MEDIA RELEASE - Canadians need homes they can afford

A media outlet reported this week that the Liberal's housing strategy isn’t delivering the affordable homes people need despite the worsening housing crisis across the country.
Families aren’t finding homes they can afford in the communities where they live and work because rich investors are hiking up rent to maximize their profits. Nearly all the government's funding allocation under the Rental Construction Financing Initiative (RCFI) ends up in the pockets of for-profit developers who often have little interest in offering homes people can afford.
This Liberal government has been telling people that they are building more affordable homes, but the reality doesn't match the rhetoric. What the government deems affordable is way over the market price — families just can’t afford it. Currently, for many of the units created under the RCFI initiative, the rent is somewhere between 30 per cent and 120 per cent above market rent. It's laughable for the Liberals to claim that this is affordable. The NDP has been calling this out for years now and the program needs to change.

April 4th, 2022

Canadians need homes they can afford

NDP Critic for Housing, Jenny Kwan, issued the following statement:

“A media outlet reported this week that the Liberal's housing strategy isn’t delivering the affordable homes people need despite the worsening housing crisis across the country.
Families aren’t finding homes they can afford in the communities where they live and work because rich investors are hiking up rent to maximize their profits. Nearly all the government's funding allocation under the Rental Construction Financing Initiative (RCFI) ends up in the pockets of for-profit developers who often have little interest in offering homes people can afford.
This Liberal government has been telling people that they are building more affordable homes, but the reality doesn't match the rhetoric. What the government deems affordable is way over the market price — families just can’t afford it. Currently, for many of the units created under the RCFI initiative, the rent is somewhere between 30 per cent and 120 per cent above market rent. It's laughable for the Liberals to claim that this is affordable. The NDP has been calling this out for years now and the program needs to change.
The agreement reached by the NDP with the Liberal government aims to re-focus the RCFI units to 80 per cent below the average market rent. In addition, the agreement also sees an expansion of the Rapid Housing Initiative for another year and meaningful action taken on a For Indigenous, By Indigenous urban, rural and northern housing strategy.
The NDP will continue to push the government to build 500,000 homes that Canadians can afford and act quickly to honour their promise to stop blind bidding that is hiking up the prices of homes.
New Democrats also want to ensure that Canada's Mortgage and Housing Corporation is producing permanently affordable non-market housing that isn't at risk of being scooped up by rich investors."

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