Why Public Housing Belongs on the Balance Sheet of City Building
Every major Canadian city is running the same experiment right now, and the results are coming back the same way each time: when housing supply falls behind demand, the costs do not disappear. They simply move, from balance sheets we track closely to ones we tend to ignore, like emergency rooms, shelters, and courtrooms. The latest evidence out of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area should change how we think about public housing, not as a social program, but as infrastructure with a measurable return.
A new analysis from the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis, “The Public Housing Dividend,” puts a number on what many of us in development have argued for years. Every dollar invested in public housing generates 2.80 dollars in return. In the GTHA specifically, a 36.4 billion dollar investment, split between 19.3 billion for 22,000 new social housing units and 17.1 billion to repair aging stock, would generate an estimated 102 billion dollars in economic and social value over 25 years. That is not a rounding error. That is the kind of return that should reframe how public capital gets allocated in this country.
The numbers behind that projection matter to anyone thinking about long term city growth: 4,700 fewer people experiencing homelessness, 14,900 jobs created annually, and 12.6 billion dollars in tax revenue generated over time. There is also a 1.8 billion dollar reduction in downstream costs to hospitals, emergency services, and the justice system. This is the part of development strategy that rarely gets modelled properly. Housing decisions ripple through health systems, labour markets, and municipal budgets in ways that outlast any single project timeline.
Context makes the urgency clear. Toronto alone has 100,000 households on wait lists for social housing, and roughly half of the existing 60,000 units are old enough that they will need to be replaced within a decade. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent announcement of 2.7 billion dollars in federal funding for 5,600 new rental units, including at least 1,800 designated affordable, is a meaningful step. But set against the scale of the wait list and the aging stock behind it, it is closer to a down payment than a solution.
Public housing is not charity, and it’s not simply shelter, it’s productive infrastructure.
That framing, drawn directly from the CCEA report, is the one developers and policymakers need to internalize. A separate report from the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness reinforces the point from another angle, showing that rising rents and shrinking rental availability, not addiction or mental illness, are the strongest predictors of rising homelessness in a given city. That is a supply and affordability problem, and supply and affordability problems are solved through deliberate, well capitalized development strategy, not another round of announcements.
The next National Housing Strategy, now being formulated, is the moment to treat public housing the way we treat transit or utility infrastructure: as a long term capital commitment with a defined return, not a discretionary line item. Cities that get this right will build stronger economies and healthier communities. Cities that keep producing reports instead of units will keep paying the deferred cost, just somewhere else on the ledger.
Source: The Globe and Mail
