OTTAWA, ON (Nov. 22, 2017): Today, the federal government will announce its national housing strategy.
Toronto and Vancouver are now among the least affordable cities in the world. Toronto’s housing prices jumped nearly 33 per cent in 2016. The average home now costs roughly $875,000. The average detached homes have reached nearly $1.6 million. Vancouver is now the only Canadian city with average prices – for both ground-level houses and condos – exceeding $1 million. The federal government has recognized that this is a growing problem.
However, it will require that the government strike a balance between investing in affordable housing and supporting affordable and responsible homeownership in the market-based share of the housing market. Last week, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute released a new study, A Home to Call our Own: A Federal Strategy for Affordable and Responsible Homeownership.
“We believe that affordable and responsible homeownership carries with it considerable economic and social benefits,” said Munk Senior Fellow Sean Speer and Jane Londerville. “Homeownership ought to be a major part of the federal government’s vision of inclusive growth.”
In the Macdonald-Laurier Institute study, A Home to Call our Own: A Federal Strategy for Affordable and Responsible Homeownership, the authors explain that federal housing policy should start to look like it was purposefully designed rather than a mishmash of disparate initiatives and measures, explain the authors.
“Current federal housing policy lacks coherence, regularly enacted with little focus on consistency or compatibility with other housing-related policies. Policymakers should aim to replace this Bride of Frankenstein with a carefully conceived strategy,” said Munk Senior Fellow Sean Speer and Jane Londerville. “Adopting the principles and recommendations set out in this paper would, in our view, help to ensure that the National Housing Strategy can be a key plank in such an agenda.”
For more information media are invited to contact:
Cole Hogan
Communications Manager
613.482.8327 x105
cole.hogan@macdonaldlaurier.ca
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Sean Speer is a Munk Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
Jane Londerville is a retired Associate Professor from the University of Guelph, where she taught real estate finance and appraisal in the B.Comm program in Real Estate and Housing for over 20 years.
The Macdonald-Laurier Institute is the only non-partisan, independent national public policy think tank in Ottawa focusing on the full range of issues that fall under the jurisdiction of the federal government.
