They are trying to solve the wrong problem.

Mainstream big developers will never build 'affordable housing' when they can sell every single 'non-affordable house' they can build, at huge profits. They have no competition. There are just too many people who CAN afford the expensive houses on the market. That is why the housing prices are so high - the demand is there.

The 'affordable housing' crisis will never go away until huge amounts of pre-development money are made available to not-for-profit housing developers. Big developers have absolutely no problem coming up with the initial development start-up money needed to get the housing developments through the land acquisition, planning, and pre-construction phases, but this money just isn't available to affordable housing developers.

Unless the initial funding bottleneck is solved, all of the downstream measures (subsidized mortgages, help with initial payments, and such) are fruitless, The units are not going to be built in the first place, so making it easier to purchase a non-existent unit is just meaningless.

One potential solution would be for the various levels of governments to introduce a new type of 'government-backed' bond, that people could buy like they used to be able to buy Canada Savings Bonds or War Bonds. The government would guarantee the interest, and the payout, like they guarantee bank deposits. The money would be made available to not-for-profit developers like Habitat for Humanity and community housing co-ops, as seed money to pay for the initial pre-construction costs of building affordable housing. Since they are government-backed, they could be included in tax free and RRSP plans. At the same time, it is not government money or a government hand-out, so it would not affect government budgets or taxes. It would all still be private money that bought the bonds. The bonds, along with interest, would be repaid when the units sold.

Parker says the Green party and NDP in Ontario and nationally have put forward practical solutions to tackle different aspects of housing and why it's become unaffordable, including building non-profit housing on public lands, implementing vacant home taxes and using inclusionary zoning, which require private developers to include a certain percentage of affordable units within new, multi-unit housing developments.

Those all sound fine. The article doesn't dig too deeply into what those solutions would actually look like, but I don't think anyone would disagree that starting with them is a good idea.

Inclusionary zoning is interesting. The City of Ottawa has been doing that for a while (not really, but there are affordability requirements that builders will agree to in order to get zoning exemptions), and I haven't seen any stats or anecdotes saying it makes a difference or helps anyone.

Maybe they exist and I missed them. I hope that's the case.

I'm not interested in a homelessness solution put forward by someone with "Green" in their title...

Building enough housing to the currently homeless will not solve homelessness.

Especially if it's setting up a benefit to pay for housing, because that's just going to push lower rents up and force other people out.