Canada’s housing crisis is one of the country’s biggest challenges, as many owners and renters struggle to stay in their homes and as younger generations wonder if they will ever be able to afford a place to live. The issue has been one of the most-covered topics across Canadian news outlets for the past decade, but despite political focus and expensive policy initiatives, the complex problem has only gotten worse.
In 2024, The Globe and Mail decided to spend the year tackling the housing issue through a consciously constructive lens, focusing coverage on explaining the root causes of housing shortages and – critically – writing about creative ideas that could help solve the crisis.
The initiative pulled in journalists from across the newsroom – including staff in our news, business, editorial board, podcast and newsletter sections, as well as our data, graphics and interactive presentation teams.
The result was dozens of stories over the course of a year, from long reads and investigative data dives to daily coverage and analysis of policy announcements. While the search for housing solutions was a focus of stories throughout the year, a key part of the initiative was contained in the House Poor project, which dissected some of the less publicized drivers of the affordability crisis.
A June feature detailed the dysfunction at a local level; the University of Guelph, for instance, was admitting far more first-year students than its residences could accommodate, heaping pressure on the city. And a deeply reported July piece examined why Canada is struggling to attract young people into skilled construction trades, creating a labour shortage that is making the country’s housing construction goals impossible to achieve.
A team of reporters – Erin Anderssen, Rachelle Younglai and Chen Wang – launched a six-month effort to examine the effectiveness of Ottawa’s housing programs for low-income Canadians. That led them to look at how government-owned land could be a useful part of the solution to help build new housing.
The trio used carefully-crafted design features and extensive research to produce a story on the need for governments to buy and preserve housing for low-income people before it is converted into high-end residential real estate. The story highlighted the plight of people who spoke to The Globe about losing their long-term rental apartments.
They also wrote a data-driven story explaining the flaws in Ottawa’s strategy to fund construction of affordable rental units, reporting it is actually providing funding for projects that are not affordable.
The reporters collected data to illustrate the large amount of under-used federal land in prime locations that could be made available for housing, especially low-income housing that is not targeted by most developers. One of the pieces they produced on this “lazy land” topic looked at the private sale of a historic post office building in Toronto as an example of missed opportunities to build on federal land.
This coverage demonstrated that Canada was well behind other countries in making the most of urban public land for housing.
