North America’s housing shortage is a daunting – and worsening – problem. According to recent estimates, the US needs between two million and five million more homes. That sobering number looms exponentially larger in the context of home prices that are now 50 percent higher than they were prior to the pandemic. Wages have not kept pace: statistics indicate that one US household in three now spends more than 30 percent of its income on housing. Meanwhile, recent Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation studies indicate that Canada needs to nearly double its current annual housing starts, to approximately 430,000 to 480,000 units, to restore affordability and meet projected demand by 2035.
Urban centers are becoming more populous, and investment in low-income housing and supportive services has not met demand, leaving seniors, low-income workers, and other vulnerable populations without viable options. Zoning restrictions, lengthy approval processes, labor shortages, and high interest rates hinder housing development, especially in high-demand areas. And there is community resistance to new residential development on all sides: people living in lower-income neighborhoods fear being priced out of their homes by gentrification, while NIMBY-minded homeowners in upscale districts often exert powerful opposition to higher-density development on their turf.
In this context, transforming lives and strengthening communities requires bold, radical shifts in thinking, funding, and policy to achieve real, measurable impact. This is where the picture brightens: it’s becoming clearer what those radical shifts need to be, and meaningful change is beginning to happen.
The Radical Concept of Abundance
One of the most cogent statements we’ve seen of what’s gone wrong and how to fix it is the book Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. “This book is dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need,” the authors write. Klein and Thompson address many topics besides housing in Abundance – transportation, energy, innovation, and health care, among them. They define abundance as the state in which “there is enough of what we need to create lives better than what we have had.”
Klein and Thompson point out that many of the factors impeding the production of housing today originated as means of mitigating the crises of an earlier era: when rampant, unchecked development created a host of socio-economic and environmental problems in the 1960s and ’70s, governments implemented density and zoning restrictions to put on the brakes. Similarly, homeowners became increasingly opposed to development in this era, in part because the wholesale razing of neighborhoods was a thing that actually happened. But over time, the authors of Abundance argue, policy has become focused on procedure instead of outcome. In recent decades, approval processes have become increasingly onerous and time-consuming.
Moving the Chains
No single policy will close the housing gap overnight, but every zoning reform, infrastructure investment, and approval streamlining effort helps move the chains. Moving the chains in housing means designing projects that are financially viable, faster to deliver, easier to approve, and better aligned with evolving community needs.
Traditionally, land use and permitting policies have been implemented at the local level. But the US National Housing Crisis Task Force notes that California, Connecticut, Arizona, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and many other states have enacted statewide zoning reform in recent years. Meanwhile, many US cities, including Cambridge, MA, and Austin, TX, have substantially rewritten their zoning codes. The end result is “a wider variety of housing forms to be built on more kinds of property types – such as small multi-family buildings with only a single stair.” States and local authorities are also trying to speed up permitting through means that include expedited review for affordable housing and concierge project management.
In Canada, arm’s length municipal agencies such as Toronto’s CreateTO are simultaneously addressing the objectives of intensifying residential development at transit hubs and reducing the approvals burden for developers. CreateTO hires design teams to master-plan the redevelopment of City-owned sites through the block context plan and zoning bylaw amendment stage. Normally developers would have to navigate that time-consuming process themselves. Instead, CreateTO awards a project to a developer with the paperwork already in place.
Regeneration and Densification Strategies
Regeneration is a key strategy in addressing the housing gap, providing speed-to-market solutions for built-to-rent and diverse housing options. By leveraging various regeneration approaches, we can collectively create sustainable, high social-impact solutions faster.
- Conversion: Converting existing buildings into supportive and affordable units can significantly reduce construction time, site preparation, and infrastructure costs to achieve proformas. The stock of underutilized city-owned or investor-owned buildings is common across regions in which office-to-residential, hotel-to-residential, and retail-to-residential solutions have proven successful in creating much-needed units.
- Modular Construction: Modular construction techniques can further accelerate the process, delivering housing in months rather than years. While the concept of modular tiny homes is not new, the way we design a site for integration into communities is a significant factor for the progression of rehabilitation, providing different options and levels of service as part of a continuum from supportive to attainable housing. Modular construction is applicable in both urban and suburban strategies as an integral community component. As an example, a vacant big-box retail facility is being transformed into a social service center, with the former parking lots populated with prefabricated tiny home cabins clustered in small, landscaped neighborhoods.
- Community Oriented Developments: The resurgence of Community Oriented Developments (traditionally known as Transit Oriented Developments) strategically places supportive and attainable housing near access to public transit. The objective is to design more compact units within an amenity-rich building and community. Many of these project types are solving the Missing Middle dilemma by providing a transitional solution between lower-density townhouse product and adjacent urban high-rise living.
- Gentle Density: One other middle-income housing trend is gentle densification in transitional neighborhoods and in the suburbs. After decades of increasingly high-density building in urban centers, zoning and policy reform is generating an influx of small to mid-rise multi-family developments that provide a mix of for-sale and built-to-rent product.
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Where Do We Go from Here?
The disappearance of Single Room Occupancy (SROs) from North American cities was not accidental — it was largely the result of planning policies, zoning restrictions, and development priorities that removed many of the housing typologies that once supported lower-income and single-person households. Today, we are being challenged to reintroduce these lost layers of affordability through modern housing models. The responsibility now extends beyond simply delivering more housing; it requires enabling housing models that bridge the gap between affordability and livability.
A single solution is not the answer. Progress will depend on public and private sectors working together, each bringing authority and discipline to formulate and implement viable solutions. Policymakers must create the conditions for housing delivery through zoning reform, infrastructure, and social policy, while the development and AEC industries bring speed, innovation, construction efficiency, and scalable delivery models that move the chains on housing affordability.
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