Housing affordability will inevitably dominate the political agenda as election debates intensify. For millions of Canadians, the question is whether they will ever be able to move from paying for housing to owning it—and building more homes will not solve that problem if they cannot get through the door.

The political response has rightly focused on supply. Canada needs to build more homes, and we need to build them faster. But after decades working across development, construction and investment, I have come to believe that the housing problem is not simply a shortage of buildings. It is a system that is not working well together. The way we build, finance and access ownership have become separate conversations, when they need to be part of the same solution.

The numbers show why. According to Statistics Canada in 2023, the median renting family under 35 had just $12,000 in liquid assets. Even if that entire amount were put toward a home purchase, the median family would still have been $80,000 short of a 20 per cent down payment. For renting families aged 35 to 44, the median shortfall was $97,000.

And the ability to close that gap is becoming harder when so much income is already going toward housing. StatCan found that in the first quarter of 2024, renters spent 33.3% of their income on housing, compared with 22.8% for homeowners. Renters also had negative net savings of $707 on average, compared with positive net savings of $2,835 for homeowners.

The barrier to ownership is not always the ability to make a monthly housing payment. For many households, it is the capital required to get into the market in the first place. StatCan has also pointed to the growing role of family wealth and inheritance in helping younger Canadians enter the housing market, raising the risk that the ownership gap becomes even harder to close.

That is the part of the housing conversation we need to change. Canada needs to innovate on both sides of the equation: how we build homes and how people access ownership.

On the supply side, Canada cannot build at the scale we need using a system that is slow, fragmented and expensive. Modern methods of construction can improve predictability, reduce waste and shorten construction timelines. But the objective should not simply be to build faster. It should be to create a more efficient housing delivery system, so those efficiencies can ultimately translate into more attainable homes.

The same thinking needs to apply to capital. Building a home is one challenge; getting the right capital into a project at the right time is another. Even when a home gets built, the traditional financing model can leave many Canadians on the outside looking in.

We need to think more creatively about how private, institutional, and impact capital can be structured to support attainable ownership, including new approaches to the upfront capital required to get into a home. This is not about replacing the mortgage or pretending that one new financing model will solve the housing crisis. It is about recognizing that the current system was designed for a different market. If the economics of housing have changed, we need to be willing to question some of the assumptions built into how we deliver and finance it.

Municipalities have an important role to play, too. Housing is ultimately delivered in communities, and local governments understand the land, infrastructure, workforce and economic conditions that determine whether a project can actually get built. They can help accelerate housing delivery by streamlining and expediting approvals, while working with builders, investors and other private-sector partners to test new approaches and identify what can be replicated at a larger scale.

That experimentation matters because there is no single Canadian housing market. The economics of building and owning a home in Vancouver are very different from those in a smaller community on Vancouver Island or elsewhere in the country. But the underlying problem is increasingly shared: people who can carry the monthly cost of housing are finding it harder to build equity through ownership.

We should therefore broaden what we mean when we talk about affordability. It is not only the monthly payment. It is the deposit, the financing structure, the cost and speed of construction, and the time it takes to deliver a home. Ultimately, it is whether a household has a realistic path to ownership. Solving that problem requires us to stop treating construction, capital and homeownership as separate problems. They are connected parts of the same system. If we can build more efficiently, deploy capital more effectively and create practical pathways into ownership, we have a much better chance of creating housing that is not just available, but attainable.

Canada absolutely needs to build more homes. But if we want to address the affordability problem Canadians are telling us matters, we need to think beyond supply alone. We need to build a housing system that makes homes easier to build—and possible to own.

Opinion : Canada’s Housing Crisis Needs A New Approach to Ownership by Josh Hunt | BIV