Affordable housing in Canada

Affordable housing in Canada is living spaces that are deemed financially accessible to those with a median household income in Canada. The property ladder continuum of affordable housing in Canada includes market (affordable rental housing and affordable home ownership/shared ownership and rent-to-buy), non-market (affordable rental housing and affordable home ownership), and government-subsidized housing (emergency shelters, transitional housing, and public housing).

Housing affordability is generally measured based on a shelter-cost-to-income ratio (STIR) of 30% by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), the national housing agency of Canada. Changes to either the cost of housing or income affect affordability. Demographics and social geography inform affordability pressures on different groups of people. According to the OECD, Canada's "price-to-income", "price-to-rent ratio", and "housing cost over-burden rate" is significantly higher compared to the other 38 countries.

As of 2021, 68.55% of Canadian families owned their homes, up from 60% in 1999. About two thirds of households live in homes they own while the other third are in rental housing. As of 2018 Canada's housing marketplace provided housing for approximately 80% of Canadian households for both homeowners and renters.

According to the National Housing Strategy Act, 2019, affordable housing has changed into a human rights issue rather than an investment opportunity in Canada. Canada does not have a large amount of social housing, and some people have argued against it because they believe it goes against capitalism. Furthermore, concerns exist regarding the possibility of inadequate supervision, a trend observed in government-driven social housing initiatives worldwide, particularly in instances involving socialist policies. Skeptics suggest that this concern might be relevant in any country embracing such an approach, especially when it comes to program execution, distribution of housing units, and maintaining and standardizing those units. Canada has also not invested in large rental areas like Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries have done to alleviate housing pressures as the country pursued for higher immigration rates. Canada does not have a renters' union like Sweden has to bargain affordable rental for tenants and to ensure rental market security for the underprivileged and working class. Across Canada, people have been asking the government to match affordable housing to the set immigration levels, while the government annually welcomes 500,000 new permanent residents, 100,000 new refugees on permanent status, and more than 800,000 foreign nationals into the country on study visas and temporary work visas. In 2022, the CMHC reported that only 14.12% of the approved affordable houses were built largely due to incompetent project management. In 2023, the CMHC suggested a long-term plan for making housing affordable by at least 2030, they approximated that in the next seven years annually 500,000 housing units are needed to achieve it. Housing affordability in Canada has been continuously deteriorating since the mid-2000s, and housing policies have weakened since the late 1980s due to the departure from cooperative federalism.

Concerns have been raised that Canada's "rental crisis"—a decrease in affordable rental units—has been exacerbated by the financialization of housing. Additionally, real estate investment trusts' (REIT) use of crisis support measures by CMHC as loopholes to further benefit their interests, and their ability to get preferential mortgage lending rates and access to National Housing Strategy low-interest loans and grants - which are effectively subsidies - without contributing to affordable housing, the primary objective of these lenders, has raised concerns in the public.