Pellerin: Ottawa's housing crisis can be fixed. Read this book

Ottawa housing expert Carolyn Whitzman’s new book looks at home-building policies that work — and those that don't.

Published Sep 20, 2024  •  Last updated 0 minutes ago  •  3 minute read

Construction workers build new homes in a development in Ottawa. Photo by Sean Kilpatrick /THE CANADIAN PRESS

HUNTSVILLE, ALA. —The housing crisis is nothing if not complex, the result of decades of misaligned and dead-wrong policies. Reading an advanced copy of Ottawa-based housing policy expert Carolyn Whitzman’s upcoming book, Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis, you’d be forgiven for feeling a little daunted by the enormity of the task. But one thing is certain: If we don’t build more housing quickly, we won’t solve the problem.

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The news this week that Ottawa is barely hitting 22 percent of its 2024 target of 12,583 housing starts is frustrating. In the three years I’ve been coming to Huntsville, Alabama (this week is my 17th visit), I’ve seen a high number of new homes being built, in a city that has yet to hit 250,000 people, barely a quarter of Ottawa’s population. Huntsville hit record growth in 2023 with over 8,400 new homes built throughout the city. Casual observation and conversations with local real-estate experts tell me last year was not an outlier.

If Ottawa, capital city of a G7 country, built new homes at the same rate as this medium-sized northern Alabama town, we’d be adding over 33,000 new units a year. Instead, between January and June this year, construction began on 1,383 apartments, 670 town houses, 38 semi-detached and 439 single-family homes, while construction was finished on another 4,209 homes. We’re not measuring up.

That’s not new. “Over a quarter million homes were completed in 1973 and 1977,” Whitzman writes. “Just under 220,000 were constructed in 2022, after dipping to a low of 120,000 in 1995.” Canada’s population in the mid-1970s was about half what it is today.

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Of course, as Whitzman argues in this book and elsewhere, it’s not just about building new units. It’s also about building non-market units — including public housing. She systematically goes through all the elements that can help us fix the crisis, with solutions that have shown they can work.

Home Truths is a unicorn of a book. Clear and concise, comprehensive yet accessible, well-researched without being heavy or jargon-y. In a little over 200 pages (plus end notes) Whitzman gives us a comprehensive and extremely well-researched overview of what the housing problem is, how we got to where we are and how we can set about fixing it.

And she can be deliciously blunt when needed. One example that really caught my eye is the discussion about the capital gains exemption on primary residences and how it contributed to the mess we’re in, where most people who don’t already own a home can’t reach the first rung of the home ownership ladder unless they inherit or accidentally trip over a quarter of a million dollars to use as downpayment.

Whitzman rejects the class-based rhetoric that assumes the housing crisis is capitalism working as intended. “Like the climate crisis,” she writes on the first page of the introduction, “the housing crisis resulted from a series of political decisions that built up over time to pose a critical threat to all Canadians. Other capitalist countries made better decisions, with better results.”

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Home Truths is the work of a passionate policy nerd who wants the rest of us to see what research (hers and other people’s) shows and equip us with the knowledge we need to demand better from policymakers. Call it a balanced approach that works for the largest number of people.

To be perfectly honest, there are bits in the book — especially at the beginning — that made me feel discouraged. Fortunately, that feeling didn’t last. Whitzman has managed to make this old cynical soul become hopeful again that if we start doing the right things, the generation that includes my kids and those who’ll come after may just be able to enjoy a roof over their heads that doesn’t cost them half (or more) of their income, and think that that’s normal.

Because it should be.

Brigitte Pellerin (they/them) is an Ottawa writer.

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Carolyn Whitzman’s Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis, published by On Point Press, will be available in October.

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