Through funding and advocating for policy changes, foundations and philanthropic organizations have a significant role to play in tackling Canada’s housing crisis, contributor Toula Drimonis writes.
Canada is in the throes of a housing crisis. More specifically, an affordable-housing crisis. One which Derek Ballantyne, the former chair of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) board, contends “has been 30 years in the making.”
A 2024 Habitat for Humanity Canada survey ranked lack of housing as a top concern for Canadians for the third consecutive year, with 88% of respondents saying the goal of owning a home in Canada has become out of reach. At the same time, homelessness has exploded, potentially affecting 300,000 people a year throughout the country.
Renting is growing twice as fast as homeownership, and in provinces where no rent control exists, renters face exorbitant increases and the constant threat of renoviction. A recent Statistics Canada study shows that the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Montreal – a city known for its affordability only a decade ago – was $1,930 in the first quarter of 2025. That’s a 71% increase compared to 2019, when the average rent for a similar apartment was $1,130. Montreal’s worsening shortage of affordable housing has prompted the city’s administration to draft a plan to increase the proportion of “non-market” housing – homes free of real-estate speculation – from the current 7% to 20% of available housing by 2050.
Since launching its National Housing Strategy in 2019, the federal government has pledged $82 billion toward affordable-housing initiatives. Despite these investments, the National Housing Council found that many low- and moderate-income Canadian families continue to struggle to access affordable and suitable housing. A recent report by the non-profit CivicAction found that Toronto’s housing crisis is pricing out the very workforce that helps run the city. Demand remains high and supply scarce.
This past June, CMHC estimated that Canada needs to build between 430,000 and 480,000 new housing units per year over the next decade to meet the projected demand and bring housing costs down to pre-pandemic levels. “This will require action by everyone to change how we build homes,” the report concludes.
Part of that action plan requires thinking outside of the box, being willing to take more chances, and ensuring that everyone who can play a role in ramping up supply of non-speculative housing that’s destined to be permanently affordable is allowed to. That means that aside from government action and policy reform, philanthropy can provide unique opportunities for project-specific interventions and innovative ways of filling in the gaps left by traditional funding methods.
Philanthropy’s role in helping end the housing crisis
Given that research shows that market housing alone can’t provide enough affordable homes to tackle a nationwide crisis that shows no signs of abating, the federal government recently created a new housing agency, Build Canada Homes, that aims to boost housing supply by working with market, non-profit, and community-housing providers and prioritizing the building of affordable housing. It’s a crucial moment for philanthropy to meet this challenge.
“Policies focused on boosting private-rental supply alone leave low-income renters behind,” says Sam DiBellonia, policy manager for Maytree, a Toronto-based foundation working to reduce poverty and inequality in Canada. “Private-market supply will never create enough affordable units for people with low incomes,” she adds. “We need significant investments in subsidized and social housing.”
Private-market supply will never create enough affordable units for people with low incomes.
Sam DiBellonia, Maytree
Foundations and philanthropic organizations have a significant role to play in tackling Canada’s housing crisis: funding front-line organizations; funding a mix of emergency and immediate help and social- and affordable-housing initiatives; and advocating for policy changes that can increase affordable housing. While philanthropy can’t fill all the policy gaps and can’t be a substitute for government funding and leadership, it can complement those efforts in an impactful way.
Shaping Maytree’s research strategy around the right to housing, DiBellonia sees the role philanthropy can play as threefold: awarding grants, funding specific projects, and investing in thought leadership.
1. Awarding grants to support and amplify community-based organizations. “Communities and individuals closer to the ground know what they need,” DiBellonia says. “Foundations can play a pivotal role in supporting people with lived experiences and organizations representing tenants, helping them do what they do best, so they can continue their work.”
2. Funding specific projects. Dunn House in Toronto is a good example of a first-of-its-kind public/non-profit collaboration where multiple partners came together to provide the capital funds and the housing grants to build and operate supportive housing, a joint partnership for people who were unhoused and frequently attended a hospital emergency room.
3. Thought leadership. This involves financially supporting and investing in policy innovation, directly funding the people who do research and advocacy with the government. Maytree has also advocated for a permanent and easily accessible housing benefit that can provide immediate rent support to low-income families, funded jointly by federal and provincial governments.
Investing in not-for-profits’ capacity and infrastructure
“This is a really important moment as the federal government develops the next version of the national affordable-housing strategy,” says Pedro Barata, the president and CEO of Habitat for Humanity, Canada’s only national affordable-homeownership organization.
The Habitat for Humanity model offers various avenues for philanthropy to help, by providing crucial financial donations, in-kind donations of building materials and products (directly reducing the costs of building homes), and donations that fund land acquisition, and working with volunteer builders to keep the costs down. These homes are mostly constructed for vulnerable populations, Indigenous communities, refugees, low-income families, et cetera.
In 2022, the average wait for a one-bedroom subsidized housing unit in Toronto was 14 years. Forty percent of Habitat for Humanity homeowners are working single moms who would never be able to afford a home without the organization’s assistance.
“Allowing housing to be treated as a vehicle for investment is something that promotes the ‘financialization’ of housing,” DiBellonia says. “People need to understand that if someone finds themselves without housing, it’s not necessarily an individual failing – it’s a systemic one.”
The sector needs dedicated investment in its own capacity to emerge as a developer at scale.
Pedro Barata, Habitat for Humanity Canada
Barata says that there are at least three angles that he finds useful in explaining how philanthropic organizations and foundations can help finance the kind of housing affordability that Canadians really need and ramp up housing capacity. “For that to happen, you need a much more robust role for the not-for-profit sector,” he says. “The sector needs dedicated investment in its own capacity to emerge as a developer at scale.”
Decision-makers, Barata says, should focus on three things: the importance of not-for-profit-led development for affordability; the importance of investing in the capacity and infrastructure of the not-for-profit sector, so it can operate effectively and provide solutions at scale; and the role of philanthropy, particularly foundations, in helping finance new solutions.
“Creating programs to encourage affordable homeownership and conversion of unused space for housing should be among the government’s top priorities,” he says.
Increasing not-for-profits’ capacity to build more
Affordable homeownership in Canada, Barata explains, needs to grow side by side with rental supply. To build faster and on a bigger scale, everyone must come together: from those at the community level to policy-makers, donors, and volunteers.
“The first national housing strategy really zeroed in on affordability, particularly for low- and modest-income people, and middle to some extent,” Barata says. At the time, the government’s focus was on providing incentives for not-for-profits to build affordable, social, not-for-profit, and rental housing and on affordable home ownership through organizations like Habitat for Humanity. “While the entire not-for-profit world,” he says, “had been working hard to maintain existing non-profit housing, co-op housing, and social housing, there was no infrastructure across the country in place to take billions of dollars, turn on a new switch, and suddenly start building lots of new non-profit housing overnight.”
Since the non-profit sector wasn’t ready to build at scale at the time, what ended up happening, Barata explains, is that the national housing strategy zeroed in on working with private developers to expand purpose-built rentals. “The past few years have been very much based on the theory that we’re going to get to affordability by expanding rental supply,” he says. “And that works to a certain extent. But the idea that, if we just build more rental housing, all of a sudden supply will catch up with demand and the invisible hand of the market will just push prices down is science fiction.”
The current approach is leading to more building and new units, but it’s not getting to the issue of affordability.
Pedro Barata
With interest rates and building costs soaring, labour shortages plaguing the construction industry, and demand continuing to grow, market supply simply can’t keep up. Philanthropy can help bridge that gap between government efforts and the private sector by providing the seed money to help facilitate more public–private partnerships.
“One of the challenges that we’re facing,” Barata says, “is that the current approach is leading to more building and new units, but it’s not getting to the issue of affordability. We can see the needle start to move on the number of rentals, especially those geared towards families with kids, but prices are not coming down. That’s a real policy challenge.” It’s precisely where, he says, philanthropy has a vital role to play.
Why investing in not-for-profits can reap results
“The way we’re going to get to a balanced housing market, where we have housing for people no matter where they are in their lives and circumstances,” Barata says, “is if we have a strong not-for-profit sector involved in creating affordable housing.”
That requires all levels of government working with not-for-profits to build non-market housing. It also requires having a robust and effective anti-homelessness strategy, like Housing First, which immediately removes people from the street or emergency shelters and provides them with homes. “The private sector is not going to do that,” Barata says. “What the private sector is good at is building lots of things. But it’s not geared towards building affordability because it doesn’t derive a profit.”
Challenge number one, policy-wise, according to Barata: we need to double down and continue to invest deliberately in not-for-profits. “To allow them to build the kind of housing,” he says, “that will address the needs of millions of Canadians.”
It’s not enough to make funding available to the sector. We also need for them to have development and technical expertise.
Pedro Barata
And the way governments can help not-for-profits do that is by recognizing that the sector itself requires support. “It’s not enough to make funding available to the sector,” Barata says. “We also need for them to have development and technical expertise. We need to increase the infrastructure that would allow not-for-profits to take the money and turn it into units.”
Big umbrella organizations like the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, Barata explains, which support thousands of not-for-profits at the local level, are now beginning to build the machinery to support the capacity to deliver more housing and take advantage of the money available. “But it needs to happen faster, and it needs to happen at scale.”
Philanthropy’s role in impact investing
As the former board chair of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Derek Ballantyne has dedicated the past few decades to community and impact investment, with a strong focus on housing affordability. Now managing partner at New Market Funds, an innovative social-impact investment platform specializing in housing affordability and community lending, as well as CEO of Boann Social Capital, an impact investment fund, he believes there’s significant room for philanthropy to contribute to the current challenge.
While a national housing strategy can focus on low-cost financing, provide grants to ensure affordability, and structure mortgage products that are favourable – both for new developments and for acquisitions of existing housing to convert to non-market ownership – Ballantyne believes there are two main ways philanthropy can play an important role:
1) Providing capital to get a project started
“There are often times in the life cycle of a non-market project,” Ballantyne says, “when the group wishing to develop it needs that initial funding to just get that project going.” Many examples exist across the country, he says, where philanthropy, community foundations in particular, steps up. “They say, ‘We’ll give you that loan. We know there’s some risk involved, but we’re willing to give it to you, and we’re willing to postpone the interest on that loan until your project takes off.’ That’s often the difference between a project going and a project not going.”
2) Providing favourable financing
“It’s unfair to expect philanthropy to pay the capital cost of housing,” Ballantyne says. “It’s very expensive. But foundations can intervene strategically in particular ways to assist groups in getting through certain stages of the development and acquisition cycle or step in to help with favourable financing.”
Using New Market Funds as an example, Ballantyne explains how it raises private capital to support investing in not-for-profit ventures. “We have foundations as investors,” he says. “It’s a way for those foundations to use capital that they have, get a return on that capital, and contribute to a social outcome, which in this case is the production of affordable housing.”
Foundations can look to fund housing opportunities and put some of that capital to work to accelerate the production of affordable housing.
Derek Ballantyne, New Market Funds
Impact investing funds are essentially about finding ways to put philanthropic capital to work so that it can attract a return. “We’ve developed a model that allows philanthropy to come and invest alongside us,” Ballantyne says. “More opportunities are certain to happen in the future where foundations can look to fund housing opportunities and put some of that capital to work to accelerate the production of affordable housing.”
Ballantyne emphasizes that – unlike government funding, which comes and goes and whose programs are often subject to political cycles – this type of capital is important because it’s steady. “It’s often the first capital invested in a project,” he says. “It therefore becomes the anchor around which other capital, including government capital, can be attracted to. In that sense, philanthropy plays a really important role in stimulating and moving projects along.”
Examples of community-based success stories
Toronto non-profit WoodGreen Community Services recently partnered up with New Commons Development – a non-profit real-estate development company that works with non-profits, co-operatives, and faith-based groups to realize community-focused projects – to build 36 new affordable rental housing units for seniors, as well as a parent-child resource centre and a social gathering space. The partnership is a good example of how a community-based agency can have an impact on increasing not-for-profit housing.
New Commons – with the support of foundation investors and other private investors – has so far supported the acquisition of almost 1,700 units of what was market housing to become not-for-profit housing in Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, and British Columbia.
“What we need is a whole lot more of New Commons,” Ballantyne says. “Organizations with the technical expertise, who know how you acquire land, how you get financing – what a developer basically does.” Right now, Canada is coming up short. “As long as we continue to have limited capacity to take advantage of dollars that might be available to build affordable housing, it’s just not going to happen,” he says. “There’s a real need to expand the capacity of the overall system so there’s more opportunities and more choice.”
Financing partnerships, research, and reporting that makes a difference
Another successful example of how the not-for-profit sector can prioritize housing affordability is the Hamilton Community Foundation.
Via a strategy dubbed “Scaffold,” the foundation connects people, ideas, and resources through all aspects of its work, which includes a 10-year, $50-million impact investment commitment for the construction and preservation of supportive and affordable housing. “They invest in our funds with their capital endowments,” Ballantyne says. “They’ve also done below-market lending for Hamilton-based non-profits to get projects moving in their community or sometimes bridge gaps in the financing that they need, and they’ve also done granting in support of groups that want to get a project off the ground. It’s a good example of a foundation using multiple tools to support housing affordability in their community and more broadly nationally.”
“We know that there is no single solution to the affordable-housing crisis,” says Rudi Wallace, president and CEO of the Hamilton Community Foundation. “We also know that non-profits cannot mobilize the same resources as different levels of government. However, non-profits can play a role in helping to build, acquire, and preserve affordable-housing units that may otherwise be lost to the private market.”
Non-profits can play a role in helping to build, acquire, and preserve affordable-housing units that may otherwise be lost to the private market.
Rudi Wallace, Hamilton Community Foundation
Philanthropy can equally lend a hand advocating for not-for-profits that don’t normally advocate for themselves, as well as increasing public awareness. In keeping with that commitment, the foundation recently launched a new pilot program with The Hamilton Spectator newspaper by funding a reporter dedicated to the housing and homelessness beat.
It’s something Maytree has also done, partnering with the West End Phoenix to examine Toronto’s housing crisis through a human-rights lens by financing the work of writers, photographers, and videographers to produce a video series showcasing local advocates who are proposing solutions.
Helping people in all sectors understand the multiple root causes of the housing crisis and funding research and data collection that can then identify solutions is one of the most effective ways philanthropical organizations can help build public awareness and inform government housing policies.
Ballantyne points to two final points that housing advocates interested in getting more foundations on board should pay attention to:
1) Non-profits are always governed by boards, and boards tend to be cautious and risk-averse. “We often see the hesitancy with which organizations or boards will embark on certain projects,” Ballantyne says. He sees a real need to build the capacity of boards to better understand risk and when to take those risks.
2) There needs to be a more organized way of accessing that initial project funding. “If you’re in a small community, where do you go?” Ballantyne asks. “It may not be obvious.” He urges the creation of a funded resource, a road map of sorts, that helps organizations access available funding.
“Governments like to fund a service or a program that helps a unit, like a person, a community, or a family,” Barata says. “But someone needs to deliver that service. Someone has to pay for the capacity of the not-for-profit to emerge as a strong effective developer.”
There’s a policy window opening up right now with the new national housing strategy that could fill critical funding gaps. With a more collaborative, cross-sector game plan, increased flexibility, and more outside-the-box investing, that someone could be foundations and philanthropical organizations across the country.
