Changing attitudes is the biggest job

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/11/2023 (741 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Canada is facing a housing crisis that is growing worse by the day, reports Canada’s Federal Housing Advocate in the annual report to the minister.

Canada’s housing crisis has reached such a crucial point that housing affordability, housing unavailability, homelessness and housing inequality dominate across all the political parties in the national conversation and in several provincial capitals of both left-leaning and right-leaning governments.

In Winnipeg, a CBC News investigation found that over 5,300 people are currently on the waitlist for Manitoba Housing. University of Winnipeg’s Institute of Urban Studies 2020 comprehensive housing needs assessment report stated that Winnipeg needs to build 4,000 units per year for the next decade in order to meet the expected need.

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.’s deputy chief economist reported in early October, the private sector must be given the proper incentives to invest more in housing in order to address the need for 3.5 million additional units by 2030. CMHC’s forecast shows Canada’s housing stock must climb to over 22 million units by 2030 to achieve affordability, which will require an estimated total investment of about $1 trillion.

Why should you care about housing? Many reasons.

Let’s start with housing is a human right — it is more than an aspiration, it is an obligation. The human right to housing is an obligation defined in the international treaties Canada has signed and ratified. The human right to housing is now enshrined in Canadian law, the National Housing Strategy Act.

‘Housing’ is a term casually thrown about in these discussions. We are all talking about ‘people’ as in ‘people live in houses’ and a growing diversity of our fellow human beings need homes. What use is government if it cannot help hard-working people struggling to find housing and manage staggering housing loans?

What should Winnipeg and Manitoba’s leaders do for the crisis of people needing homes? Addressing technical issues — as requested by the federal government in the Housing Accelerator Fund application being considered in Winnipeg — to remove zoning barriers, modernizing permit applications, and ensuring land-use regulatory reforms for inclusive housing such as legalizing fourplexes is one important step, but is not the paramount step leaders need to take.

Belief and faith is the biggest change needed in Winnipeg to accept new housing, to accept new people living in our neighbourhoods.

Vocal, inflexible persons wanting to stop housing have been highly successful for many years, stopping and reducing housing on technicalities. Heritage preservation or housing. Tree preservation or housing. Parking stalls or housing. Children or housing.

A smorgasbord of technical ‘issues’ are casually manufactured and flung around to impede people from having homes, because the idea of new housing transforming existing neighbourhoods is not accepted.

Can Winnipeggers change their beliefs and tolerate a transformation to accept change? How many Winnipeggers reminisce about the glory days at the old Winnipeg Stadium at Polo Park with the bike corrals along St. James Street and the Transit Station on St. Matthews Avenue? None do, because these did not exist at the old stadium. Nearly every football fan drove and parked at or near the old stadium. Winnipeggers held an adamant belief this ability to park right outside the football stands would endure at the new stadium, an impossibility in the design and location of the new stadium.

Winnipeggers were brought along by a broad-minded, diverse group of special interest advocates and government employees who believed in a fulsome, co-operative, engaging and consensus-building planning process to accept alternative modes of transportation.

Several thousand Manitobans now take the bus, ride their bikes and walk to the new stadium and join together to cheer on the home team.

The Kinew and Gillingham administrations’ most immediate and impactful steps for tackling the housing crisis is to do the heavy lifting to foster consensus-building amongst the diverging people of Manitoba to change the ‘or’ conjunction into ‘and’: trees and housing, history and housing, Indigenous spaces and housing, safer neighbourhoods and housing, new housing and existing housing, new neighbours and existing neighbours. Housing is a human right and is the right thing to do for humans.

John Wintrup is life-long Winnipegger, urbanist, globetrotting explorer of cities, Harvard student, and a professional city planner with accreditation in both Canada and the United States.