Surranna Sandy
Workforce housing affordability in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area is at a critical juncture: without it, we are losing our workforce talent and facing increased service delivery costs and system pressures, costing us up to $8 million in lost annually.
The GTHA needs roughly 15,000 affordable workforce housing units a year. It is producing fewer than 5,000.
That gap is not a mystery. We have the research. We have the panels. We have the reports. What we have not had is an honest conversation about who gets to define what the problem actually is.
Because who defines the problem determines who the solution serves.
Developers often point to approvals. Too slow, too costly, too uncertain. Fix the process and supply follows.
Policy analysts often point to financing. The numbers do not pencil without subsidy. Fix the funding models and the units come.
Both of those things are true. Neither of them is the whole picture. And to be clear: the people making these arguments are not wrong, and many are working seriously on real solutions. The challenge is not bad actors. It is fragmented incentives and no shared mechanism to bring all the right actors, including the people most affected, into the same room at the same time.
The teacher in Scarborough cannot afford to live near the school where she works. She is not waiting on an approval process. She is making decisions right now about whether she stays in this city.
The PSW in Brampton is commuting two hours each way to care for someone else’s family while she cannot afford stability for her own. Nobody convened a panel about her commute.
The young person in Hamilton has done everything right. Finished school. Entered the workforce. Built skills. Still cannot find a footing in a housing market that was never designed with her in mind.
The newcomer family in Mississauga arrived with credentials, ambition, and a willingness to build something here. They are spending more than half their income on rent in a unit that is too small, in a neighbourhood disconnected from opportunity.
These are not edge cases. Middle-income workers represent roughly half the population of this region and contribute about 60% of Ontario’s GDP. And nearly one in two renters are spending more than 30% of their income on housing. One in four are spending roughly half. That is not a housing crisis at the margins. That is the region hollowing out from the middle.
The cost of that is not abstract. Housing unaffordability is costing this region between $5.9 and $7.9 billion annually in lost productivity and service strain. That is what it costs when the people who power a region cannot afford to stay in it.
When the people most affected by a problem are brought in after the solutions are already shaped, we should not be surprised when those solutions do not reach them. This is not a failure of individual effort. It is what happens when a complex regional problem gets addressed sector by sector, with no sustained coordination around a shared outcome.
What needs to happen is earlier alignment: between municipalities, employers, housing providers, civic institutions, and residents, before projects are fully designed. The region does not only need more housing approvals. It needs stronger civic coordination around workforce housing outcomes, and it needs the people most affected to be part of shaping what those outcomes look like.
At CivicAction, this is where we are focusing our work. Our Workforce Housing Playbook was built on data and the voices of over 350 cross-sector leaders. It shows that the gap between 5,000 units and 15,000 units is not primarily a funding problem. It is a coordination and design problem. The land exists. The capital exists. What has been missing is a way to align partners early enough and structure projects around people, not just around what the market can bear.
Through Youth Civic Corps, we are bringing young people directly into the housing conversation, not as research subjects, not as statistics, but as people with firsthand knowledge of what this crisis actually costs. The generation most priced out of this region has insight that no panel has fully captured. That needs to change.
The question this election cycle is putting on the table is the same one our research has been asking: who is this region being built for?
If the honest answer is that it has mostly been built for people who were already stable, then the work ahead is not just more housing. It is a different kind of decision-making, one where the people most affected help shape what gets built, where it goes, and who it actually reaches.
Surranna Sandy is CEO of CivicAction, a catalyst for civic leadership and action across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area.