Urgent action needed to fix ‘broken’ housing system: Habitat WR

Urgent action is needed to ensure the dream of local homeownership doesn’t fall out of reach.

That’s according to the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity which suggests the realities of the region’s housing market, like in many other parts of the province and the country, are “not great.”

“[Even] at $85,000 a year, you cannot afford a house–the math just doesn’t work.” said Philip Mills, CEO, Habitat for Humanity Waterloo Region.

“If you were to buy the average townhouse in the region, [which] in June [cost] $665,000, your mortgage on that would be over $4,000 a month or 56 per cent of your income,” Mills continued. “That’s before you even start talking about what taxes are taking off.”

By comparison, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation defines housing as ‘affordable‘ only if it costs less than 30 per cent of pre-tax household earnings.

“This is really bad,” said Mills, who then went on to suggest the status quo solution of throwing money at the problem isn’t a solution at all.

“The governments are doing a lot of what they can but the reality is, by and large, governments don’t build homes,” Mills said. “What we need to start finding, what I’m hoping we can find as a community, are some solutions that don’t require massive government investment, that don’t require ongoing grants of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. How do we find a way to just fix a broken system?”

“We’ve got folks who are living in encampments and on the street and we’ve got people who are working hard, making decent wages, who also can’t afford to live. How broken does something have to be that, at $85,000 a year, you still actually can’t afford to live in our region–that’s insanity.”

Mills went on to also suggest the high price of homeownership will likely continue to see professionals who may be considering relocating to the region instead choosing to move to other areas where their money goes further.

“We as the region need to be able to connect our current region to the future self we want it to be, the future region we wish we had that has affordable housing, that has people who are here and it is stable,” he said. “That takes choices now and, if we don’t make those choices now, […] we as a region are going to wake up [asking], ‘what happened?’.”

“What happened to our community that used to be thriving? What happened to our community that was this wonderful space to live and to grow because we haven’t done what we needed to today to make that reality in five to ten or 15 to 30 years? We have to start doing work now [because] this stuff takes time [and] we’re already behind, to be honest.”