This year, we’ve seen substantial changes to housing policy, yet many people are still struggling to find an affordable home. The scale and complexity of today’s housing challenges have surpassed what any one sector can address alone. Affordability pressures are impacting communities across the country—not just our largest cities—and the need for more housing, and more housing options, has never been clearer.
The moment demands a new approach: a deeper form of collaboration that brings together the strengths, expertise, and capacities of market and non-market partners. The question is not whether sectors should work more closely together, but how to do so more effectively, more consistently, and at the scale required to change outcomes.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, affordability issues that once only affected certain parts of the country have spread to every region in Canada. Today, housing construction is under strain across the board. Developers and builders know that, thanks to a combination of higher financing costs, labour shortages, rising material prices, regulatory bottlenecks, and substantial development charges and fees, the economics of building have become increasingly difficult. Delivering new supply is challenging, especially in our largest cities.
Today, the math simply isn’t working.
Non-profit and community housing providers know the issue well—and it’s in their mandates to respond. As front-line organizations for those experiencing deep affordability challenges, they have long understood the impacts of the housing crisis. By responding to the needs of lower-income households, newcomers, Indigenous communities, and families most affected by rising costs, their expertise is essential to our response to today’s crisis.
To meet Canadians’ needs today and in the future, the system needs a strategy grounded in shared action. There is growing recognition that we can all benefit most when market and non-market actors lean into complementary roles rather than compete for them. Each brings something to the table that the other cannot and shouldn’t need to replicate.
Market actors possess deep building and financing expertise, experience leveraging and deploying capital, the ability to construct at scale, and the resources to innovate with new materials and techniques. Non-profit and community providers are focused on mission-driven responses, building communities that ensure housing can remain affordable and supportive in the long term. Through cultivating strong local relationships, they deeply understand communities’ unique housing needs.
These strengths can be mutually reinforcing when we work together. It is possible to more deeply pair purpose with capacity, matching the intention to create lasting affordability and community engagement with the ability to deliver housing at scale. This is the real potential of blended partnerships—creating a system where each partner is empowered to do what they know best.
Collaboration across Canada’s housing system is evolving, and it’s to our collective benefit. Effective partnership is rooted in understanding each party’s strengths and limitations and creating a streamlined way of working together. It requires resisting the urge to duplicate roles and instead structuring relationships around comparative advantage.
The way forward requires a conscious reorientation to see each other as partners in a shared system, not as isolated actors or adversaries. To get there, we can:
- Play to each partner’s strengths, clarifying roles and responsibilities so that each is positioned to contribute effectively and create the most value.
- Clarify expectations around sharing risk, and structure projects so that no single actor carries disproportionate exposure.
- Align on timelines and pace, recognizing that there can be different planning, approval, and funding cycles in each sphere and that agreement on speed and sequencing is critical to delivery.
- Act in genuine, consistent good faith to build lasting relationships that can be leveraged at the right moment.
- Develop shared frameworks, tools, and financing approaches that make collaboration more straightforward, rather than more complex.
- Establish common definitions of evaluation and success at a project’s inception.
- Embed practices into organizational DNA that normalize collaboration, through effective leadership, consistent engagement, and ongoing learnings.
When these conditions are firmly in place, collaboration can unlock value that no single actor or sector could generate alone.
Canada will not be able to meet its housing needs without new thinking and ways of working. This moment asks all of us—governments, non-profits, builders, lenders, philanthropists—to push beyond traditional roles and to bring our respective strengths forward in ways that are coordinated, intentional, and scalable.
That’s not to say that everything will always be smooth. The task is too large not to expect bumps in the road. But embracing the opportunity for deep and meaningful collaboration is essential if we are to deliver the housing Canada urgently needs.
By moving forward together, grounded in purpose and trust, we can not only improve the housing crisis, but build stronger, more resilient, and caring communities for people in need of safe, adequate, and affordable homes.
What are the key economic hurdles hindering housing construction in Canada, and how can collaboration help overcome them?
Beyond affordability, what non-economic strengths do non-profit housing providers bring to the table that market actors might lack?
How can Canada's housing system move beyond traditional adversarial roles to foster genuine partnership between market and non-market sectors?
