This spring and summer, we’ve shared some incredible conversations with leading affordable housing advocates, researchers, and builders. These are great story tellers with cutting insights on how Canada’s housing system has grown so inequitable, and how to transform it.
Below are some recent highlights from our growing library of episodes.
Scaling up community land trusts in Toronto and beyond
This spring, we spoke with two of Canada’s leading advocates for Community Land Trusts.
In our April episode, Dominique Russell shares the riveting history of the Kensington Market Community Land Trust (KMCLT), and KMCLT’s bold aspirations to take much more of their neighbourhood under community ownership. Dominique draws on a wealth of experience as an activist, writer, teacher, and co‑director of the KMCLT.
From stopping a proposed Walmart to acquiring three mixed‑use buildings, she explains how the CLT model has helped KMCLT build community power and reimagine what “ownership” can look like. She discusses funding tools like the City of Toronto’s Multi‑Unit Residential Acquisition (MURA) program and community bonds. And she reflects on how CLTs across Canada are increasingly grounding their work in decolonization, land back, and social justice.
We also spoke with Chiyi Tam in our June episode, Managing Director & Co‑founder of the Toronto Chinatown Land Trust (TCLT). She offers powerful examples of how, in the face of intense displacement pressures, community land trusts (CLT) can bring communities together to protect housing, small businesses, and cultural spaces.
Chiyi traces a lineage from historic Tongs to today’s community land trusts in Toronto’s West Chinatown, Boston, and Los Angeles. It’s a fascinating story. Long before the term “community land trust” existed, Tongs have provided an important tool for mutual aid in Chinatowns across North America. Historically, Tongs operated as diasporic clan and hometown associations that pooled funds to buy property, house workers, and offer near-interest-free loans. They bought property together, ran internal lending systems, and helped members survive racist labour regimes and exclusionary housing markets — functioning as democratically controlled, member‑based land stewards.
Tongs remind us that Chinatowns are evolving ecosystems, sustained by overlapping networks of family associations, BIAs, kung fu clubs, mahjong halls, artists, and multiple levels of government. TCLT seeks to work with and within this ecosystem of mutual aid, rather than as a singular organization “representing” Chinatown. This is a community where many people live, work, and socialize in the same spaces. Sustaining holistic, made-in-Chinatown solutions to displacement can be challenging, considering conventional planning tools and funding streams are often narrowly focused on realizing “housing‑only” solutions. Nonetheless, as Chiyi explains, approaching their goals from this holistic perspective is essential for TCLT’s long run success. Indeed, it has helped them arrive at a big recent win.
In partnership with a long-standing Tong, TCLT are now preparing to develop a new project, which will significantly expand access to seniors’ housing and community space. The project involves redeveloping an ancestral hall at 217 Augusta. By partnering with the Hainan Association of Ontario on the redevelopment of its clubhouse, the TCLT is piloting a model that could potentially be used in many other locations across the neighbourhood and beyond.
Building co-op housing skyscrapers
In our June episode, Graeme Hussey walks us through the practicalities, politics, and economics of building large non-market housing developments, and the policy tools needed to scale this work.
As Director of Affordable Housing at Windmill Developments, and as President of Nesting Ground, Graeme is an excellent guide to these important issues. That’s because Windmill is currently building the largest coop housing development built in Canada in over 30 years. It’s an impressive two tower project by Toronto’s Kennedy GO Station, that will create 612 new rent-controlled homes. Windmill is also building a 400‑unit, transit‑oriented mass‑timber development in Ottawa.
This conversation dovetails with and drills down on key insights in our March episode with Tim Ross, Executive Director of the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada (CHFC). In this engaging conversation, Tim lays out the history and future of co-op housing in Canada as he sees it. He also outline the crucial role of regional and national organizations such as CHFC in advocating for policy and programs to expand the sector.
The role of community foundations in co-ordinating and financing non-market housing development.
In our latest episode this August with Alex Laidlaw, we hear how community foundations can help close the financing gaps preventing supportive & non-market housing projects from getting built. He offers a clear-eyed perspective on the potential (and limitations) of mobilizing philanthropy to expand access to affordable housing.
Alex draws on five years of experience with the Calgary Foundation, one of Canada’s largest community foundations, where he is Director of Impact Investments.
He begins with the inspiring story of the Resolve campaign, a recent collaborative effort by nine housing agencies in Calgary, which set out to raise $120 million for permanent supportive housing. In the philanthropic world, the Resolve campaign has mobilized an unusual strategy. Instead of competing campaigns chasing the same donors, organizations pooled their asks, coordinated messaging, and treated housing as a shared civic project. The campaign ultimately raised nearly $80 million — enough, when paired with public funding and financing, to bring all of the planned projects to fruition. Across Calgary, the campaign has resulted in affordable rental homes for over 3,000 people.
From there, the conversation turns to the broader role of philanthropy in the housing system: not as a replacement for government, but as one critical slice of the capital stack. Alex highlights the importance of using donations to build organizational capacity, fund feasibility work, and take early‑stage risks that public programs are often too rigid or slow to support. He also describes Calgary Foundation’s impact investing program, which uses short‑term, flexible “bridge” loans so non‑profits can acquire land and move projects forward while they wait on federal, provincial, and municipal grants.
Looking beyond Calgary, we’re reminded of the more than 200 community foundations across Canada that could be mobilized as powerful, grounded partners in housing solutions.
The role of financialized landlords in driving gentrification and displacement
In our February episode with Nemoy Lewis, we hear how large financial firms’ aggressive investment practices are exacerbating racialized housing disparities. Nemoy is an Assistant Professor at the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Over the past decade, huge financial firms have bought up a fast-growing share Canada’s purpose-built rental stock. The largest 20 alone own close to 20% of these units. Across Toronto, for example, these giants have acquired the vast majority of units put up for sale in recent years. Indeed, between 2010 and 2021, their share of ownership of purpose-built rental ballooned. It rose from 14% to 24% of all units in the City of Toronto, and from 24% to 31% in the surrounding suburbs.
As more and more homes are subsumed into the portfolios of financial firms, many tenants are concerned about how this will effect the stability and affordability of their homes. Extensive research by NHA partners shows they are right to be.
Through painstaking analysis of building-level rent and ownership data across the Greater Toronto Area, research by Martine August, Julie Mah, Sean Grisdale, Nemoy Lewis and others reveals that financial firms tend to:
- raise rents more aggressively than other types of landlords
- evict tenants at higher rates than other types of landlords, especially shortly after buying properties.
Nemoy walks us through this growing body of research that gives the lie to the rosy perspectives peddled by industry lobbyists. We hone in on Nemoy’s recent work, which shows financial firms are especially targeting historically working class & racialized neighbourhoods in Toronto. We discuss their role in driving gentrification and displacement,. We also discuss how these communities are organizing to fight back.
You can listen to all our episodes on the NHA website, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.