The Broken Covenant

How Housing Stopped Being Homes

The keys were small and unremarkable—two of them on a cheap metal ring, handed over by a real estate agent without ceremony. But to me, at 30 years old, married, with a one-year-old daughter and an annual salary of $5,000, those keys felt gold. They opened the front door of our newly built four-bedroom split-level home in a Toronto suburb. The price: $18,763. Roughly 3.8 times my yearly income.

We didn’t need spreadsheets to know this was right. We felt it in our bones.

That home was a financial stretch, but it was a stretch within reach. Every member of my local hockey team had purchased their first home by age 30. None of us were rich or came from money. We were simply becoming adults, honoring a covenant: work hard, get a secure job, save for a down payment, buy your own home.

My first home is on the market again, now listed at $1.2 million. A buyer will pay roughly 16 times the average Toronto salary of $73,000. This arithmetic explains why my grandchildren feel cheated. The game is rigged against them. Homeownership—the foundation of raising a family for my generation—is now deferred until middle age, if it happens at all.

These factors may be the cause of the following. Couples are starting families years later than their parents did. Capable young adults remain dependent on aging parents. Homes have ceased to be shelters. They have become retirement plans and chips in a global casino.

It seems we’ve made a collective decision without ever having a national conversation. It’s my view shelter should not be considered a luxury commodity but as a fundamental right. We would never accept this logic for education, healthcare, or roads. We agreed long ago that certain things are too fundamental to be left entirely to market forces. Housing belongs on that list. You cannot stay healthy, learn, hold a job, or raise children without stable shelter. When housing fails, everything else strains under pressure. We pay for housing one way or another—upfront, or later through emergency rooms, shelters, and policing.

There was a time when we understood this. In the shadow of the Depression and Second World War, governments treated housing as literal infrastructure—planned like highways, financed like electrical grids, built at scale. That is how the stable, tree-lined neighbourhoods we now romanticize came into existence. Through public policy.

Over the past 40 years, we walked away. We stopped building public housing. We rewrote zoning codes to make density illegal. We deregulated finance and celebrated rising prices as success. Housing didn’t just drift into becoming an investment. We made it one.

None of this was inevitable. It was policy. And policy can change.

The Finland Model: Proof that Change Works

Finland provides the clearest evidence. In the 1980s, the country’s capital, Helsinki had rows of homeless shelters filled with people cycling between temporary housing and the streets. The conventional approach—requiring sobriety, treatment, or employment first was failing repeatedly.

Then Finland made a radical shift. They adopted Housing First, treating stable shelter as a right, not a reward for compliance. The logic was simple: people cannot address addiction, mental health, or unemployment while sleeping in doorways. Give them a home first. Then provide support.

Between 2008 and 2015, Finland built thousands of permanent supportive housing units across eight cities. Long-term homelessness fell by more than 35 percent and has continued declining while rising nearly everywhere else in Europe. Y-Foundation, a nonprofit organization, now manages over 18,000 rental units, with 3,500 dedicated to Housing First tenants. The government provides subsidies for up to 80 percent of rent. Municipalities cover support services.

The cost savings are undeniable. Studies show every euro spent on Housing First saves up to 1.5 euros in emergency healthcare, policing, and shelter costs. For rough sleepers, the savings are even larger—police contact drops by 75 percent, ambulance use by 60 percent.

But Finland did not stop at Housing First. They understood that solving homelessness required fixing the entire housing system. The state invests directly through the Housing Finance and Development Centre, offering low-interest loans and construction subsidies to municipalities and nonprofits. Over 70,000 households live in state-subsidized rental homes. Nonprofits are preferred developers, ensuring profits are capped and reinvested. Municipalities reserve land for affordable development. Private landlords who accept subsidy vouchers receive stable, guaranteed payments.

The result is a housing system where affordability is engineered, not hoped for.

An Action Plan for North America

We once understood what Finland still understands. We did not lose the ability. We lost the will. Rebuilding that will is the central political task of our time.

First, reclaim local control. Zoning laws remain the single greatest barrier to building needed homes. Challenge exclusionary single-family zoning. Legalize duplexes, triplexes, and small apartment buildings. Pair new housing with tangible community benefits: property tax relief for long-term residents, infrastructure upgrades, and direct neighborhood investments.

Second, redirect capital toward communities. Expand community development financial institutions that specialize in affordable housing. Scale community land trusts, where land beneath homes is held in common to preserve permanent affordability. Strengthen housing voucher programs so they function reliably for families and landlords alike.

Third, build faster, cheaper, at scale. Off-site modular construction, standardized designs, and bulk public procurement can reduce costs and timelines dramatically. Convert vacant offices, dead malls, and underused commercial land into housing. Repair cities hollowed out by disinvestment and distorted by speculation.

Finally, ground this work in justice. The housing crisis does not fall evenly. Black, Latino, and Indigenous households bear disproportionate burdens because of discriminatory policy. Mixed-income communities, anti-displacement protections, and strong tenant rights must be core features, not afterthoughts.

Housing policy determines who gets stability, who gets opportunity, who gets to plan a future. We know how to build. We know how to finance. We know what works—Finland has proven it.

What remains is a choice: do we return to the simple idea that a home is, first and foremost, a place to live?

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