2023: The Year Canada Started Taking Housing Seriously

Let's make 2024 the year we get the details right!

Photo by Brandon Griggs on Unsplash

Canada is in the grips of a serious housing crisis. While it started as a South of Bloor phenomenon, it quickly spread out to the entire country over the past several years. It’s no longer something we can ignore. Happily, it’s an issue politicians finally began to take seriously in 2023.

Not only have politicians finally got the message that we’re in a housing crisis, but they’ve started to act. It started with small things, like Ontario’s Bill 23 that challenged the taboo against upper levels of government getting involved in municipal land use policy.¹ The new federal minister of housing, Sean Fraser, started using the Housing Accelerator Fund to entice cities to end single-family only zoning in many large and medium sized cities. Then the Government of BC, motivated by the most imbalanced housing market in the country, passed the most ambitious housing reforms in North America, legalizing massive amounts of density near transit stops.

Of course, these reforms will take time to work, especially given the combination of tight financial conditions and a tight labour market. There’s not a lot of slack out there. As interest rates gradually fall, it will get easier to finance projects. But unless a lot more Canadians put down their laptops and pick up hammers, it’ll take time to recruit enough construction labour to meet our goal of doubling housing production.

This post isn’t meant to be any kind of comprehensive overview of housing progress this year. I wish I’d found the time to write that post. Rather than being bound by the calendar, I’ll probably wait until the Housing Accelerator Funds have all been allocated.

For now, I mostly wanted to push back on some of the pessimism out there. We are making progress. If you’d told me 18 months ago the federal government would succeed in convincing most big municipal governments to end single-family only zoning and the Government of British Columbia would turn NIMBY Vancouver into a YIMBY success story, I would not have believed you.

The idea of provincial, let alone federal, intervention in local land-use policy was extremely controversial last year. Now federal and provincial politicians are competing to show that they will do more than their opponents. That’s a major change, and one that YIMBYs in particular should celebrate. We’re winning! Let’s do more of that in 2024!

If 2023 was the year we started taking housing seriously, I hope 2024 is the year we start sweating the details. Legalizing more density is a big step. But there’s often a gap between legality and viability. We need to make sure that adding density is financially viable, and that it can be done fast. That’s our task in 2024. Let’s get on it!

1. Technically, this was late 2022.