Dear Canada: we have a housing affordability crisis.  The reasons are complex; the solutions moreso. A multi-faceted approach involving every level of government will be required to ensure housing only devours a moderate portion of people's income.

But municipal governments, stricken with fear, are dragging their feet.  If they refuse to take substantive action, provincial governments should brush them aside.  Too much is at stake not to.

Canadians have witnessed the cost of housing explode in recent years.  Exorbitant increases were initially limited to major cities such as Toronto and Vancouver, but now even rural Prince Edward Island is struggling to remain affordable.  Prices in Metro Vancouver ballooned roughly 80 percent between 2016 and 2019 a brief window of just three years.  Also in 2019, Toronto was named the world's 12th most expensive city for housing.

Numerous factors in combination have delivered this depressing new reality: increasing urbanization, financial deregulation and the global flow of capital, exclusionary zoning, as well as decades of idleness on building rental and non-market housing.

Senior levels of government have the most prominent role to play in orchestrating solutions.  For example, they control most of the money required to build non-market housing, such as co-ops.  But municipal government wields the greatest power when it comes to addressing one of the prominent factors behind housing affordability: exclusionary zoning.

Zoning became common in North America in the late 1800s, primarily as a tool for preventing racialized minorities from being able to afford to live in middle- and upper-class neighbourhoods.  Walls and gates are the explicit tools of the 21st century's unimaginative demagogues; a hundred years earlier, innocuous-sounding municipal bylaws performed such dirty work by stealth.

In other words, Toronto's notorious "yellowbelt" zoning that restricts residential construction primarily to detached housing across much of the city is the municipal equivalent of Donald Trump's would-be border wall: its original intention was to keep "undesirable" people out.  The same goes for Vancouver's ubiquitous RS and RT zones, which restrict housing to a suburban style of development.

Although our communities are now much more multicultural, such overly-restrictive zoning persists.  Today it causes numerous problems, such as artificial scarcity that inflates land prices and exacerbates suburban sprawl.  Many people are left with little choice but live in automobile-dependent suburbs and spend hours each week contributing to traffic congestion in a time of climate crisis.

Such exclusionary zoning acts to blanket or perhaps more accurately, smother growth in Canada's largest cities.  Instead of gradually replacing single-family housing with low-rise apartments as our population increases, municipal zoning has instead embedded our cities in amber, as if to preserve them for display in a museum.

Restrictive zoning imposed by municipal government also makes it difficult to find sites to build purpose-built rental or non-market housing when senior government is in a generous financial mood.

Toronto is perhaps the best example in Canada of the bipolar extreme that zoning can encourage.  The city has a "tall and sprawl" housing regime, in which there is massive density limited mostly to downtown and the Yonge Street corridor, while leafy sprawl dominates almost everywhere else.  The contrast is startling.

In both Toronto and Vancouver, the absurd reality is that detached housing can be found mere steps away from many subway stations, the ideal location for denser housing.

Three- to five-storey apartments, so ubiquitous across Europe, are seemingly an endangered species in Canada.  It is this "missing middle" of housing which also includes courtyard apartments, bungalow courts, townhouses and multiplexes that Canada's largest cities are in dire need of, yet have deemed illegal through archaic bylaws.  Frankly, we're doing a lousy job of making room for new people into most of our neighbourhoods.

Unfortunately, while some efforts are being made by municipal governments to ease the restrictions of zoning, progress can be described as glacial at best.  Toronto and Vancouver both legalized secondary suites and laneway houses in the early 2000s.  Vancouver upzoned the entire city's detached housing stock in 2018 to allow for duplexes everywhere, and will allow rental buildings up to six storeys in commercial zones as well as near schools, parks and shops.  Likewise, Toronto has asked city staff to produce a report on possible housing options for its restrictive "yellowbelt."

But actions haven't been nearly enough in either city.  Both locations continue to suffocate under suburban-style zoning that has become an anachronism in the 21st century.

In many ways, the amount of housing major Canadian cities allow has actually regressed over the decades.  Low-rise apartments that would have been legal in much of Toronto and Vancouver in the early 1900s are not permittable today.

Easing residential zoning restrictions would offer numerous benefits, including reduced construction costs, shorter commute times, a stronger justification for public transit and cycling infrastructure, fewer carbon emissions, more cultural and social hubs, decreased social isolation, as well as cities that are safer and offer more opportunities for children to play.

Sadly, a lack of action by municipal government has impeded such progress.  This is mostly due to city councillors who defer to noisy landowners opposing change.  Politicians become afraid for their re-election prospects if they dare propose even the slightest transformation to accommodate population growth.

Ironically, such opposition to change often stems from the political right, despite politicians of this persuasion frequently proclaiming themselves to be champions of choice, free enterprise and less government.

If cities won't allow a reasonable amount of housing, provincial government should overrule them.  Constitutionally, cities don't exist as a level of government in Canada; as the old cliché goes, cities are creatures of the province, and municipal government is only created at the pleasure of provincial government.  If cowardly city councillors are preventing a reasonable amount of housing from being built in their communities, they involvement in city planning should be temporarily brushed aside by provinces.  Such actions would be justified by a benevolent desire to restore affordability to housing.

Such a scenario would certainly not be ideal.  In this era of looming demagogic populism, we need more democracy and citizen input, not less.  The process of democracy can be messy; it often unfolds at the speed of molasses.  And it's generally worth the wait, as it tends to lead to the best outcomes.

But if city councils endlessly debate whether to build new housing at all, or to which small corner of the city it should be condemned to as opposed to how to best integrate new housing appropriately into every neighbourhood they are undermining the needs of the next generation of Canadians.

If municipal government refuses to play its part in solving housing affordability, provinces must be willing to intervene.  Most Canadians struggle with excessive housing prices; it's increasingly common for the majority of a person's income to be spent solely on rent or mortgage payments.

Politicians inert with fear due to small cabals of over-privileged residents dominating the housing conservation would be wise to remember that the quiet people struggling to pay for housing are the ones who will ultimately determine whether public representatives will be re-elected.

Photo Credit: CBC News