21 Oct 2025
Introducing Placemark Newsroom: Canada’s housing crisis compels us to join an urgent conversation. The gap between what’s being built and what Canadians can afford continues to grow. It’s time for the private and public sectors to rise above the noise and work together on a better future.
British Columbia, along with the rest of Canada, is in the midst of a housing crisis.
We’ve all seen the stories - young parents who will never be able to afford a home - never mind the classic suburban bungalow with a white picket fence. Meanwhile, fully employed people struggle to meet the rent on a studio apartment - so they rent the sofa.
It’s a predicament that touches and perplexes us all, including the people who design and build neighbourhoods.
“Is this really my Canada?”
In all his years in the business of designing neighbourhoods and communities, Placemark Principal Paul Fenske has never seen anything like it, and he finds one symptom particularly disturbing:
“Having lived in this country for more than 50 years,” he said in a recent interview, “I’ve never come across this phenomenon of people living in cars, whether students at universities, families living in RVs, or young couples with dogs living in parking lots, and I think, “Is this really my Canada? Is there something wrong with people or is there something wrong with the housing supply?”
A Crisis that doesn’t Discriminate on the Basis of Age or Profession.
Like the pandemic we have all recently weathered, the housing crisis doesn’t discriminate on the basis of age or profession. Paul’s Placemark partner, Theo Finseth, represents a generation of young professionals experiencing their own version of the crisis.
Theo sees colleagues and friends who have studied for years to qualify for high paying professions in law and medicine struggling to afford a home.
“These are professionals who have a good stable salary, and yet it’s still a big concern. I can only imagine people coming from outside the country, people with families. Buying a home, impossible. If you don’t have a family who can support you with a down payment, how do you even do that? And even if you do, your mortgage will be $5,000 a month. How do you do that unless you’re two people with high paying jobs? Obviously, that speaks of a crisis.”
How The Housing Crisis Affects Us All
What does the chronic housing crisis really mean to people and the communities they live in? Paul and Theo sat down recently to speak to this question.
Clearly, it’s been going on a long time – Paul Fenske refers to it as a “slow-motion train wreck” – and he identifies four crises within the crisis:
What We’re Building is out of sync with our changing needs. The neighbourhoods of big single-family homes from the 70s + 80s don’t meet the range of needs of today’s communities with its diversity of lifestyles, life stages and incomes. How can a single housing form meet all our ever-changing requirements?
How We’re Building is out of sync with our community life. The planning of homes has become detached from its context of a supporting neighbourhood with its local shops and services, schools and playgrounds, block parties and trusted neighbours. If it takes a village to raise a child, where is the village among the homes?
Where We’re Building is out of sync with our environment. We’ve pursued our version of the American dream prizing the suburban house - complete with white picket fence – while disregarding the growing toll that isolated sprawling subdivisions place on our streets and infrastructure. How do we link home with work, school, shopping and play without having to drag our cars with us everywhere we go?
Who is Leading the Building is out of sync with the task at hand. In the 60s and 70s the public sector took the lead with the CMHC and purpose-built rental policies, subsidies, and community planning. By the 80s, 90s and 2000s the private sector was squarely in charge of delivering housing for the market. The resulting uncoordinated back-and-forth of leadership has led us to the present crisis. How can the complex puzzle of housing a community be solved by parties who only possess half of the solution?
Theo Finseth adds a fifth contributor to the crisis:
Why We’re Building has fallen out of sync with the original purpose of providing a home. As prices climb, housing has been separated from this purpose to become an investment vehicle which puts continuous stress on the need for profitability over affordability.
“It’s hard to work with people you don’t trust or don’t believe in.”
“As Canadians, I think we should be smarter than to allow this kind of crisis to emerge”, adds Paul.
Placemark wants to see a partnership emerge between forces that are currently antagonists: private sector developers and public sector politicians, policy, and planning officials. Rather than exacerbating the problem through “denialism” - it’s the other guys’ fault - we’re going to have to work together.
The crisis has bred chronic antagonism between private and public sectors, which is unproductive. “It’s hard to work with people you don’t trust and don’t believe in”, says Theo, and that’s a problem because the issues are, at this point, too complex to solve without private/public collaboration. There’s work the public sector must do, from public policy for subsidized housing, housing authorities, public land trusts, purpose built rental housing subsidies. But, in case we’ve forgotten, the public sector doesn’t build things; they don’t bang nails or do drywall— that is left to the private sector.
The solution for the housing crisis rests upon the recognition of this need for partnership, as well as a shift in attitude that calls for abandoning the idea of suburbia and all the infrastructure required to keep it going and growing. “It’s not the 1950s,” explains Theo. “We don’t have vast tracts of land we can just go eat up with suburbia. How can we be more thoughtful with the constraints we’re left with to come up with creative solutions? How do we build great communities on a tight budget?”
If you believe in the Possibilities of Place, learn more at Placemark.