Researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) have developed a tool to assess the ever-important issue of affordable housing needs in cities.
In a climate where affordable housing is front and centre on campaign platforms for the upcoming federal election, Canada currently lacks a method to assess needs by income and future population growth at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels. Subsequently, planners have had to rely on tools that often produced less-than-reliable results.
But that is (finally) changing.
Dr. Penny Gurstein, head of the Housing Research Collaborative at UBC’s school of community and regional planning, and her team have developed the game-changing Housing Assessment Resource Tools (HART). HART will help assess people’s housing needs more accurately and set realistic targets for creating affordable and equitable housing across the country.
READ: GTA Residents More Concerned About Affordable Housing Than COVID
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HART was recently tested in the city of Kelowna, BC, where it found that more than half of lower-income households are paying an unaffordable proportion of their income on rent. Now, the UBC team hopes to roll it out across many more cities and regions.
Currently, more than 1.7 million Canadians live in unaffordable, overcrowded, or poor-condition housing, according to Gurstein.
“HART is designed to provide planners with a simple, robust, equity-focused tool that will work across different locations and jurisdictions,” said Gurstein in a press release.
The first part of the equation involves a housing needs assessment, an inventory of the number of households in need, the net change in affordable rental housing units, and changes in population growth, according to Gurstein. “It also estimates the housing needs of different income levels. And it takes stock of the priority populations identified for that region—for example Indigenous households, people of colour or households led by women,” says Gurstein.
The second part is a land assessment that identifies locations to deliver affordable housing.
“It’s important to consider if the sites are located near essential services and amenities, whether public and non-profit land is available (to reduce land costs), whether new housing can be layered on top of existing buildings, and where affordable homes are currently located so that they can be retained,” says Gurstein. “All these data sets will allow planners to assess specific housing requirements in an efficient, systematic way.”
Gurstein and her team developed HART after winning Stage 1 of the Housing Supply Challenge -- Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s callout for new ideas and solutions to help more Canadians find more affordable places to call home.
“We hope to win Stage 2, which will enable us to roll out this tool in other cities,” says Gurstein. “Regardless of the outcome, we hope to disseminate HART widely, and one of the ways to do that is by training planners and other professionals to use this tool through an online certificate program.”
