The Future of Housing in Canada
by Daniel Duffin
In the future, a man wakes up in his 50 square foot apartment, a luxury in the modern world. He rolls out of bed, opens his door, and steps out into the street to get breakfast. He sits down at a communal cafeteria to eat. The cafeteria table stretches along the entire street where everyone else exits their micro-apartments, sleeping pods, or shanty tents that are squished between kitchens, bathrooms and food stands that are bustling with people. No more cars or highways or trees or parks. The sunlight is blocked by the super tall skyscrapers surrounding his “apartment”.
The man is young and willing to cut corners to get a jump at his dream career. Jobs in the city pay well, but they limit the options for housing. His 50 square foot apartment still costs him over half his paycheck in rent. This may sound similar to the crisis we find ourselves in today, and there’s a reason why. This city is Toronto.
By 2050, Canada’s population could grow to over 45 million people (UN 2019). What will that country look like? Picture Toronto, 50 years from now. If it’s anything like our urban environment today, skyscrapers will grow to touch the sky and suburban single-family homes will spread across the horizon, replacing the natural landscape we recognize Canada for.
The Housing Crisis
Canada is one of the richest countries in the world, yet housing is becoming less affordable, as the supply lags behind demand. Canada has a growing population but is far behind meeting the housing supply necessary for an affordable market. Currently, Canada is on track to build 2.3 million homes by 2030, but the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). says that we need 5.8 million homes to be built to address affordable housing in Canada (Ali 2022). Housing takes time to build, and even longer to receive regulatory permission, and with the cost of materials going up, and the supply of labour going down, it is unlikely Canada will meet this vital housing supply threshold (Ali 2022).
Part of the supply issue comes down to the kinds of urban planning we see in much of North America. In cities, we have high rises and skyscrapers. In a downtown core, it’s hard to find any building smaller than 10 floors. Outside the city, it’s hard to find anything higher than 2 floors as single-family homes spread uninterrupted as far as the eye can see.
Such asymmetry is called the “Missing Middle”, and it refers to the lack of multi-unit housing such as duplexes, triplexes, townhouses, and low to mid-rise apartment buildings that are illegal to build in much of the province, due to restrictive zoning laws (Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing 2022). Restrictive zoning prevents a variety of new housing from being built in the places people actually want to live and forces new housing to spread out into the outer suburbs, rural areas, and protected green spaces. This means getting anywhere, let alone the city, takes longer and longer. In the future, our relationship with housing as a concept might drastically change. If there are no private places to call home, people will live and work and cook and sleep in public.
The Future of Housing
When no new housing is built, eventually people will be priced out of existing homes, and forced to survive wherever they can, erasing the idea of private places for much of the population. This mass houselessness will redefine housing as we know it. Currently, we treat housing instability as a sign of poverty that should be hidden from view, as unhoused people are ticketed and even arrested for “camping” in public (Dholakia 2022). However, a day may come where not knowing where you’ll spend the night becomes the new normal for much of society, as people struggle to admit how much their quality of life has diminished. An engineer for Google isn’t unhoused, he’s being “frugal” and “cutting costs”.
In the city, many inadequate forms of housing will be marketed as a new hip trend to escape the housing crisis. Landlords and developers will create marketing campaigns using borderline offensive slogans calling the newly unhoused “Pioneers of Petite Habitation”. Many people will live in makeshift housing, abandoned homes, tiny apartments in overcrowded buildings, or sleep in public places like transit stations and office lobbies, even while working high paying jobs. Maybe developers will accommodate these “pioneers” by creating more options for those on the brink of houselessness, such as micro-apartments, parking lots converted to hotels, and rows of bunk beds with lockable doors called “sleeping pods” lining the streets.