Four pathways to housing affordability

The Blueprint for More and Better Housing, released in early 2024, provided a plan for Canada to build 5.8 million affordable, resilient and low-carbon homes. Although many of the recommendations have proven popular with policymakers and the public, getting buy-in for the overall vision can be difficult. Too often, those policymakers and the public see the four goals of the Blueprint at odds with each other. They think that measures to mitigate or adapt to the effects of climate change must come at the expense of affordability.

When it comes to housing, no such trade-offs need to exist. Well-designed public policy can lower shelter-related costs for families, lower carbon emissions and make homes and neighbourhoods more resilient to extreme weather events. By building homes the right way, we can drive down specific costs that makeup more than 40% of household budgets.

In this report, we pull some recommendations from the Blueprint for each order of government and place them under the appropriate pathway. This reimagining of the Blueprint can guide policymakers, from provincial governments that are looking to slash utility bills for families to municipal governments trying to slow the growth of property taxes while ensuring communities can meet their climate targets and create neighbourhoods that are resilient to extreme weather events.