CHASING ANSWERS ON HOUSING IN CANADA

a harsh reality when it comes to applying for a mortgage. Since they do not have a regular pay check or access to financial statements such as the T4, “gig” workers have found themselves on the wrong side of conventional mortgage lenders. CREA believes that financial institutions and their regulators should adapt to the changing face of today’s work force and ensure lending practices provide more flexibility for non-traditional workers

A. (MJ) This is a larger question here for our societies and whether we need to ensure

better security for employment. Unfortunately that might not be possible and lenders (including banks) need to factor in flexibility when assessing a person for a mortgage. Contract work is slowly becoming the new “norm” and if the banks don’t take this into account, other lenders will which might start drawing customers from banks. At that point banks will have to take notice I suspect. Q. How much are code changes affecting affordability?

A. (KL) With Canada’s housing affordability crisis, policy makers need to consider well all the impacts involved when making changes to the Building Code that increase costs. While current building standards are excellent, there are many ways to continue to improve housing; but this needs to be done through innovation to avoid excessively increasing costs. When you add up all the changes that various groups want that “don’t cost a lot”, it costs a lot!

That is why federal parties need to adopt CHBA’s recommendation to enshrine affordability as a core objective of the National Building Code, to ensure that we are building better, more efficient houses for the same price or less.