Interview with Nicholas Gazzard, executive director of CHF Canada
Nicholas Gazzard, CHF Canada
The last federal housing programs supporting cooperatives in Canada date from the mid 1990s and although the governments have spent money on housing, they have not favored co-op development as part of an affordable housing strategy. At present, there are almost 4 million Canadians living in core housing need* and in some cities home ownership seems impossible for young people. Nicholas Gazzard, executive director of the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada (CHF) and vice president of the International Coopreative Alliance (ICA) Housing Board, talked to ICA-Americas Newsletter about how co-op housing could be reinvented to address these problems.
Most housing co-ops in Canada were developed under the federal government programs for affordable housing which began in the 1970s and finished in the 1990s. Housing co-ops in Canada have always been associated with housing for people with lower incomes and they used to fill a gap between ownership and rental.
“There is not much new development of housing co-ops in Canada today” said Nicholas Gazzard, who explained CHF has tried to encourage the government to include cooperatives in any new development program it offers. “It hasn’t been easy for us to do that over the last ten or fifteen years” he said.
During the development years -from the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s- CHF did manage to get government support. The legacy of those programs remains: there are over 90,000 units in 2,200 housing co-ops throughout Canada.
Today, the main problem cooperatives have is financial. “The government has been putting money into housing but not in specific programs. Instead, it gives money to the provinces, and the provinces spend it however they want. Province governments tend to fall to more tradional forms, top-down management of affordable housing” Gazzard said.
He explained that during the downturn they were able to persuade the government to invest in existing housing co-ops to help with repairs and renovations. However, the government has not supported the creation of new ones.
Nicholas Gazzard highlighted the population of housing co-ops is getting older and as a result, a re-development should be encouraged. “We do have an aging problem because we have older peolple living in units bigger than they need. We are trying to promote the idea of existing co-ops buidling new units that should be suitable for seniors, who made their families in the co-op, but whose childen have grown up and left. They are living in a unit bigger than their needs but they have nowhere else to go” he said. “If new units were built within the cooperative, this would free up larger housing units for younger families” he added.
At the moment, CHF is also analyzing the idea of a new model of housing co-ops partly rental - partly ownership. “In some markets in Canada, particularly in the big cities, home ownership is very difficult for young people to achieve because the cost of housing is very expensive. We are talking about an hybrid model between rental and ownership in which a cooperative member owns a part of the house and rents the rest of it from some sort of organization, who actually holds the titles. You get your security and you get some equity, though not the full equity return. In exchange for that you get access to the market."
As an example, Gazzard suggested a model that was talked out in the United Kingdom. "It arose from a problem of scarcity of housing for key workers in London. So we are talking probably about this kind of demographic: not very highly paid people, but not poor people either," he explained.
Gazzard emphasized reinventing co-ops for affordable housing is crucial and expressed one of the things they would like the government to start doing is measuring results. “Right now the government is putting money into housing but it is not measuring the reduction of housing needs, since it allows the money to go to any kind of development. It is only in a housing co-op that the members have control over their community” he remarked.
“Our members in more than 2,200 housing co-ops across the country push us quite actively to lobby the governments for more co-ops for the new generations. They do want to see the same benefits extended to other Canadians. Within the co-op itself they are quite active, they attend meetings and help each other in different ways. Also, they usually tend to use other cooperatives such as banking co-ops more than the typical Canadian does”.
The way Nicholas Gazzard talked about cooperatives througout the interview showed he strongly believes in this model for affordable housing; he has no doubt that belonging to a community is much more than just having a roof over your head.
Only Quebec has an active development program today.
In all, the programs have delivered over 90,000 units in 2,200 Canadian housing co-ops.
*“Core housing need” refers to households which are unable to afford shelter that meets adequacy, suitability, and affordability norms. The norms have been adjusted over time to reflect the housing expectations of Canadians. Affordability, one of the elements used to determine core housing need, is recognized as a maximum of 30 per cent of the household income spent on shelter.
