How can Canada fix its housing crisis?

In 2014, while Craig Jones was working on a UBC master’s degree on Vancouver’s accelerating housing crunch, his landlord called to inform him that the Cambie Street house in which he rented a barely affordable basement suite was being knocked down for redevelopment. Jones had to move out. He found an alternative rental—more expensive, not as nice—finished the master’s in 2015, and had just settled into the research for his PhD when he got another call: renovicted again.

Dr. Jones, now associate director of the Housing Assessment Resource Tools project (HART) at UBC, says that at the time he thought, “Is there a housing crisis? Yeah! I’m living it.”

Then things got worse. Between 2014 and 2024, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) reports that the average house price in Vancouver doubled; even outside Canada’s largest markets, prices rose by more than 50 per cent. Vancouver rents in the same period climbed by 70 per cent. The housing affordability issue had gone mainstream.

Nationally, the Canadian Real Estate Association reports that housing prices declined marginally from 2025 to 2026, and even in previously hot markets like Vancouver rents are rising more slowly. But the accumulated inflation in housing costs remains a critical national concern, with over 1.5 million households paying more than they can afford. Canada is now building more homes than it has in decades—but not nearly enough, and not always the right kind, creating a mismatch between what’s built and what most people can afford or need.

A diverse group of academics is now in search of solutions. Dr. Alexandra Flynn, an associate dean and professor at the Allard School of Law, is acquainted with most of them. She is director of the Housing Research Collaborative, a cross-disciplinary research group at UBC that includes HART and the Balanced Supply of Housing (BSH), a national network of academics and community partners that conducts rigorous research and data analysis to foster a more equitable housing system. Her own area of expertise is urban governance.

Dr. Flynn has a simultaneously broad and nuanced grasp of the complexities involved in Canada’s housing crisis and is better positioned than most to know whether there is an end in sight. No single input caused the housing problem, and no single solution is going to fix it, she says, but lots of researchers across campus are tackling it, and some of their work has already had a measurable benefit across the country. It’s early days, Dr. Flynn says, “but I am an unnaturally positive person. I always have a lot of hope.”

Good data, better decisions

One of the projects giving Dr. Flynn hope is HART, the initiative led by her colleague, former no-fault evictee Craig Jones. HART’s specialty, says Dr. Jones, is accessing and analyzing public data to help governments and non-profits understand and improve the current housing situation.

Many housing experts agree that much of today's housing problem arose from previous government policies—or the lack of them. Canada once built public housing at scale, treating it as essential infrastructure like hospitals and schools. But the federal government abandoned the field in the 1990s, even as the population has increased. Some provinces stepped into the breach, and the feds are beginning to reinvest, but the market has failed to keep pace in providing affordable housing.

For those who've been able to afford it, housing has emerged as an increasingly popular investment opportunity, even while new market entrants struggle to get a foot in the door. At the same time, says Dr. Flynn, we’ve seen the erosion of tenant protections, and dominant single-family municipal zoning has restricted the building of multi-unit developments that might have helped ease the pressure.

“This crisis did not emerge overnight,” she says. “It’s the product of decades of policy decisions.”

Subsequent policies enacted to counter the crisis set off other unintended consequences. For example, when higher levels of government stepped in to override restrictive zoning, developers—looking for new higher-density project sites—started buying and knocking down lower-density blocks, actually draining some of the most affordable homes from the market.

Conscious of past complications, Dr. Jones and the HART team are looking to give legislators and non-profit developers the information they need to optimize new policies and expenditures.

A potential early win is using census and other data to identify the housing we need and the income levels where the need is greatest. To that end, HART has created data dashboards that support every community in the country, locating hot spots where housing doesn’t meet demand and determining what kind of housing communities need.

Without HART’s help, many municipalities have neither the staff nor the expertise to identify or use this data, and it can cost between $15,000 and $70,000 to hire consultants to collate the information necessary to inform good policy locally, or to qualify for federal housing programs.

Hundreds of communities, large and small, have taken advantage of these services to accurately identify their specific needs, and to avoid cumulative expenses in excess of $5.5 million—not to mention saving months’ worth of staff time.

Less quantifiable but potentially more powerful, communities across Canada also report using HART data to update Official Community Plans and land-use policies (such as zoning bylaws); guide budget allocations and housing priorities; and revise housing affordability strategies.

The potential of public land

Dr. Jones’s most recent HART project charts the current state and availability of all publicly owned land in British Columbia, with an eye to identifying parcels that could be used more effectively and/or be made available for affordable housing projects, whether by government or housing non-profits. Dr. Jones says he’s looking in particular for vacant properties in promising development locations or for places that are underutilized—for example, a single-storey government office that could easily have housing on top. “I’m doing everything I can to draw attention to places of potential,” he says.

This inventory is specific to British Columbia, based on datasets from the BC Land Title Survey Authority and BC Assessment, but Dr. Jones hopes that it may show other jurisdictions how the data can be managed, spreading the model and any useful insights.

Given that land prices are now such a prohibitive component of housing costs, Dr. Flynn is also excited about the potential of using public land to address the affordability problem. Making land available to non-profits, she says, can be a vital part of the solution. “The non-profit sector is doing great work. Forty years ago, the construction of social housing was all government. But now, non-profits are filling in the gaps. We need them. It would be a mistake to leave them out.”

Another important trend Dr. Flynn notes is the emerging effectiveness of community land trusts, organizations—like cooperatives—that hold land in perpetuity, disentangling it from a financialized and overheated open market and protecting the affordability of the housing units within. Dr. Margaret Low, assistant professor and co-chair of the Indigenous Community Planning (ICP) program at the School of Community and Regional Planning, says that land trusts can help redefine how we think about and use land. “We have come to think of land primarily as a commodity, rather than accepting an Indigenous perspective of land as a source of communal benefit,” she says. In acting as a vessel for the permanent ownership of land, trusts can protect that property from market forces and preserve its affordability.

Balanced Supply of Housing researchers in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal have generated a host of papers on regulatory issues and tenant protections. Recent publications have touched on the disparities among provincial eviction policies, and housing accessibility for those with disabilities and minority communities, including Indigenous people. Noting that we are not going to conquer the underlying problems of housing availability and affordability overnight, Dr. Flynn says it’s important to protect tenancy rights and strengthen the rules that help maintain affordability—to deal with issues of equity and justice as we go.

No single input caused the housing problem,  and no single solution is going to fix it. But lots of researchers across campus are tackling it, and some of their work has already had a measurable benefit across the country. It’s early days, Dr. Alexandra Flynn says, “But I am an unnaturally positive person. I always have a lot of hope.”

Government intervention is key

In a fractious subject area, where the sole point of agreement is often the existence of the housing problem, there is a broad consensus that government intervention is now an inevitable condition for any kind of broad and lasting solution. Dr. Flynn says, “There is no incentive for the market to maintain affordable housing. And all governments own a piece of the problem. There are now a lot of cooks, all pointing at one another, but governments need to step up and, ideally, to work together. The private sector cannot solve this on its own.”

Drs. Flynn and Jones speak positively of some of the policies that governments at every level have already developed to address the crisis. Dr. Jones points to the Rental Protection Fund, for which the BC government budgeted $500 million to acquire and preserve rental properties at risk of redevelopment, and the Canada Rental Protection Fund, which provides another $1.5 billion for a similar purpose. Given the risk that government could wind up in bidding wars with developers—actually inflating prices—Dr. Jones says it’s important that both programs avoid low-density developments in transit-oriented areas where private-sector developers still have an opportunity to expand housing choice. Dr. Flynn praises the BC government for creating its Rent Bank, which provides assistance to renters who are at risk of eviction because of unforeseen financial crises.

BSH collaborator Dr. Tom Davidoff, who holds the Stanley Hamilton Professorship in Real Estate Finance and directs UBC’s Centre for Urban Economics and Real Estate, gives both provincial and federal legislators credit for their efforts to break up the single-family zoning restrictions that have made it so difficult to densify urban residential neighbourhoods. Zoning has long been controversial, not least in Vancouver where, prior to provincial intervention, city zoning preserved 70 per cent of the land base for single-family housing.

Regardless of how the arguments unfold on individual issues, Dr. Jones says the increased focus on housing is a positive development. “Fifteen years ago, housing wasn’t really on the policy landscape,” he says. “Now it’s on everyone’s radar. All levels of government have to think about affordability.”

And they’ll have an opportunity to be better informed when they do.