A Complex Housing Ecosystem
Over the past decade, the issue of housing affordability has come into sharp focus. When I left Canadian Architect in 2012, the average home price in Toronto was just under $500,000. In 2025 that figure exceeded $1 million for the fifth consecutive year; by January 2026 it had dipped marginally to $950,000. A glut in the condo market is just one factor contributing to this price correction. Average homeowner salaries have certainly not doubled, yet approval timelines and development-related fees have more than doubled, in some cases. Many factors affect the ability to own or rent a home in Canada: interest rates, construction costs, taxes, municipal charges, speculation, and greed, to name a few.
It is often said that we are living in a housing crisis. Yet, as Carolyn Whitzman describes in her book Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis, our current “crisis” is the result of a housing ecosystem that is, in fact, the cumulative effect of decades of political and policy decisions. Over the last two decades, housing has definitively shifted from a shelter to a financial instrument.
As this issue shows, architects can serve as advocates for change to our housing ecosystem.
Since his election one year ago, Prime Minister Mark Carney has declared housing to be a priority, quickly establishing Build Canada Homes last September to deploy meaningful public capital to finance and build non-market homes at scale. Its $13 billion budget for the next five years could create 13,000 new affordable housing units for low-income households, amounting to a modest 2.1 percent increase in total housing completions, according to a February report by the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer. Incidentally, those figures are unrealistic. They are based on multifamily developments with a 50% affordable-housing ratio. To put things into perspective, Statistics Canada reported a total investment in multi-family residential construction of $9.5 billion in December 2025. Unless our levels of government introduce additional funding or new programs to facilitate housing delivery, delivering affordable housing to our clients in the foreseeable future will remain a “crisis.”
Fortunately, topics like medium-density housing, building code changes such as single-stair egresses, and modern methods of construction (including mass timber, prefabricated, and modular construction) are moving into the mainstream, and architects are being asked to apply these ideas to increase housing affordability and supply.
There are policies and procedures that architects can advocate for, given our intimate familiarity with obstacles that can slow down construction. As Kirsten Harrison reports, CMHC’s Housing Accelerator Fund is helping with zoning reform and permitting friction, opening new sites for missing-middle and multi-family developments. And as Gregory Henriquez notes, we could push for the adoption of a priority approval lane for projects that deliver positive public outcomes, such as affordable housing.
Implementing new building codes and zoning reform can unlock new housing typologies and increase density on ordinary lots. If we want to increase affordable mid-rise housing, then we need to legalize floor plans that make family life possible. Forego home ownership altogether? Geoff Turnbull of Heartwood Trust is one architect dedicated to building a new generation of stable, high-quality, purpose-built rental housing.
The federal government’s recent attention to standardization and modern methods of construction (MMC) signals a new willingness to treat housing as a growth industry that could benefit our profession, but we will have to assert ourselves in this evolving supply chain. This is certainly an idea that architects like Carol Phillips of Moriyama Teshima Architects maintain. Her firm is heavily involved in mass timber and modular construction.
When leading housing projects, we are beholden to our clients’ pro forma, while our clients are generally obligated to their lenders, whether financial institutions or investor groups. Seemingly, this leaves little room for our profession to advocate for building affordable housing at scale. But many architects have succeeded in creating new opportunities through publications, research, and work on new models for multi-family living. This issue is a testament to their vision and a call to action for all of us to keep advancing the housing agenda.
Ian Chodikoff was the guest editor for the April 2026 issue of Canadian Architect. The full issue can be found online here.
