"If you work in Canada, you should be able to afford a place to call home"
Housing Minister on Canada's housing affordability challenges
Canadian Housing Minister Sean Fraser was in British Columbia visiting Vancouver to address public transit and housing affordability issues. He also spoke to the press to express his views on the housing situation in Canada. According to Fraser, the federal government should have paid more attention to housing in the past. Now the country has come to a point where even people with high incomes cannot always find affordable housing.
"For the better part of the last half century, federal governments of different partisan stripes, by the way, liberal and conservatives, have stepped away from forwarding affordable housing in this country. That should never have happened, but it did," Fraser said.
Fraser believes that people across much of Canada are currently facing a housing crisis. And there are no easy ways out of it.
He said that in the past federal governments were mainly focused on providing subsidized housing for low-income people, but there has been a major shift in this area. Now even working professionals are having trouble acquiring housing.
Fraser said he saw a headline in the newspaper that the average rental price for a one-bedroom apartment in Vancouver is now CAD 3,000 per month. And the minister doesn't quite understand how a senior citizen on a fixed income, or a student who has to pay for education or pay off a loan can afford housing at that cost. Fraser has a hard time saying what a reasonable price is for renting a one-bedroom apartment, but is confident that people shouldn't be paying more than 30% of their income for housing.
"If you work in Canada, you should be able to afford a place to call home," Fraser said.
Increasing road networks and building housing near them, according to Minister Fraser, will give people the opportunity to live and work in their communities.
Also, Sean Fraser said it is important to build housing for people of different income levels, and the government is working on a plan for how the rate of housing construction can be accommodated through subsidies and other incentives.
The Minister believes that the emergence of more apartments for rent will lead to lower rental costs, but recognizes that the cost of housing and its rent in Canada depends on many market factors. Therefore, it is difficult to predict the price situation.
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"Right now we want to bring down the cost of living. That includes bringing down the cost of rent for people by building more purpose-built rental construction right across the country. If you are a person who is willing to work in this country, it's unacceptable that you can't afford a place to live in the community you call home," the minister concluded.
