When the federal government launched Build Canada Homes (BCH) in the fall of 2025, it promised a bold solution to the housing shortage: build faster, build smarter, and finally close the supply gap. The urgency is clear. According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Canada must double new housing starts from 250,000 to 430,000–480,000 units annually by 2035 to restore affordability to pre-pandemic levels before housing and other costs ballooned. While affordability concerns have long plagued Vancouver and Toronto, the most pronounced decline occurred during the Covid period (CMHC 2025).
However, building more homes without confronting the racialized dynamics that determine who gets housed and who gets pushed out will repeat old mistakes. For example, across the housing system, Black individuals and families are underrepresented among homeownership rates and wealth levels while being overrepresented among people experiencing homelessness or unsuitable housing conditions, and among communities facing displacement pressures. These outcomes are evident across both smaller and larger Canadian cities (Sioufi 2025). As the largest and most diverse urban center, the city of Toronto is emblematic of these dynamics. Research at the Housing Justice Lab shows that anti-Black racism is not peripheral to the city’s housing system—it’s built into it. Unless BCH embeds an anti-racist framework like the City of Toronto’s Confronting Anti-Black Racism (CABR) initiative, its impact will fall short.
Equity isn’t optional
The Five-Year Toronto Action Plan to Confront Anti-Black Racism (CABR) was adopted by the city council in 2017. Developed in consultation with Black community members and organizations, city staff and the City of Toronto, the plan focused on using municipal powers to reduce systemic issues. Former mayor John Tory’s opening statement in the report embraced a reality for many Canadians: “Anti-Black racism exists in Toronto.” The plan included 22 recommendations and 80 actions to address five priority areas: children and youth development, health and community services, job opportunities and income supports, policing and the justice system, and community engagement and Black leadership (City of Toronto 2017). CABR called for measurable results to dismantle systemic racial barriers in urban administration: collecting race-based data, tracking progress of development projects, ending ineffective planning practices, and redirecting resources to what works. Yet these directives have rarely been applied to housing and homelessness services, where inequality is most visible.
In a recent Toronto field experiment, researchers found that anti-Black discrimination remains pervasive in Toronto’s rental market, with Black renters receiving significantly fewer positive responses from landlords, even after controlling for building types, neighborhood characteristics, and rent levels (Akaabre et al. 2025). In another study, researchers found that, between 2016 and 2021, eviction filings were disproportionately concentrated in Toronto’s Black-majority neighborhoods, where corporate and financialized landlords dominate the rental market (Lewis et al. 2026). These patterns persisted across neighborhoods, housing types and rent levels, exposing racial biases embedded in Canada’s housing landscape.
From apartment seeking to displacement pressures, race structures housing opportunity across Canada’s multicultural society. The core description of BCH focuses on expanding the supply of affordable and non‑market housing, supporting builders with financing, and working with partners (provinces, municipalities, Indigenous communities, non‑profits, co‑ops) to address housing affordability and homelessness. Yet this program lacks any meaningful targets to address anti-Black racism within the housing market. As it focuses mainly on scaling up the supply of affordable housing, BCH ignores the reality facing Black communities in core need. Without planning processes and data systems that track who benefits from new housing and who bears the costs of redevelopment, the agency risks reproducing ethnoracial inequities under the guise of building more supply for all. Ignoring race in housing policy does not produce neutrality—it entrenches the very disparities such polices claim to solve.
Ignoring race undermines progress
In Toronto, the most recent Street Needs Assessment found Black people make up a disproportionately larger share of those experiencing homelessness (58%) relative to their population within the city (10%). Black residents are also overrepresented in social housing, the Canada Ontario Housing Benefit program, and the city’s shelter system—outcomes rooted in decades of exclusion from ownership and stable tenancy. These disparities persist precisely because anti-Black racism has not been structurally addressed. BCH cannot claim to be a national solution if it ignores the communities most marginalized by existing systems.
However, the City of Toronto already has a road map to address these issues: CABR calls for anti-racism impact assessments, race-based data, and public accountability. While these tools arguably have been underused, underfunded or not implemented to date, the framework itself provides a form of accountability for all levels of government and local communities while increasing communication across sectors. It also serves as a way to embed equity into monitoring and evaluation processes as development unfolds. BCH is positioned to make a meaningful dent in the country’s ongoing housing crises—but without incorporating an equity lens, it will replicate the same practices that lead to precarious housing, especially for Black communities.
For example, the recent passage of Ontario’s Bill 60, the Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, received backlash from several housing advocates. While aimed at increasing housing supply by cutting red tape, it also reduces tenant protections by reducing eviction filing times for non-payment of rent, shortening appeal timelines for tenants, and eliminating requirements for landlords to provide compensation or alternative accommodations for “own-use” evictions. While many understand the sense of urgency, policy changes designed to speed up development can reduce tenant protections by making it easier and faster for landlords to pursue evictions, and harder for tenants to defend themselves. Government support that subsidizes developers without securing tenure for groups in core need turn public money into engines of exclusion. Building faster while ignoring racism means building inequity at scale.
Advancing racial justice through building
If BCH wants equitable outcomes, it must treat racial equity as a measure of success. To support its goals of reducing core housing need, lowering housing costs, and reducing homelessness, implementing the following recommendations would further these efforts:
- Adopt CABR-style data governance. Track who benefits from new housing—by race, income, immigration status, and neighborhood—and publish the results regularly. Canada’s data practices must also support data sharing with other housing supports, including homelessness services, rental assistance programs, and subsidized housing providers. Researchers have noted that limited open data on public lands in Canada hinders efforts to build affordable housing on free or lost-cost sites. Efforts like RenovationWatch.ca—an online platform that tracks renovations and building permit applications for multi-unit housing in Toronto—serve as models.
- Tie federal funding to anti-displacement and tenant-protection standards. Provinces and developers should demonstrate how projects prevent eviction and exclusion while maintaining affordability. Recent attempts at weakening tenant protections while building more housing (such as Ontario’s passing of Bill 60) further these outcomes. Filtering—the process through which older, more affordable units become available to lower-income households as higher-income households move into newer units—is both too slow and inattentive to rising income inequality and intra-regional changes across Canada (Skaburskis 2006).
- Invest in community-based ownership models. Support community land trusts and collective-stewardship approaches that keep current and future development in community control. Programs like the Multi-Unit Residential Acquisition Program should be scaled up with rehabilitation loans to secure deeply affordable housing while preserving property dynamics and “community character” in some of the country’s oldest neighborhoods. Entities like the Housing Commons Research Centre provide useful examples.
These are pragmatic safeguards to ensure that “more homes” doesn’t mean more inequity. Building homes without a racial equity lens builds the wrong future. While Build Canada Homes will operate alongside the private sector, its mandate to prioritize non-market and community housing means it should serve those most vulnerable and often excluded from new private development. Private builders will continue to chase profitability, but this new agency must get equity right because expanding affordable and non-market housing without equity targets risks reproducing the same disparities it aims to address. Canada can’t build its way out of the housing crisis while ignoring how racism has, and continues to, shape its communities.
Bibliography
- Akaabre, P. B., Hackworth, J. and Keckesova, N. 2025. “Anti-black rental housing discrimination in the multicultural city? A field experiment in Toronto, Canada”, Journal of Urban Affairs, September, pp. 1–15.
- Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). 2025. Canada’s Housing Supply Shortages: Moving to a New Framework. Available online at the following URL: www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/professionals/housing-markets-data-and-research/housing-research/research-reports/accelerate-supply/canadas-housing-supply-shortages-a-new-framework?ap=a1-p2.
- City of Toronto. (n.d.). Confronting Anti-Black Racism. Available online at the following URL: www.toronto.ca/community-people/get-involved/community/confronting-anti-black-racism.
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- New Housing Alternatives. (n.d.). Ontario’s Bill 60 will make it easier and faster for landlords to evict tenants. Available online at the following URL: https://newhousingalternatives.ca/ontarios-bill-60-will-make-it-easier-and-faster-for-landlords-to-evict-tenants.
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