It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that Canada's housing crisis was named the Canadian Press Story Of The Year.
The issue dominated local headlines in 2024, beginning with the region's endorsement of an innovative housing solution and ending with efforts to get affordable housing built on city-owned land.
What might come as a surprise, however, is the city's definition of affordable housing as it ramps up efforts to do its part to address the housing crisis.
The City of Cambridge says it will use numbers provided by the province in June to determine what monthly rent should be charged for any affordable unit built in the city.
Right now, for a one-bedroom apartment, it's $1,220.
An affordable purchase price is $391,600 for all built forms.
If you think that's a bit high, you're not alone.
Kitchener MP Mike Morrice tabled a motion in the House of Commons in late November that calls for an overhaul of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation's affordable housing criteria with a goal to prioritize funding for deeply affordable units over what's currently in place.
Instead of defining affordability as 80 per cent of median market rates, he wants CMHC to stick to its established target of 30 per cent of gross household income for shelter costs. That includes rent, mortgage payments, utilities, property taxes and condo fees.
CMHC worked with the provinces to come up with its 30 per cent shelter-cost-to-income ratio (STIR) in 1986 as a way to measure affordability when determining the need for social housing.
Using STIR as a guideline means the city's definition of affordable rent assumes gross annual household income should be at least $48,800.
In terms of the city's target purchase price, a 10 per cent down payment, a 4.5 per cent mortgage rate and 25-year amortization, buyers are looking at a monthly mortgage payment of $2,093.
That means they should have a gross annual household income of at least $75,348 to meet the 30 per cent threshold.
All of that information could have been used to calm neighbours of 25 Chalmers St. S. and 0 Grand Ridge Dr. during a recent public meeting on proposed changes the city hopes will attract developers to build about 250 units on the two sites.
The Nov. 12 meeting went off the rails when some delegates opposed to the city's concepts ignored the rules and made derogatory comments about the types of people they believe live in affordable housing.
Many seemed to be reading from a NIMBY playbook with their concerns about oppressive building heights, traffic impacts, property values, pressure on nearby schools, diminished property standards and rising crime.
It got so bad that near the end of the meeting, councillors Corey Kimpson and Adam Cooper had to remind delegates to stick to planning considerations and that affordable housing is the goal when other land uses were suggested.
Their comments were followed by a harsh rebuke from Coun. Scott Hamilton who called some of the delegations "outrageous, antiquated and frankly offensive."
After the meeting, Hamilton said he understands change is hard, but people need to realize the sheer scale of the housing crisis, which in ten years, has flipped the world of real estate and the ability to buy a house on its head.
"If I would be coming back to Canada today with my wife, she was a young professional and I was a PhD student, I would be in affordable housing," he told delegations lingering in council chambers that night.
In advance of a report and recommendation on the two proposals, which could return to council for a decision as early as next month, he called on staff to help clear up all the misconceptions by defining what affordable housing means and identifying who the city is trying to help.
"So when people hear the words affordable housing, they don't think, 'oh no, crime, drug deals, cars on cinder blocks.' They think it's a family with a single income. It's a young professional. It's a senior. It's a new trades person. It's a post-doctoral student. That's who needs affordable housing right now," he says.
"What we're really talking about is opposition to housing aimed at middle income households," says Laura Pin, an associate professor of political science at Wilfrid Laurier University. "Isn't it wild?"
She points to a 2022 survey conducted by the Laurier Institute of Public Policy that focused on public attitudes toward different types of housing using examples ranging from condominiums to affordable rental apartments and a variety of building heights and densities.
It found no statistical difference in favour or against any type of build.
"So, I would suggest those opinions, that renters are bad neighbours or that affordable housing is a negative for the community, are increasingly out of step with what the public in general believes," Pin says.
It's also important for anyone opposed to this type of housing in their neighbourhood to know that the average wait for a one-bedroom subsidized unit in Waterloo region is about eight years.
A recent Point in Time count found more than 2,100 unsheltered individuals living across the region, either hidden or in encampments.
"My understanding is that folks in Cambridge are not big fans of encampments, are concerned about visible homelessness in their community, and so it would seem to me that these sorts of developments are an important way to address some of those things," she says.
Martin Asling, who was at the November meeting, says he's disappointed to learn the city isn't aiming for deeply affordable units and believes that should be the requirement for municipalities to receive federal funding.
As a member of the Waterloo region housing advocacy group WR YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard), he hears the same rhetoric from neighbours opposed to affordable housing proposals all the time.
"You have to put the housing somewhere" and with 56 per cent of Cambridge housing stock in single-family homes, building it in any other part of the city is becoming increasingly difficult, he says.
Asling says one of the biggest misconceptions he hears about high density builds is their impact on traffic.
Denser forms of housing make public transit more viable and allow people to rely less on cars, he says. "Those are very real, tangible benefits" that can positively impact the entire city.
He's also found no correlation between affordable housing builds and shrinking property values, a repeated claim from neighbours of these proposals.
Many new affordable housing developments are indistinguishable from market rent buildings or condominiums, he says.
They're also often designed now as mixed-use buildings, meaning businesses and services that benefit the entire neighbourhood often fill ground floor units.
Diane Goodwin says she went in to the meeting expecting pushback but admits it was much stronger than expected, particularly for the Grand Ridge site.
Located in a modest, family-oriented neighbourhood, close to schools, shopping and public transit, the site is what she calls a perfect fit for the 55-unit apartment building the city has conceptualized for the property.
Goodwin, who is a member of the local housing advocacy group Citizens for Cambridge and lives about a kilometre down the road from the site, says the field has been such a "scrubby, ugly blight for so many years" she imagined nearby residents would be happy to see it developed.
Concerns about traffic along Cedar Creek Road were expected. So were worries about parking on nearby streets. Those are all legitimate concerns, Goodwin says have only gotten worse in the decades she's lived in the neighbourhood.
She believes an apartment building at that corner, might prompt the region to add traffic lights at the intersection and improve the situation for the entire neighbourhood.
But it was particularly disappointing to hear people complain they might not get sunshine through their kitchen windows because of a shadow cast from a four-storey building, she says.
"I hate hearing people talk about this so negatively when they sit in warm and comfortable homes."
