Time to adjust our housing expectations

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/09/2023 (734 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There were three news stories about housing in a recent edition of the Free Press. On the surface, they were good news stories.

One story was touting a multi-residential development in Stonewall, a lovely town about 30 kilometres north of Winnipeg, another was urging the federal government to turbo-charge housing construction in Canada, and one was about the need for the Liberal government to deal with the affordability crisis in housing.

There can be no doubt that we face housing challenges. Our growing population means we need more housing. In the midst of these challenges, many think we should be considering this latest crisis as an opportunity to reset our dangerously inflated expectations about what housing should look like. An opportunity to grapple simultaneously with the questions of housing affordability, housing density and our climate crisis.

The housing crisis, particularly the affordability crisis, seems largely of our own making.

No conversation about housing affordability should ignore the very real cost of allowing rampant speculation in the housing market or venture capitalist raiding of the housing stock in Canada. Aggressive hedge funds and profiteering are a root cause of the escalating cost of renting an apartment in Manitoba and elsewhere.

Our governments need to figure out how to get greed out of the housing equation. Doubling or tripling the current capital gains taxes on corporate profit made in the housing market would be a good start.

Likewise, no discussion of the full cost of housing should ignore the growing bedroom communities around big cities. These outlying suburbs are creating pressure on road and municipal infrastructure and undermining any hope of creating the kind of urban density that would make sense in terms of rapid transit.

Finally, while building and maintaining housing is a significant part of the Canadian economy, housing activity is also a major contributor to our climate crisis. If we are to meet our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions targets, no part of our large and ever-expanding environmental footprint can be ignored. Housing, particularly the kind and scale of housing that is currently considered necessary for a modern family, has a big impact on our GHG emissions. It is estimated that as much as 25 per cent of our GHG emissions come from building and maintaining our homes and commercial buildings. The cement we use, the lumber and all of the other materials we use to build the average new single detached home of more than 2,000 square-feet of living area takes a toll on the environment.

And that’s before we consider the environmental cost of heating and cooling our suburban palaces or the cost of the commute to the burbs in time, money and GHG emissions.

These problems are all connected, but what stands out most clearly is that our expectations of the kind of house we deserve and where we would like to live are out of step with what people can afford, environmental imperatives and municipal costs.

All of these costs should be important to us as home buyers, municipal taxpayers, and as guardians of our environment.

To unravel these competing interests, we need to agree that part of the answer to this crisis has to do with us, and the things we want. We need to start thinking strategically about what we can realistically expect, or need, in terms of meeting our basic housing goals. Previous generations of Canadians lived in more modest housing. And, the larger the house, the greater the impact on the environment.

If we are to consider conservation, energy efficiency, and a more minimalist lifestyle in the interests of our children and grandchildren, then a rethink about our housing needs, and wants, is in order.

If you follow the historical trajectory of both the size of homes, the number of square feet available for individuals in the home and the cost, it is easy to conclude that much of our housing crisis is not so much one of cost, but rather a function of our expectations.

Somehow, we have come to expect that we will be living in houses bigger than our parents and more than twice the size of the houses once considered normal by our grandparents. It is also troubling to note that this is a fiction that seems to consume North America and a few other countries in the world.

The average suburban home in Canada has more than 2,000 square feet of living space, well above the average size of a home in Finland of approximately 800 square feet. In the U.K., the average home is approximately 818 square feet and Japanese houses average about 1,023 square feet. French homes average about 1,206 square feet and Indian and Chinese homes average a little more than 500 square feet.

Homebuyers in Canada are expecting to buy and live in homes that are two, three or four times as large as those with whom we share the planet.

The difficult question is how do you change expectations? How do you convince someone who was raised in a 2,000-square-foot home with a pool that an 800-square-foot home in a high-density area in an urban setting is an acceptable alternative? However, if building houses and housing maintenance is responsible for as much as 25 per cent of our destructive environmental footprint, surely it is time to change our thinking.

No one wants to be first to say that we need to do something different and it is going to be inconvenient and there will be a price to pay.

But someday, someone is going to have to do something, not only with respect to the pricing of fossil fuels, but with respect to the outsized carbon footprint that supports our lifestyle, including our addiction to ever bigger homes. We need to price carbon to reflect its actual cost to our planet. Maybe if we think about our housing purchase as a proxy for our commitment to environmental sustainability, we can adjust our expectations.

A 2019 Stats Canada report states, “In Ontario, the median above-grade living area of recently built single-detached houses is 2,380 square feet… they have an above-grade living area 30 per cent larger than that of single-detached houses constructed during the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, single-detached houses built most recently are almost twice as large as houses built in 1960 or earlier.” Our homes have gotten larger while the number of people living in each home has shrunk. Today, on average, each person living in a new home enjoys about 800 square feet of space — as much space as a whole Canadian family in the 1950s.

If Canadians would willingly purchase a smaller home, as Finnish or United Kingdom home buyers do, the cost of housing here would be substantially reduced. If the current new homes being built in Winnipeg were 1,000 square feet instead of more that 2,000 square feet, housing costs would be cut suddenly, miraculously, almost in half — and it would be a win for the environment as well. Whether houses of this size will, or could, meet their expectations is a question everyone needs to ask themselves.

The path to smaller homes is uncertain, but there is no doubt that path runs through our own expectations of what we need in terms of housing. Hopefully, we can also consider other things, like the environmental cost of our housing choices. In doing so we would acknowledge that we share the world with folks whose homes are more modest and sustainable.

Unfortunately, not one of the three articles that appeared in the newspaper acknowledged the complex problems we need to address urgently, and hopefully simultaneously, if we are to build homes and residential buildings that are truly affordable and environmentally sustainable.

Jerry Storie writes from Winnipeg.