Rental Paths from Postwar to Present: Canada Compared

This research paper seeks to put Canadian rental housing – its postwar peak and subsequent decline – in comparative historical perspective. How similar or different is Canada’s rental history from that of six other large affluent Western nations? Are there parallels, or tendencies to convergence, in the postwar years or since? What is distinctive about Canada? Canada’s rental sector history has notable parallels with European social housing: in demand, supply and policy. In various ways it resembles Northwestern Europe more than the United States or Australia – the latter two being Anglo, new-world, “liberal welfare” nations generally most like Canada. In all countries, today’s rental stock is physically a product of the postwar era, and socio-economically a product of more recent changes which have downgraded the place of rental in the broader housing system. Though homeownership dominated in postwar Canada, rental was 42 percent of net housing demand. This proportion of rental was fed by the highest growth and “catch-up urbanization” among affluent nations, and robust tenant incomes like postwar Europe. Canada’s postwar rental production was far higher per capita than the United States or Australia, and similar to that of Northwestern Europe. Apartments were integral in the development industry and in the postwar landscape. Policy gave moderate support to homeownership by liberal-welfare standards, and rising support to rental. Rising priority for social rental in 1965-75 paralleled Europe’s new low-income targeting. But similar 1970s forces undermined production in Canada as in Europe: rising costs of production and of capital but weakening demand, the latter driven by similar declines in Canadian and European tenant incomes. Canada’s mid-Atlantic 1970s-80s policy prolonged the private production boom, and raised social production to levels approaching those seen in Europe after 1975. Our ill-timed shift to mixed-income social rental propelled targeting debates and higher subsidy requirements which, much as in Europe, undermined political support. Unlike most affluent countries, 1970s−80s Canada did not embrace demand-side subsidy nor raise support for homeownership. In the 1990s it reverted to a liberal-welfare path, with extreme devolution propelling a near-end of social rental production. Comparative rental history is approached here in terms of alternative “systems of housing provision,” associated with different regimes types of welfare capitalism. But what emerges is a mix of path-dependent differences between regime types; converging or parallel trends which cut across regimes; and distinct national features