ago.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_09: So, how are you gonna make an 18-year investment when you don't even know the predictability of the tools that might be available to you?
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_17: Though accessing available capital in predictable ways is one issue to solve, there are others in need of more creative financing options.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_17: The Building Ontario Fund generated some headlines a while back with an initiative that prompted this FAQ, which went to its CEO, Michael Fetishan.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_15: I read that the province of Ontario is helping turn vacant condos in the GTA into affordable rental units.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_15: Where can I sign up for one?
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_13: And that's um a transaction we call high arts.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_13: It's uh it's uh essentially a fund that we've capitalized and catalyzed to purchase um vacant condo units in the city, about 2200, depending on how things go, um, and repurpose them into purpose-built rentals.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_13: In that pool of 2200 units, about um 550 of those will be affordable, and affordable based on a definition that's barely in line with your conventional uh definitions.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_13: It took us about a year to figure out how to underwrite that deal.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_13: We hit the street looking for capital.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_13: Everyone's like, eh, I don't know, a little risky, um, not sure where the market's going.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_13: Um we looked at that as an opportunity to really make a difference in terms of that hangover inventory and try and poke the market and try to use the term call the bottom.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_13: Um, and give some confidence that uh you know that there was a turnaround afoot, get liquidity into the market, so on.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_13: Uh very creative structure.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_13: Took a long time to figure out how to get the affordability and how to get the scale that we've achieved there.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_13: So the whole fund's about$1.3 billion.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_13: Um that's an example of where we've where we've, I'd say, been creative, but also seized a moment in time to achieve an objective and one that's um affordable into perpetuity uh and without any sort of direct subsidy.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_21: I have kids heading off to university soon.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_21: Are there any new student housing options I should know about?
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_17: Canada's housing ecosystem certainly includes student housing.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_17: And it's starting to get more attention, thanks in part to the efforts of UTEL, a non-for-profit developer in Quebec that's found some fresh, innovative ways to raise capital for over 600 new student units year over year.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_17: Laurent Levesque, UTL CEO, shares his perspective.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_05: We managed to achieve this scale of the scaling up and this uh this growth trajectory, despite the fact, and this is my main uh point here, that we don't have a financing ecosystem that's actually designed to scale non-market housing.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_05: Uh and so we've faced and we've solved, I think, three specific challenges trying to land this idea around really concrete, actionable items.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, the first that uh Peter from Pita from uh UN Habitat was actually talking about was capacity building.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_05: So it's really hard to have uh adequate staffing for the volume of projects you want to do when those projects haven't broken ground and uh recycle money into development fees.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_05: So we leveraged about uh$9 million in growth financing to develop that capacity uh within our organization, a blend of grants and loans.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_05: Uh it started off uh Quebec's social enterprise financing ecosystem, which is actually quite developed but wasn't sufficient for that amount of capital, and we leverage different uh CMHC and transformation center uh financing.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_05: But capacity isn't useful if you don't have investment capacity for actual development of projects.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_05: And this is a real challenge right now, even with all of this money coming into the sector, where all financiers, especially public ones, want shovel-ready projects.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_05: And they don't want to finance the soft costs, the acquisition costs that you need to get to that uh breaking ground.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_05: And our initial uh solution to that, which unfortunately is not highly replicable, is we leverage funds from students themselves.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_05: So we also raised almost 10 million from student societies across Quebec in a rotating equity fund called the Push Fund, which is our seed money to get projects off the ground and to leverage private capital.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_05: So this is where uh I I believe we need to bring private capital into the non-market housing sector as financing, not as financialization, but really to be able to take the risky part of the projects off the government's books.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_05: Because no government wants to subsidize the risky part of development, and you are looking at higher uh risk-adjusted returns for the development phase, so it is more attractive to private capital as well.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_05: And we initially worked um with labor union funds, but we also recently closed on a$30 million fund entirely raised with private capital for this specific segment, and it's a fund that's dedicated to ETSEL's projects, which I think is made possible by the scale that we've already achieved, that we can attract that trust from institutional investors.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_05: But the the the development uh phase of the funding isn't sufficient if you don't have the long-term uh financing, the definitive takeout financing.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_05: And this is where I think there's still a lot of work to be done.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_05: We've grown uh pretty dependent on CMHC programs since 2017.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_05: They're great, but we still have an equity gap in a financing in a capital structure.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_05: And the equity gap doesn't look, uh doesn't take the same shape in non-market structures because in co-ops and nonprofits we don't have shareholders.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_05: Uh so this is where the solution we need is patient capital.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_05: And the patient capital piece is really the thing we need to structure and I think work on for the next few years in the country because as a long-term non-market housing provider, we never plan to sell off our assets.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_05: And we, contrary to a household that's gonna retire one day, we don't need to entirely pay off our mortgage either.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_05: We can plan on future refinancing and future cash flows, and that's what patient capital allows us to actualize in our capital stack today.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_05: And this is something that we've worked on already with institutional uh investors, but I think our affordable housing financing ecosystem isn't mature in that regard yet, and that's something that we can collectively work on.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_17: So if there's all this capital available and an increasing level of willingness to be creative with it, is there a clear answer to this straightforward FAQ?
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_20: Why won't the market build housing that low-income Canadians can afford?
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_17: Victor Couture, Associate Professor and Cab Rostvell Corp Chair in Real Estate at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, steps right up to the microphone.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_25: Short answer is the ability to pay rent of low-income Canadian is less than what it costs to house them.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_25: Okay?
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_25: And a point I want to make, it's not a law of nature.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_25: Developers are able to build cheap.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_25: They could build an$80,000 unit.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_25: They can build an individual shelter that costs$20,000 and that sure beats a tenth if you're homeless, right?
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_25: None of this is legal, of course.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_25: Like there are standards, building code, all for good reasons.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_25: Say the cheapest unit you can build to code is 200k.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_25: Well, that's more than can be covered by rent from people who are on welfare or even who work minimum wage, right?
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_25: So you have this gap between building for at the standards that we set and ability to pay a low-income Canadian to house them, you need to close that gap.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_25: So then how do you do that?
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_25: There's two ways, right?
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_25: You can lower construction costs, we all love that, or you can, you know, raise people's income.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_25: And I think at the deep end, like even construction costs go down 20%, it's not enough at the deep end.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_25: If the problem set is how do we build affordable housing, you know, soon, then you have to subsidize rent for lower income Canadians.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_25: I don't think there's an alternative, like you have to subsidize rent and fill that gap.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_25: And once you do that, when there's a predictable cash flow that's government-backed, real estate loves predictable cash flows, then it becomes attractive for investors, for lenders, for developers that are willing to accept like a lower return, but in exchange for more certainty and hopefully uh volume.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_17: And before we hear from the minister, there are a couple of FAQs on let's call it the optimum role of government in the housing ecosystem.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_12: Here's the first if there's a lot of public investment, is there a risk it'll crowd out private capital instead of unlocking it?
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_17: This one goes to Michael from the Building Ontario Fund.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_13: It certainly can do both.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_13: And I think we've seen examples of where an overinvestment of public capital can actually crowd out part of the private market.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_13: I think one of our uh one of our operating ethos at uh Building Ontario Fund is to not do that.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_13: So almost the maybe it's the second question people get when they walk in the front door is have you tried to finance this another way?
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_13: And if the answer is yes, we just want it cheaper, then you know, the doors that way.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_13: Um we say it more politely than that, of course.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_13: But um, you know, we we we have a test of need that we apply.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_13: And I think this is critical because uh, you know, there there's been other agencies that have been criticized for this.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_13: And uh our mandate is to bring capital in, to fill that bit no one else will fill.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_13: And whether it's because of leverage, uh insufficient leverage, or whether it's because the cost of capital doesn't quite work, we've seen all of those stripes at uh at Build Ontario Fund.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_13: And um one needs to not have to um not want the outcome so badly that you're willing to do the wrong thing to get it as public capital.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_28: Given everything at stake, what is the ideal role for governments to play?
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_17: We're tossing this big question to two people whose perspectives are long and deep.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_17: Industry veteran Vic Gupta is currently CEO of Create TO.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_17: Essentially, he's the City of Toronto's land guy.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_17: And Jail Akee is CEO of the BC Nonprofit Housing Association.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_08: I would say that the government's role is absolutely as a first priority of stepping in to fund where we know there is no market opportunity.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_08: Uh, and then, you know, if it's a nonprofit that comes forward to operate that with stable funding, I think that's one area of clarity.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_08: And then I think on the other hand, um we need to really be clear about what are the tools available that government can offer through organizations like BCH, um, BOF, and CRATO and the City of Toronto, for example, on how we can catalyze more market and workforce affordable housing.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_08: And I think those are the kinds of things.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_08: I think that to start with that kind of clarity of whose role is what, and then we can start to solution those and compartmentalize those, and it becomes, I think, a lot more easier a conversation for nonprofits to engage, for the private sector to engage.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_19: When we look at the median renter household income in this country, it's$55,000 pre-tax.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_19: That's a$1,375 a month rent.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_19: The market is not solving for that problem, and and in fact, in many ways it can't.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_19: But I think we need to be very, very real about where the market is and what is expected of which actor within the system, because there are blurring of lines, you know, absolutely the market can make a contribution to affordability, but we need to be looking at is that affordable over the long term?
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_19: Anytime you're asking a sector to do something that goes directly against its mission, uh, the oversight required to track that affordability is not insignificant.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_17: I first met Gregor Robertson during his stint as mayor of Vancouver.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_17: I was in New York, and he was there stewarding the early days of Vancouver's housing boom.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_17: He helped cement its progressive standing among world communities with his Greenest City 2030 plan.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_17: And he went on to serve on the C 40 Group of Cities on Climate Action.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_17: Now he's representing his town as the MP for Fraser View South Burnaby, and most relevant to this FAQ, he's Canada's Minister of Housing, Infrastructure, and Communities.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_17: From his keynote address.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_17: Delivered at CUI's Housing Future Summit, come his answers to these FAQs.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_23: Among all the federal housing projects right now, where does affordability rank?
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_10: Housing affordability is really at the top of the priority list with uh the Prime Minister and our team.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_10: Uh that continues to be uh a really big challenge and and the the the the toughest edge of it with homelessness, obviously compounded by many other factors, but affordability and homelessness are two uh in immense challenges that we have to make massive progress on.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_10: These things have been undermining the fabric of our cities and towns for years.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_10: In the case of my city, it's been decades of challenge with affordability, uh kind of getting to the the brink of being even able to use the affordable word uh in a city like Vancouver and uh but clawing our way back.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_10: And I and I think that's what we're starting to see a turn here for a number of different reasons.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_10: Uh, and this is a moment to capitalize on that momentum shift and the opportunity to track back towards affordability.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: Will housing remain a top priority given everything else Ottawa is dealing with this year?
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_10: When I look at our next big phase though, I I have a lot of optimism.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_10: I feel like uh that the momentum that we have within our government right now, the leadership that I uh hear from our Prime Minister, uh, which is is really where it needs to start in the federal government.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_10: The Prime Minister is committed uh to uh pushing the team on this and empowering uh my team and housing infrastructure and communities, that makes a world of difference.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_10: Our government is now making significant investments uh in housing and the industry more broadly.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_10: And we have built Canada homes up and running now.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_10: Big thanks to Anna Bailau and the team who've done a great job as a startup.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_10: We've taken the affordable housing pressure uh to a degree off of CMHC.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_10: It is now officially a crown corporation.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_10: So for the first time, and to my knowledge, in Canada's history, we have a dedicated permanent affordable housing agency.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_10: So they are putting the initial capitalization of$13 billion on the table.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_10: That is moving out swiftly.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_10: There's about 12,000 homes in the pipeline through that, six direct build sites on federal land, lots more federal land coming available with an expedited process to repurpose any federal land that should be housing is going into that funnel and being prioritized for that, uh, working through Build Canada Homes.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_10: So we're we have the components uh for Build Canada Homes in place to uh to make significant progress, and the partnerships uh at the community level in particular are going to be critical for that.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_17: The second of three portfolios on Gregor's desk is infrastructure, and given its mission critical relationship to housing, it merits its own FAQ.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_24: It's pretty obvious that Canadian cities need lots of help upgrading and growing the infrastructure needed for housing.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_24: What's the government doing on that front?
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_10: The Build Community Strong Fund is now up and running.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_10: The initial uh fund direct to communities is a$5 billion fund.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_10: There's an additional billion that goes out through regional development agencies.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_10: But that's really about giving communities the tools to modernize their infrastructure, invest in uh in housing enabling infrastructure, all the water and stormwater, wastewater infrastructure, transit.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_10: There is$17.2 billion on the table for provinces and territories to match.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_10: So that's a that's almost$35 billion.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_10: That is uh a provincial and territorial stream for infrastructure.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_10: I will flag uh climate resilience is baked into that.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_10: It we've had the a disaster mitigation and adaptation fund in recent years.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_10: It was it was very much oversubscribed.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_10: Lots of communities have challenges with um adaptation, with resilience, and we need to be investing a lot more there.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_10: That that we have eligible in in all of those funds.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_10: Um important priority that we got to keep uh driving and investing on before it's costing us many times that in terms of the impacts from the disasters that are increasingly frequent.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_17: And as it's been frequently pointed out in this podcast series, Canada is rich in capital, which the minister is well aware of in responding to this question.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_28: What else is the housing ministry looking for to succeed in its goals?
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_10: Other sources of capital, private and philanthropic.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_10: Uh Canada has about three and a half trillion dollars of pension funds, uh, some of the most successful and uh best pension funds in the world.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_10: We have to mobilize more of that capital into affordable housing and community infrastructure.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_10: We can't afford to do this all through our tax base.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_10: Uh I don't think it any longer is best practice to just use public funding.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_10: We're really going to be looking at what other sources of capital we can mobilize, we can leverage using public funding, really looking at how to expedite, how to accelerate the work that we do and leverage and uh and really uh stack private and philanthropic and other other sources of capital into the work that we do.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_10: Canada has a big balance sheet, we need to leverage that, but it's not all on uh on our taxpayer uh backs.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_17: To wrap up both the Housing Future Summit and this FAQ series, we invited a group to reflect on everything they'd learned and heard from their colleagues to answer this summary, FAQ.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_12: Which actions do you want to see as the top priorities for Canada's housing system?
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_17: The first responder is Jamie McKenna, president of Fengate Real Estate.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_26: The answer actually needs to be simple because the problem is complex.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_26: So if we can have five, I'm just making it up, but five answers, five programs, five policies, five funding models, something along those lines.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_26: Because right now I literally have to hire people that have PhDs in federal, provincial, municipal policy, and that changes every time there's an election cycle.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_26: So we can't even get our hands around what's out there, and it's getting in the way of us delivering affordable housing, which is a top priority for us.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_17: Next up is Matt De Bleager, the Assistant Deputy Minister of Strategic Policy and Integration for Housing Infrastructure and Communities Canada.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_06: We have been challenged through this crisis, through the pandemic, after the pandemic, in a sustained way.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_06: The kind of thing that we thought was a system built from the post-war has not stood up to the kinds of challenges that this country has faced.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_06: But it is time to take stock of this housing system.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_06: We've talked about the continuum or the spectrum of types of housing and the needs that are different across those types of housing.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_06: And really zeroing in, you get to the results part.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_06: Where are the gaps?
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_06: Where are our tools not up to snuff?
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_06: And where do we need to then do more of them and to adjust them?
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_06: So, you know, I think there are some really important aspects on the kind of the continuum of housing, what are the roles and responsibilities?
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_06: Certainly the minister talked about federal leadership, uh, but there are other players, and the roles and the and responsibilities have to be very clear as we uh formalize and define the country's housing system.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_06: Somebody said we don't have uh you know one housing market.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_06: Very true, we've got many housing markets across the country, but we have the same kinds of roles and responsibilities for players.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_06: The the national government, the provincial governments, the municipalities, indigenous governments.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_06: Very important to be able to formalize what those roles are.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_06: Very real.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, labor force, uh, industrial strategy, uh, all of these things need to be much more integrated into that housing system.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_06: So I think the rallying cry is to pull all these pieces together and to formalize it into a system and build on what works.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_17: The FAQ microphone is passed to Ray Sullivan, Executive Director of the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association, for his parting thoughts.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_04: We have a systemic problem here.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_04: You know, we have a problem where we cannot create new supply at rents and at prices that people are willing to or can't afford to actually pay.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_04: And and the lowest 20% of income earners, the lowest, you know, one out of every five households can't afford more than about$900 a month in their housing costs, right?
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_04: We talk a lot about new development, the cost of construction, the cost of development.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_04: The cost of development does not determine the market price or the market rent.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_04: Most homes that are bought are resales.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_04: Most leases and rents that are signed are older buildings, not new buildings.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_04: So let's let's come to terms with that.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_04: But here's the fundamental thing: there is this basic policy tension that we need to resolve.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_04: Do we want rents and housing prices to go down and become more affordable?
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_04: Or do we want them to come up because people's personal investments are in their housing costs and because it's like such a big chunk of our GDP?
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_04: And when I open my Globe and Mail report on business in the morning, I can't tell which of those two things we actually want to get out of this problem.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_17: And with the final response to our last FAQ, here's Alexandra Flynn, with perhaps the longest title ever, Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Professional Programs, as well as the Director of the Housing Research Collaborative at the Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_18: The problem that we have is that we cannot build the housing through the market system for those who actually need it.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_18: If we look at uh housing assessment data, who actually needs housing?
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_18: It's people who aren't getting it through the free market.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_18: And so that's the problem that we have to solve.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_18: And the the thing I want to share or add to the conversation is that we have been in this kind of situation before.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_18: We've been in this situation when we introduced a national healthcare strategy.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_18: We've been in this situation when we needed employment insurance because there were too many people who didn't have necessary income, when we had too many people who didn't have access to education.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_18: So we are at that crossroads now when it comes to housing, when it comes to affordable and deeply affordable housing.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_18: That's the problem that we need to solve.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_17: Lots of hopeful ideas, but still a lot more questions than answers on how we turn these insights into concrete actions.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_17: And from our compact corner of the continuum, CUI will keep doing its part to help move everything forward.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_17: What we hear loud and clear is that housing in Canada is a system that needs transformation, which is what we are all engaged in doing, because the time has to be now.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_17: Hope we also helped answer some of your questions about Canada's housing ecosystem.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_17: You can find more resources and ideas at our website, which is canerb.org.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_17: Citalk's Housing in Canada FAQ series was produced for CUI by Andre La Riviera at Purple Pro Solutions.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_17: I'm Mary Rowe.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_17: Thanks for listening.