Mission: Affordable is a multi-year commitment by CivicAction and its newly-formed Housing Affordability Collaborative comprising leaders and doers from the private, nonprofit, civic, and community sectors across the GTHA.

Our goal is to accelerate cross-sectoral collaboration on proven and innovative solutions to improve housing affordability for key workers across the GTHA.

We know that these solutions exist. There are tangible examples of successful initiatives addressing them here in the GTHA and in many regions and municipalities across Canada and the globe.

But coordinated action isn’t happening at the speed and scale needed to tackle the urgency of this issue.

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Take these three easy steps:

1. Accept the mission [link right to the data capture form] to get tools, information, and inspiration to become an agent of change for housing affordability.
2. Tell others about Mission: Affordable and get them to accept the mission.
3. Donate to raise awareness, mobilize more changemakers, and advance bold, practical solutions across the GTHA.

If you accept the mission [link right to the data capture form], we will send you tools, information, and inspiration by email to help you become a better agent of change. You can unsubscribe from our emails at any time. For more information please read our Privacy Policy.

Current prices to rent a 1-bedroom apartment in the region average close to $2,400 per month. At the CMHC’s recommended limit of spending no more than 30% of your pre-tax income on housing, this means you would need to earn $96,000 annually (or $46 per hour in equivalent wages) to afford available 1-bedrooms.

More than 70% of income earners across the GTHA earn less than $90,000 annually, including most of the workers that provide the services and amenities we need to live in and enjoy this region - our teachers, nurses, healthcare providers, caregivers, 

tradespeople, retail and hospitality staff, artists, municipal and transit employees, social service workers, and many more.

If they can’t afford to live here, or if living here negatively impacts their health and quality of life, we face a much bigger crisis than simply housing affordability.

There are no simple answers to this question, and no single group is to blame – or can solve the problem on their own.

We can point to at least five key factors that are contributing to the issue, each of which requires greater collaboration among governments, the private sector, and community partners to solve. These include:

• Rising interest rates and the cost and availability of capital
• Increases in government fees and taxes
• Increasing building costs, including both materials and labour
• Long, complicated, and non-standardized zoning and approvals processes
• An overall lack of available housing, causing a growing imbalance between demand and supply.

We need partners across all sectors to accept the mission and show their support: workplaces, nonprofits, for-profits, decision-makers, and more. Please contact us today.

For more than 20 years, CivicAction has been a catalyst for positive change in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GHTA), turning collaboration into action to build better, more inclusive cities. Learn more about us.

Since our inception more than two decades ago as the Toronto City Summit Alliance by David Pecaut, CivicAction has recognized that complex challenges need an all-hands-on-deck approach to cross-sectoral action on solutions to these issues.

Every four years, we have conducted research, canvassed leaders from all sectors across the region, and hosted a Summit to identify and prioritize the most pressing issues facing the GTHA at that time. In 2023, it was clear that affordability - and housing affordability in particular - was the overriding concern for almost every individual and organization that we engaged, no matter which sector or whose interests they represented.

And we are widely recognized and appreciated for our ability to mobilize, focus, and coordinate efforts to action solutions to these challenges across all sectors in a non-partisan, non-judgmental, and inclusive manner.

It’s the overarching objective we bring to Mission: Affordable and all of our work to support housing affordability across the GTHA.

CivicAction is deeply indebted to our partners and members for their ongoing and essential support of Mission: Affordable and our work in housing affordability. We are also grateful for their support of our broader mission and mandate, which includes our inclusive leadership programs designed to build the collective leadership capacity of our region by preparing and empowering those who will lead it.