Hey everyone, and welcome to Canada's Housing Crisis Podcast. I'm Alia, and wow, do we have a packed episode for you today. I mean, I've been getting so many messages from listeners asking about this one particular image that keeps floating around social media - you know the one - it's got this red circle drawn around the northern part of Canada with the question "If Canada has a housing crisis, why don't they build houses within the red circle?"

And honestly? At first glance, it seems like a totally reasonable question, right? I mean, we've got all this land up there... why aren't we using it? But here's the thing - and this is what we're gonna dive deep into today - that question reveals a pretty fundamental misunderstanding about why Canadians live where they live. And more importantly, what we can actually do about our housing crisis with the land we *can* use.

So buckle up, because we're going to break this down into two parts. First, I'm gonna explain exactly why that red circle isn't the solution everyone thinks it is. And then - and this is the exciting part - we're gonna talk about how we can actually solve this crisis by making better use of the roughly five to ten percent of Canada where people can, you know, actually live and work.

Alright, let's start with that red circle. So when people see this map - and I've seen it shared thousands of times on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit - they're looking at what appears to be this massive empty space and thinking, "Well, there's the answer to our housing problems!" But here's what most people don't realize about that red circle: it represents some of the most inhospitable terrain on Earth for permanent human settlement.

Now, I know that sounds dramatic, but bear with me here because the numbers are pretty staggering. We're talking about the Canadian Shield, which covers about fifty percent of our entire country, plus huge chunks of our Arctic regions. And when I say the Canadian Shield is challenging to build on... I mean, we're talking about exposed Precambrian rocks that are billions - with a B - billions of years old.

During multiple ice ages over the past two million years, massive glaciers basically scraped away most of the soil, leaving behind either completely exposed bedrock or maybe - *maybe* - a few inches of soil if you're lucky. Picture trying to dig a foundation for your house and instead of hitting nice, workable soil, you're hitting solid rock after a couple of inches. That's the reality up there.

I was reading this fascinating study - and this really put it in perspective for me - municipal infrastructure costs in Canadian Shield cities average fifteen to forty percent higher than comparable cities built on, you know, normal sedimentary plains. Fifteen to forty percent! That's not just a little bit more expensive, that's breaking-the-bank expensive.

And here's something that really stuck with me: many older homes in Shield regions don't even have full basements because excavating through bedrock was just too expensive back when they were built. These weren't people cutting corners or being cheap - they literally couldn't afford to blast through rock to dig a basement.

But wait, it gets worse. About half of Canada - fifty percent! - is sitting on permafrost. Now, if you've never tried to build on permafrost... well, let me put it this way: it's like trying to build your house on a foundation that's constantly shifting and changing as the climate warms up.

I came across these numbers from the Northwest Territories that just... they blew my mind. The annual cost of infrastructure damage from thawing permafrost up there? Fifty-one million dollars per year. Just from the ground literally moving beneath buildings and roads as it thaws and refreezes.

And if you want a real-world comparison - I love these kinds of comparisons because they make the abstract concrete - maintenance costs for sections of the Alaska Highway built on permafrost average thirty thousand dollars per kilometer per year. Compare that to permafrost-free sections at four thousand dollars per kilometer. We're talking about a seven-and-a-half times cost difference just for basic maintenance!

Now let's talk about the transportation nightmare. Because even if we could somehow solve the geological issues, how do you get materials up there? How do you get workers up there? How do you get... well, anything up there?

Most of that red circle region has essentially no transportation infrastructure. I'm talking about places where the majority of goods have to be shipped over twenty-one hundred kilometers on average, compared to fourteen hundred kilometers for trade within southern provinces. That's a forty-five percent increase in transportation costs right off the bat.

And here's something that really drives the point home: most Arctic transportation relies on what they call "ice roads" - literally roads made of ice that are only accessible during winter months. And with climate change? These are becoming less and less reliable every year.

I was looking at some statistics about housing need in the territories - because people do live up there, right? - and the numbers are pretty sobering. About ten percent of Yukon residents are classified as being "in core housing need," eleven-point-four percent in Northwest Territories, and get this - forty percent in Nunavut. Forty percent! These are places that already exist, with some infrastructure, and they're struggling to house the people who are already there.

So when someone points to that red circle and asks "why don't we just build there," it's a bit like pointing to the middle of the Sahara Desert and asking why we don't build cities there. The challenges aren't just practical - they're fundamental.

But here's where it gets interesting, and this is where we pivot to the solution part of today's episode. That red circle? It's not where the problem is, and it's definitely not where the solution is. The real issue - and the real opportunity - lies in how we use that narrow band of habitable land where ninety percent of Canadians already live.

And when I say narrow band, I mean narrow. We're talking about a ribbon of land that's mostly within about a hundred and sixty kilometers of the U.S. border. Some sources put it as high as ninety percent of Canadians living in this zone, others say it's closer to eighty or eighty-five percent, but either way, we're talking about the vast majority of our population crammed into a relatively small area.

Now, here's the key insight that I think gets lost in all the housing crisis discussions: Canada doesn't have a land shortage. We have a land-use efficiency problem. We have enough land in our existing habitable areas - what geographers call the "ecumene" - to solve our housing shortage. We just need to use it better.

So let me paint you a picture of what that actually looks like in practice. Imagine we're urban planners tasked with solving this crisis using only the land where people can actually live and work. What would we do?

First thing - and this is probably the biggest single change we need - we need to legalize what planners call "missing middle" housing across the country. Right now, huge swaths of our most desirable, transit-connected neighborhoods are zoned exclusively for single-family houses. But here's the math that'll blow your mind: the typical single-detached home uses about three hundred square meters of land per person. But if you build a modest four-to-six story apartment building on that same land? You're talking about seventy-five square meters per person or less.

That's a four-fold increase in housing capacity without expanding city footprints even one meter beyond where they are today. Four times as many homes on the same land! And I'm not talking about building massive towers or changing the character of neighborhoods - I'm talking about the kind of gentle density you see in Montreal's Plateau, or Vancouver's Kitsilano, or Toronto's Annex. Beautiful, walkable neighborhoods where people actually want to live.

But here's the thing - and this is where policy gets really interesting - cities aren't going to do this voluntarily. They need incentives. So what I'd propose is tying federal infrastructure funding to upzoning timelines. Miss your density targets? You lose a chunk of your federal transportation money. It's that "use it or lose it" approach that we've seen work with programs like the Housing Accelerator Fund.

And while we're talking about zoning reform, can we please - *please* - eliminate mandatory parking minimums near rapid transit? I was just looking at some numbers, and the construction cost savings from not having to build underground parking runs fifty to eighty thousand dollars per parking stall. Per stall! That's money that could go toward making housing more affordable instead of subsidizing car storage.

Now, the second big piece of the puzzle - and this is where it gets really exciting - is converting public land into mixed-income communities. The federal government has been mapping this out through their "Public Lands for Homes" initiative, and they've identified over four thousand hectares of under-utilized sites along existing rail corridors and transit lines.

But here's the key: instead of selling this land, we should be leasing it. Keep it in public ownership, lease it to developers at nominal rates, but require them to meet affordability and energy efficiency benchmarks. This way, we can keep prices in check long-term instead of just generating a one-time windfall for government coffers.

And I love this concept they're calling "mega-batches" through the new Build Canada Homes agency. Instead of developers having to deal with dozens of different municipalities and approval processes, bundle multiple federal and provincial sites into these big, two-thousand to five-thousand unit packages. Large scale attracts the kind of off-site manufacturers who can deliver factory-built volume discounts of twenty to twenty-five percent compared to traditional stick-built construction.

But you know what? Even with better land use, we've still got this massive workforce challenge. We just don't have enough people who know how to build homes. So what do we do about that?

Well, first, we need to fast-track skilled trades immigration. I'm talking about adding twenty thousand annual spots specifically targeted at Red Seal carpenters, electricians, plumbers - the people who actually build houses. And tie those work permits to accredited employers so we don't lose these folks to other sectors.

Second - and this is where manufacturing gets interesting - we need tax credits for advanced manufacturing facilities that can produce Net-Zero-Ready wall and floor assemblies. Right now, Canada's modular housing plants are producing maybe ten thousand units per year. If we could scale that to a hundred thousand units per year, we're talking about cutting per-unit labor hours by forty to fifty percent.

And here's something that really gets me excited: a national apprenticeship surge. Fund fifty thousand additional apprenticeship seats annually, with completion bonuses for under-represented groups. Because right now, labor shortages are adding about twenty-eight thousand dollars to the average new home price in Ontario alone. Twenty-eight thousand! That's not a small factor - that's a massive chunk of what's making housing unaffordable.

Now, when we do need to expand beyond existing urban boundaries - because let's be realistic, some growth will happen on greenfield sites - we need to do it smart. Build transit first, then develop around it. I keep coming back to success stories like Vaudreuil-Dorion outside Montreal or Langford near Victoria, where frequent rail service plus smart rezoning created these walkable, fifteen-minute neighborhoods that people actually want to live in.

And here's where the Canada Infrastructure Bank could really make a difference: only provide preferential loan rates to transit projects where municipalities guarantee minimum density and mixed-use zoning around stations. No more building expensive transit to nowhere, or building transit and then allowing only single-family homes within walking distance.

But you know what's really exciting? We can add housing capacity without building a single new structure in a lot of cases. I'm talking about extracting under-used space from our existing housing stock.

CMHC predicts - and these are their numbers, not mine - that we could add up to one million basement or garden suites in the next decade if all provinces adopt Ontario-style province-wide permissions for secondary suites. One million units! And most of the infrastructure is already there - the water, the sewer, the electrical. We just need to make it legal and provide zero-interest retrofit loans for energy upgrades.

Similarly, empty office buildings - especially those 1980s and 1990s Class B towers that are sitting vacant in downtown cores across the country - are actually ideal candidates for residential conversion. Provide GST/HST rebates on conversion costs plus accelerated depreciation, and suddenly these projects become financially viable.

But here's the thing - and this is really important - we can't just focus on supply. We need to keep affordability front and center throughout this whole process.

The National Housing Accord is calling for two million new purpose-built rental units by 2030. Two million! And I think we can do it by providing fifty-year, one percent CMHC mortgages to non-profit and co-op providers, but require that thirty percent of those units rent for eighty percent or less of median market rent.

We also need to capture some of those land value gains that happen when we upzone neighborhoods or build new transit. Even a modest transit-oriented development charge - say, fifteen dollars per additional buildable square foot - could raise billions within major metros that goes right back into affordable housing funds.

And because I can't talk about housing in 2025 without talking about climate change, everything we build needs to be climate-smart and resilient. That means net-zero-ready building codes by 2030, paired with bulk purchase programs for heat pumps and triple-pane windows so we don't spike construction costs.

It also means designing for heat resilience, especially in southern Ontario and BC's Fraser Valley, where climate models project that days with temperatures over thirty-five degrees Celsius are going to triple by 2050. We need passive cooling measures - solar shading, reflective roofs - built into the building code.

Now, you might be wondering: is this all just theoretical wishful thinking, or can we actually make the numbers work? Well, I've been running some calculations, and here's what it looks like if we implement everything I've talked about over the next decade:

Missing-middle upzoning could add about 1.3 million units at an average cost of around four hundred and twenty thousand dollars each. That's mostly private investment, so we're talking about 546 billion dollars in economic activity.

Public land developments could add another six hundred thousand units at around three hundred and fifty thousand each - that's 210 billion in public-private investment.

Secondary suites could add a million units at about a hundred and twenty thousand each for retrofits and approvals - another 120 billion.

And conversions plus modular infill could add four hundred thousand units at around two hundred and eighty thousand each - that's 112 billion.

Add it all up, and we're looking at 3.3 million new homes over the next decade, with a total investment of just under one trillion dollars. Now, that sounds like a lot, but remember: about seventy percent of that would be private capital, twenty percent federal low-cost loans, and only ten percent direct grants for deep affordability programs.

And here's the kicker: 3.3 million new homes actually exceeds the 2.3 million additional homes that the Parliamentary Budget Office says we need by 2030. So we'd actually have a buffer against future demand surges.

But none of this happens automatically. We need what I like to call "federal-provincial housing delivery compacts" - annual targets for starts, completions, and affordability benchmarks that are publicly reported with real fiscal consequences for missed milestones.

And we need data transparency. Statistics Canada's housing supply toolkit should include real-time building permit dashboards so market participants can anticipate pipeline shortages early instead of always being reactive.

Look, I know this all sounds like a lot. And honestly? It is a lot. But here's the thing that gives me hope: every single thing I've talked about today is technically feasible with current technology and current governance structures. We don't need to invent new construction methods or create new levels of government. We just need the political will to do it.

And more importantly, we don't need to do the impossible - like building cities in the Arctic tundra or blasting foundations through the Canadian Shield. We just need to be smarter about using the land where people already live and work.

Canada's habitable belt already has the infrastructure, the labor markets, and the climate conditions to house our growing population. By densifying existing cities, unlocking public land, modernizing construction, and embedding affordability protections throughout the process, we can add more than three million homes within a decade.

That red circle in the viral image? It's not the solution to our housing crisis. The solution is right here, in that narrow band where most of us already live. We just need to use it better.

That's all for today's episode of Canada's Housing Crisis Podcast. I'm Alia, and if this episode got you thinking, I'd love to hear from you. Send me your thoughts, your questions, your pushback - whatever you've got - at our website or on social media.

Next week, we're going to dive into the politics of housing - why some cities are embracing gentle density while others are fighting it tooth and nail. And trust me, the reasons might surprise you.

Until then, keep questioning those viral housing takes, keep pushing for better policy, and remember: the solution to Canada's housing crisis isn't in the frozen north. It's right here, in how we choose to build our communities.

Talk to you next week.