This paper provides context and background on housing in the GTHA to help build a shared understanding of core elements, threats, and assumptions. It was prepared for Evergreen’s Housing Lab. The Mowat Centre produced this background brief on the region’s housing system challenges and available policy tools to support the Housing Action Lab being convened by Evergreen CityWorks and its partners with the goal of identifying and advancing scalable solutions that can help to overcome these threats.

Executive Summary

The Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area’s (GTHA) housing system is increasingly failing to serve the region’s needs. Trends in land use and built form have encouraged inefficient sprawling development and energy-inefficient construction that is ecologically unsustainable and costly for municipalities, landlords and residents alike. Rising income inequality, soaring housing costs and the shortage of new affordable housing (especially rental) have all resulted in an affordability crisis for many low- and middle-income households while environmental pressures persist.

Our housing system is fragmented, with a range of governments, public agencies, residents’ groups, private enterprises and other organizations undertaking activities with little shared understanding of mutual interests and opportunities or shared vision of the overarching challenges, the public policy objectives, and how incentives can be aligned to help address them. As it stands, these widespread private concerns are not viewed, or organized, as public issues. As a result our region faces environmental, affordability and economic threats to our quality of life.

In response to this, Evergreen CityWorks and its partners are initiating a multi-year project to examine our system with the goal of identifying and advancing scalable solutions that can help to overcome these threats.

This brief is the first step in that conversation. Its purpose is not to identify solutions, but to provide context and background and to begin to build a shared understanding of the core elements of our housing system, to understand what factors produced these threats and identify our underlying assumptions about our housing system.

Our current housing system is not well-equipped to meet the needs of our population.