Canada has over 8 million single detached houses, representing well over half of the housing stock in Canada. Most of the homes are owned and occupied by older generations, three-quarters of whom have already retired as of 2024.
A new report from the Toronto Metropolitan University suggests that an overlooked strategy to provide single-detached houses for younger and newcomers families lies in ‘recycling’ and ‘repurposing’ the existing stock.
The key to this strategy is to redirect resources towards developing housing options for seniors that are desirable and affordable. Desirable options could help motivate seniors to downsize sooner, freeing up many thousands of detached houses sooner than when this cohort would be forced to leave their homes due to failing health.
According to the Nova Scotian Provincial Housing Needs Assessment Report, a lack of suitable, accessible housing for seniors was one of the issues heard most often in both urban and rural areas.
Based on that feedback, Nova Scotia’s Provincial Housing Strategy has placed a focus on the development and replacement of 3,500 long-term care rooms to support seniors with failing health, however, the Province has also been incentivizing healthy seniors to remain in their homes longer.
In 2021, Nova Scotia introduced the Seniors Care Grant, a $500 annual grant to low-income senior households that helped seniors remain in their homes. In 2023 the grant was increased to $750, and the number of recipients increased to 37,000. The Province is also seeking to make home repair programs for accessibility upgrades more effective to ensure that seniors can remain in their own homes for as long as possible.
While this strategy to keep seniors in their homes longer could help to alleviate the burden on our long-term care system, it also discourages those who may have considered downsizing from doing so. Further compounding that problem is Nova Scotia’s Capped Assessment Program. Although capping assessments helps protect existing property owners from sudden increases in property assessments, it further incentivizes seniors to remain in their homes longer as downsizing to a smaller home could actually increase the amounts of
property taxes they are required to pay.
This creates a problem for young and newcomer families looking for appropriate housing to raise a family. A recent study found that 55% of Canadians 18-34 said the housing crisis has affected their decision to start a family. And while there are several factors as to why younger Canadians are opting out of starting families like the cost of living, childcare options, and changing attitudes, the prospect of starting a family in an apartment can be challenging.
Surrogation is the term for when people become so focused on improving a metric that they lose sight of the nuanced complexity of the “real thing”. The process involves replacing the original long term goal with a simpler, quantifiable measure that was initially intended as a means to gauge progress. For the housing crisis, the surrogation snare has become ‘Units’. And what is the simplest way to build more units? Large scale apartment complexes.
This is all not to say that we shouldn’t be building apartments, or that we shouldn’t invest in home care services for seniors. However, if our current strategy is not trying to recycle existing single-family homes for young families, we need to ensure that we are at least building them.
< Back to Articles | Topics: Working for you