Reaching New Heights:
Increasing Canada’s Housing Supply
VCF is excited to share that our Vancity Affordable Community Housing Program’s project “Reaching New Heights: Scaling the Vancity Affordable Housing Accelerator Program across Canada” received support and funding from CMHC’s Housing Supply Challenge Level-Up Round. We are one of 20 semi-finalists, receiving $1 million and moving into Stage 2.
The Housing Supply Challenge aims to remove or reduce barriers that hinder housing supply. Round 5, titled “Level Up Challenge: Transforming the Way Canada Delivers Housing”, addresses the entrenched housing affordability crisis in Canada. Its goal is to scale systems-level solutions to expedite housing provision.
Unlocking the power of community housing
Non-market, community-owned housing can help solve Canada’s housing crisis. In countries like Sweden and Austria where up to 30% of rental housing is community-owned, housing is much more affordable. But in Canada, only around 5% of rental homes are community-owned.
Canada has a vibrant non-profit, co-operative and Indigenous housing sector. These groups often have the land needed to build more housing. What they lack is the early-stage risk capital to advance projects from idea to construction to occupancy.
A proven model to build affordable homes faster
Since 2011, the Vancity Affordable Community Housing Program has helped address this capital gap in order to build affordable housing faster in British Columbia. The program leverages seed funding from Vancity credit union and CMHC to raise funds from impact investors that help organizations to acquire and develop affordable housing.
How it works
Grants
Loans
Capacity Building
A vision to scale across Canada
This program was born from the local expertise of a credit union along with the power of impact investment – and we know it’s a model that can scale across Canada.
The vision is to create a national pool of funds made up of capital from governments, foundations, and impact investors. This national fund would then be matched with local capital generated by local investors, non-profit organizations, and credit unions.
This means new regional funding envelopes across the country bringing millions of dollars in new capital to support early-stage community-housing projects – unlocking vacant and underutilized land from coast to coast and accelerating a pipeline of new affordable housing projects that would otherwise simply remain ideas.
Our proposed model
Local expertise meets national funding
Credit unions have in-depth knowledge of their communities and local market conditions to originate grant and loan opportunities, the financial expertise, infrastructure, and local partners, to raise and deploy capital rapidly, and have a wide geographic reach across Canada, providing access to underserved markets in rural and urban centers.
Partnering with Canada’s credit union sector helps deliver national matching capital to local projects efficiently through a rapidly scalable model.
Join us to learn more and help make this a reality
Is your organization considering, currently developing or acquiring an affordable housing project? Is access to sufficient early-stage planning and pre-development funding preventing you from moving your project forward or slowing down your progress to construction or acquisition? If so, the Vancity Affordable Community Housing Program may be able to support you.
Currently, the program operates primarily in southern British Columbia. As part of the CMHC Housing Supply Challenge, we are exploring expanding the program across Canada, including more communities in British Columbia, in collaboration with Canadian credit unions. To this end, we are looking to identify projects that could benefit from our program and services, to help advance and speed up the housing development process.
If you are considering or currently engaged in a housing development or acquisition project, we would appreciate your time to complete our survey.
In appreciation of your time, all eligible respondents will automatically be considered for one of four $25,000 project planning grants, that will be announced on September 15, 2024.
To be considered for the grants, please complete this survey by 11:59 PM PST on Tuesday July 23, 2024.