One of Affordable Housing’s Hardest Tensions: Supply, Speed, and Community Need

The central tension is this: affordable housing policy is rightly focused on getting more homes built quickly, but the systems built for speed can erode the community knowledge that makes those homes work for the people who need them most. This blog seeks to bring attention to this tension surfacing through the CMHC LIFT Housing Solutions Lab.

LIFT is a CMHC sponsored housing solutions lab run by Paths to Place. It offers flexible, no-interest financing to community organizations working on housing projects that are too early for conventional capital to reach, after an idea has taken real shape but before it’s far enough along to attract larger investment. The lab works with a small number of organizations in Edmonton and the surrounding area, staying close through regular check-ins rather than handing over funding and stepping back. Those conversations track what’s actually helping projects move, and what’s getting in the way. A tension has been surfacing through that process. This post tries to give it some room.

The pattern looks like this. Someone has a clear, specific picture of the kind of housing and community they want to build. Not a generic affordable housing project. A particular place, shaped by a particular understanding of what the people who'll live there actually need to feel safe and rooted. And as that vision moves forward, it doesn't get rejected outright. It gets narrowed, piece by piece, by zoning categories that weren't built with an organization like theirs in mind, by capital structures that assume a kind of development experience they don't have yet, by relationships and technical knowledge that take years to build and that the timeline doesn't allow for. The vision isn't being told no. It's being told: not like that, not here, not yet. The accumulation of those small narrowings can add up to something that no longer looks much like what was first imagined.

For anyone who's followed the proponent stories published so far, the church-led project at St. Faith's and the rural shelter-led work at Wellspring are not side examples. They are where the central claim of this post becomes visible: organizations that don’t look like conventional developers may be exactly the ones who should be shaping what affordable housing becomes.

A church and a rural shelter aren't obvious candidates for housing development, and that's exactly why they're worth attention here. They hold something a conventional developer can't easily acquire: trust, built over years, with the people the housing is for. Proximity to need that isn't theoretical. Land, relationships, institutional credibility that exist because of who they already are in their community, not because someone assembled a pro forma. What they don't have, often, is development capacity: the financing literacy, the technical

sequencing knowledge, the comfort navigating a process built for organizations very different from them. That gap is real and closing it is a meaningful part of what this work is trying to do.

Mobilizing an organization to articulate its vision is not the same as getting that vision built.

Because even once an organization can navigate the system, the question that matters most has not been answered yet: housing built around what, exactly? A generic affordable housing project, delivered efficiently, is not the same outcome as the place these organizations pictured when they started. Closing the capacity gap may help a project get built. It does not guarantee their project gets built. That is the deeper value of community-led housing: it brings a different standard into the room, one rooted in relationship, trust, and lived knowledge rather than in what a delivery system can most easily process.

This is where that early tension comes back in. It's a live example of this gap, not the abstract version of it. The vision isn't being rejected outright. It's being shaped and narrowed by structures, rules, and power dynamics that were never built with this kind of organization in mind, a sign of what the system has room for, and what it doesn’t, rather than one project running into bad luck.

This is where that early tension comes back in. It's a live example of this gap, not the abstract version of it. The vision isn't being rejected outright. It's being shaped and narrowed by structures, rules, and power dynamics that were never built with this kind of organization in mind, a sign of what the system has room for, and what it doesn’t, rather than one project running into bad luck.

This pattern doesn’t exist in isolation, and ignoring it would understate what’s actually at stake.

Canada needs to build something in the range of 430,000 to 480,000 new homes a year through 2035 just to bring affordability back toward where it was before the pandemic, and the current trajectory isn't close. This isn't a new problem. For decades, Canada built public and co-operative housing at real scale, including the kind of community-rooted projects organizations like these are trying to build today. Then, through the late 1980s and into the 1990s, the federal government stepped back almost entirely. Annual social housing production fell from a range of seven to 20 percent of all housing built between 1972 and 1994 to one to two percent after 1996, and the federal co-op housing program, which had helped build nearly 60,000 affordable homes, was cancelled outright in 1992. The shortfall isn't a sign that this kind of housing didn't work. It's the result of thirty years spent mostly not building it.

Quantity matters here without qualification. Nobody serious about this crisis gets to dismiss counting, and this post doesn't either.

But there's a trap inside that urgency. It isn't unique to the Prairies, and it isn't limited to small community organizations. It's visible right now in national housing policy. The same dynamic shows up there too, evidence that this isn't a tension specific to one proponent or one lab, but a pattern in how housing systems behave when speed becomes the priority. The federal government's own Housing Design Catalogue exists to speed up construction by offering builders pre-approved, standardized home designs, a reasonable response to

real pressure. But when planners and builders were consulted directly about it, the same concern kept surfacing: the fragmented, community-specific nature of local rules makes real standardization hard, and designs without room for adaptation risk being unusable in practice. One housing researcher put the underlying risk more bluntly, warning that past pushes toward prefabricated housing elsewhere have failed when the result

ended up “cookie-cutter, similar and boxy, the kind of housing nobody really wants to live in.” It's unlikely anyone designing that catalogue wants that outcome. What's more likely is something more ordinary: a system solving for what it can measure, units delivered and months saved, rather than what it actually wants.

The systems theorist Russell Ackoff made a related point about organizations generally: when people don't know how to measure what they actually want, they tend to “settle for wanting what they can measure.” Swap "managers"; for "housing systems," and that's nearly the same tension surfacing at the proponent level in this work, just visible here at national scale.

The question worth asking is whether the choice is really between quantity and quality. Or whether it’s possible to build a system that races to meet the numbers without losing track of what people actually need from a home, not just a roof. Organizations like the ones in this lab, the ones holding relationships and ground-level knowledge of what their community needs to feel safe, may not be a slower alternative to hitting the targets. They may be what keeps the targets honest.

It's not a hypothetical question elsewhere. In Vienna, well over a third of households live in social or limited- profit housing, combining municipal social housing and limited-profit housing associations. In the Netherlands, non-profit organizations hold almost a third of the entire housing stock. These are large, mainstream systems, not fringe experiments, proof that housing can scale without losing sight of what a home is supposed to feel like.

There's no tidy resolution to offer here and pretending otherwise wouldn't serve the work. How much can the system flex for organizations like these without losing what makes it work? What gets left on the table when the easiest thing to count becomes the default? These questions don't have answers yet, inside this lab or anywhere else. They're the ones the rest of this series will work through.