The housing crisis is a well-trod matter in municipal election debates, and concerns about cost of living and housing affordability have remained at the top of polls for months.
Politicians running in Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, where unaffordability has hit disastrous levels, need to be speaking more about this crisis for middle-income households.
CivicAction’s research finds that half of GTHA households, those earning $40,000 to $125,000 annually, can be described as the “squeezed-out” middle. They make too much to qualify for most subsidies but too little to afford suitable housing near their workplaces.
Sixty-six percent of surveyed middle-income workers in the region spend more than 30% of their household income on housing. Almost 30% spend more than half. Overall, middle-income housing unaffordability means our region loses $5.88 to $7.98 billion every year.
No wonder that a recent poll shows that over one-third of Toronto residents are considering leaving, 65% of which say the city being “too expensive” is their top reason.
The most frustrating thing is that these workers have what we call “good jobs.” They’re nurses and personal support workers, educators and childcare providers, transit operators, skilled tradespeople, human services providers, and hospitality workers. They’re the people everybody relies on, in some way: fellow city dwellers, as well as all Ontarians and Canadians, given the GTHA’s share of GDP.
When workers can’t afford to live within a reasonable distance of their jobs, when they are pressed to leave or else stay and struggle to make ends meet, loosing wiggle-room to participate in and fuel the local economy, the city-region flounders. The needle that pivots between city-as-problem and city-as-solution starts to lean in the wrong direction, where no one can afford it to go.
The losses, too easily cast as the failing of an individual or family, start to spread beyond the household. They turn into a community and city with needs unmet, services unrendered, construction and repair halted. These losses become weak productivity and sluggish markets, an austerity lived from the ground up, where no one can spare the change.
The good news is that Canadians want real fixes. A recent Abacus Data poll found that three in four Canadians support governments taking steps to encourage partnerships between employers, nonprofits, builders, and institutions to create affordable housing for middle-income workers in high-cost regions. The sentiment crosses party lines, stretching beyond housing developers and providers. Nearly 60% of Canadians believe major employers and institutions should play a role in delivering housing affordability, and nearly 70% characterize it as a public policy and workforce issue, not just a personal or household matter.
Policy debates have cycled around unit targets, approvals, and pipelines. These findings suggest the need to answer deeper questions: who can afford what’s built, and where it’s located? How will all actors with a stake — including the employers who do well when workers live near work — play their part to deliver affordable, attainable housing, rental and owned options alike?
Housing-workers-who-power-us logic helps us get out of the weeds. It helps us envision the true wins of housing affordability at speed and scale. This is not just about making sure people at risk of housing precarity will be relieved. It’s that we can’t expect our cities to act as Canada’s solution engines when we don’t invest in affordability for key workers with intention. We need to use every tool available to reduce friction and lower barriers that get in the way of lasting affordability.
Our goal, however, shouldn’t just be about building affordable housing stock. That’s too narrow. Our goal should be to shift how we “do housing” so that it becomes easier to finance, deliver, and maintain affordability for lower, moderate, and middle-income residents. We need productive partnerships that make housing affordability easier to pursue than to not pursue.
CivicAction’s Workforce Housing Affordability Playbook for Action, shaped by more than 350 leaders in the housing ecosystem, offers a path for change we need. Our problem isn’t an absence of land, money, or interest. Affordable projects stall because effective land, capital, approvals, and partnership arrangements aren’t assembled early enough. The Playbook shows how partners can get into the game with what they each do best: government can bring land, approvals, infrastructure coordination, and policy certainty. Employers can bring demand for housing from their workforce. Builders and non-profits can bring development and operating capacity. Lenders and investors can bring financing and patient capital. Community partners can bring local knowledge and durable outcomes.
There are inspiring examples of partnership-based workforce housing projects we can all get behind, like the Coach Terminal development near University Health Network and the new development near Vancouver General Hospital, both designed to support healthcare workers. We need more of this targeting employees across more sectors, at speed and scale.
Faster approvals and lower development fees certainly help, but they don’t create lasting affordability in and of themselves. Our urgent opportunity is to revitalize our housing system to do better than it has ever done for workers.
In coming weeks, we’ll hear a lot of ambitions for our cities from the people who take the risk and put their hats in the political ring. What deserves attention and action is whether the workers who power our city-systems will be able to afford to stay, thrive, and make our cities benefit all of us.
Andrea Gunraj is Vice President of Policy and Partnerships at CivicAction, an organization that turns cross-sector collaboration into action to build better, more inclusive cities. She is also author of Go-Between Girl: My Indentured Roots as Reclaimed Present, published by McClelland and Stewart in 2026.
