Thank you very much.

Good afternoon. I'm Ray Sullivan. I'm representing CHRA, the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association. CHRA is the national voice for community housing. We're a membership-based association that represents non-profit, co-op, public and community housing as well as service agencies, advocacy organizations and municipal and provincial governments.

We believe we need to more than double the relative share of non-market community housing. We're not alone. Scotiabank has also called for doubling the supply of social housing. More recently, RBC has called for quadrupling the rate at which we're building non-profit community housing.

Why does it feel like we're playing catch-up? To understand the current housing crisis, we have to go back earlier than 2006, and we have to understand some key economic principles.

One, there is one single housing market. From someone living in a multi-million dollar mansion to someone sleeping on a park bench and all of us in between, the forces that impact one part of that market also impact all the other parts.

Two, housing is directly linked to economic productivity. Specifically, there's evidence that increasing the supply of non-market community housing leads to gains in per capita GDP. It's not a coincidence that our productivity is dropping as our housing crisis is increasing. It's not a coincidence that productivity is declining as the share of non-market community housing is also dropping.

For context, let's go back before 2006. From the mid-1960s to 1993, the federal government directly supported and financed the development of co-op and non-profit housing. We reached points where 7% to 8% of housing supply was permanently affordable outside of the speculative market. We reached points where 15% to 20% of housing starts were non-market community housing. Then we stopped.

Starting in 1993, the federal government downloaded housing to provinces and territories. Because they don't have the same fiscal capacity as the federal government, provinces and territories couldn't, or chose not to, support that continued investment. We faced more than a decade where the new supply of affordable housing was interrupted. To make things worse, with the creation of strata condo title and changes in tax and investment policy, the private market stopped building much rental housing at all. For a whole generation, we virtually stopped building new affordable rental housing. Current generations are paying the price.

By the early 2000s, the federal government started its slow return. By 2005 they dipped their toes back into the water with a cost-shared federal-provincial program, called the affordable housing initiative, or AHI, which was later renamed as investing in affordable housing, or IAH. These federal programs, as well as others addressing homelessness, were sustained from 2006 to 2014. In the first decade of the new millennium, investment was modest. AHI created about 50,000 new homes.

Then it picked up in the next decade. From 2011 to 2019, IAH created 420,000 new affordable homes. In my former roles managing and developing non-profit housing, I was involved in creating a few hundred of those, including the Beaver Barracks project that Dr. Whitzman mentioned.

Those programs had some strengths. For example, they allowed for acquisition and rehabilitation of existing rental housing. They also had weaknesses, such as overlooking the important role of the federal superpower of direct below-market lending. They in fact forced most non-profit developers to go to private banks at market rates.

In 2017, with the national housing strategy, the federal government did more than just dip its toes in the water. It jumped back in with both feet. Significantly, it brought back direct below-market federal financing for affordable rental housing. Timing was good because the private sector was also returning back to purpose-built rental housing.

In 2017, none of us would have predicted the pandemic and the resulting economic shift. Making things a little bit worse, the national housing strategy programs didn't respond quickly enough to that economic shift. We're playing a bit of catch-up now in the last six months. More importantly, and this is what I want to emphasize, we're actually playing catch-up from 1993—from neglecting affordable rental housing, especially co-op and non-profit housing, for a generation.

In the early 1970s, Canadian housing policy was described as “programs in search of a policy”. Fifty years later, this is still the case. We have not adequately connected housing policy to broader economic and social policy. We haven't adequately connected social and community housing policy to objectives in the broader housing market.

The rental market and ownership market are fundamentally connected. We can't have a functioning and fair housing market until everyone has access to a decent, affordable home. This requires a commitment to more than double the share of non-market community housing. This was true from 2006 to 2015, and it is true today.

Thank you for your time and attention.

I look forward to your questions.