Housing as a Human Right Requires 3+ Bedroom Homes in Every Community
Housing through a human rights lens
Highlights
Canada’s National Housing Strategy Act recognizes “that the right to adequate housing is a fundamental human right affirmed in international law”.
In international law, the definition of “adequate housing” includes “the right to choose one’s residence, to determine where to live, and to freedom of movement” and the requirement that housing provide “adequate space.”
In Canada, “adequate space” is defined by the National Occupancy Standard, which requires all families with three children and most families with two children to have a home with three bedrooms. In some cases, four bedrooms are also required.
For Canada to take housing as a human right seriously, any young middle-class family should be able to afford a 3-bedroom home in any community. Those families must have the option to have children while also retaining their freedom of movement, as guaranteed under international law.
In Ontario, the number of homes with three bedrooms or more increased by 154,000 units between 2016 and 2021. Almost all of this increase, 92%, came from single-detached houses, semi-detached houses, and townhouses, collectively known as ground-oriented housing. Under the current regulatory, economic and tax environment, very few 3-bedroom and larger apartment units are built.
Any policies that inhibit middle-class families' access to 3-bedroom homes, including (but not limited to) high housing construction taxes such as development charges, as well as zoning, land use, and building code provisions that make building 3+ bedroom units economically prohibitive, clearly violate the spirit of housing as a human right.
A unit is not a unit is not a unit
There is an ideology, or perhaps an oversimplification, in the housing discourse and public policy that treats a “unit as a unit.” Whether it’s Ontario’s 1.5 million homes target or the federal government’s promise to achieve 3.9 million new homes by 2031, all homes are treated as identical, from 400 sq. ft. studio suites to four-bedroom homes with a backyard.
We must take a fair amount of responsibility for starting, or at least spreading, this ideology, as many of our past works, including 'Baby Needs a New Home' and 'Ontario's Need for 1.5 Million More Homes,' treat all units as being functionally identical. Our RoCA Benchmark 2.0 model is our attempt to address this issue. Because “a unit is not a unit”, and different homes serve different needs.
No two homes are the same, and it is vitally important that young families have reasonable access to rent or own a three-bedroom home, in any community they wish. Reasonable access to those homes is not just a nice-to-have; it is a human right under Canada’s implementation of international law.
We recognize that, to many, the claim that “young, middle-class families should have reasonable access to a three-bedroom home in any community in Canada is a human right” is a bold assertion. So let’s dig deeper.
Canada’s National Housing Strategy Act recognizes housing as a human right
In 2019, the federal government passed the National Housing Strategy Act (NHSA), which declares that the federal government must “recognize that the right to adequate housing is a fundamental human right affirmed in international law”. The preamble to the Act notes that the federal government’s national housing strategy is to support “progressive realization of the right to adequate housing as recognized in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to which Canada is a party”.
Two clauses in the United Nations’ International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1966 are particularly relevant to this discussion:
10.1 The widest possible protection and assistance should be accorded to the family, which is the natural and fundamental group unit of society, particularly for its establishment and while it is responsible for the care and education of dependent children. Marriage must be entered into with the free consent of the intending spouses.
11.1 The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions. The States Parties will take appropriate steps to ensure the realization of this right, recognizing to this effect the essential importance of international co-operation based on free consent.
The Covenant places particular emphasis on the importance of families, the care of dependent children and “adequate” housing. This raises the obvious challenge of defining what constitutes adequate housing.
Adequate housing: the international view
The United Nations provided an interpretation of “adequate housing” in their 1991 general comment on the right to adequate housing. The document makes it clear that “should not be interpreted in a narrow or restrictive sense”, but rather incorporates a number of factors. In particular:
“Adequate shelter means ... adequate privacy, adequate space, adequate security, adequate lighting and ventilation, adequate basic infrastructure and adequate location with regard to work and basic facilities ‑ all at a reasonable cost”.
The inclusion of adequate space makes it clear that home size matters, and a reasonable cost indicates that the right to housing incorporates economic considerations. The document encompasses seven factors (security of tenure, availability of services, affordability, habitability, accessibility, location, and cultural adequacy) that must be considered in determining adequacy.
The section on affordability begins with two sentences that mirror the discussions we have here at the Missing Middle:
Personal or household financial costs associated with housing should be at such a level that the attainment and satisfaction of other basic needs are not threatened or compromised. Steps should be taken by States parties to ensure that the percentage of housing‑related costs is, in general, commensurate with income levels.
Because the context of “affordability” or “cultural adequacy” will differ substantially between countries, many of the details are left for individual countries to fill in, which brings us to the Canadian context.
Adequate housing: Canada’s view
When the NHSA was released, the federal government set the goals of “removing 530,000 Canadian families from housing need and reducing chronic homelessness by half over the next decade”. A report from the Maytree Foundation notes that the National Housing Strategy Act created a linkage between housing as a human right and the federal government’s core housing need metric:
[I]n 2019, the federal government adopted the National Housing Strategy Act (NHSA). The Act not only formally recognizes the right to adequate housing as a fundamental human right, but enshrines this key goal of the NHS—to improve housing outcomes for those in greatest need—into law. As the main indicator of need, core housing need is being used to measure progress against the NHSA.
The Maytree report, titled “Modernizing Core Housing Need: Why the Key Indicator in Canadian Housing Policy Needs a Refresh,” argues that the statistic is not fully suited to its purpose, but for the time being, it is what we have.
Core housing need is being used as a proxy for Canada’s implementation of housing as a human right, or more specifically, where the country is falling short of realizing that right. Unlike the UN document, which has seven factors, the core housing needs metric only incorporates three. Confusingly, one of Canada’s three factors has the designation “adequate”, which the UN uses as an umbrella term to incorporate all of their seven factors.
Families that live in housing which does not meet one or more of these factors are considered to be in core housing need:
Adequate housing: is reported by their residents as not requiring any major repairs.
Affordable housing: has shelter costs equal to less than 30% of total before-tax household income.
Suitable housing has enough bedrooms for the size and composition of resident households according to the National Occupancy Standard (NOS).
As part of this definition, the federal government chose to exempt “non-family households with at least one maintainer aged 15 to 29 attending school, as they are currently in a “transitional phase” and “are viewed as being a temporary condition”. Therefore, under the current definition, the government does not consider 25 students living in a basement to be in core housing need, which is Canada’s standard for measuring housing as a human right. Clearly, reforms are needed in the metric.
Although imperfect, core housing need is currently Canada’s standard for housing as a human right, encompassing both the cost of housing and the number of bedrooms.
All households with three children, and many with two, require at a minimum three bedrooms
The National Occupancy Standard outlines the criteria for determining the minimum number of bedrooms required for a household to be considered in core housing need, which are:
A maximum of 2 persons per bedroom.
Household members, of any age, living as part of a married or common-law couple share a bedroom with their spouse or common-law partner.
Lone parents, of any age, have a separate bedroom from their children.
Household members aged 18 or over have a separate bedroom, except those living as part of a married or common-law couple.
Household members under 18 years of age of the same sex may share a bedroom, except lone parents and those living as part of a married or common-law couple.
Household members under 5 years of age of the opposite sex may share a bedroom if doing so would reduce the number of required bedrooms. This situation would arise only in households with an odd number of males under 18, and odd number of females under 18 and at least one female and one male under the age of 5.
An exception to the above is a household consisting of 1 individual living alone who may live in a studio apartment with no separate bedroom.
For a single-parent or dual-parent family with one child, a minimum of two bedrooms is required. However, when a family has two children, they will typically require three bedrooms, unless both children are under the age of five or both children are under the age of 18 and of the same sex, in which case two bedrooms are acceptable. For three-child families, either three or four bedrooms are required, depending on the ages and sex of the children. And none of this takes into account multi-generational families or other forms of families.
As such, families with three children and a large number of families with two children have a human right to have access to a home with three or more bedrooms. For this right to have meaning, however, it must also extend to those families who do not have that many children yet, because they cannot afford to rent or buy a three-bedroom home.
The right to access a three-bedroom home must extend beyond families that currently have two or more kids
The choices that individuals and families make are a function of their options. For example, housing research has a concept called “suppressed household formation,” which attempts to measure the number of new households that are not formed due to a lack of affordable housing. This could include an adult continuing to live with their parents because they cannot afford to move out, or persons forced to continue to live with an abusive partner, as they cannot afford to leave. Our choices are a function of the options available to us, a concept known in philosophy as option-freedom. Unattainable housing limits those options and reduces our freedom.
High and rising rents and home prices can also reduce the number of children families have, as it prices them out of suitable housing. Research conducted by the real estate tech firm Zillow found that American communities where home prices rose the fastest experienced the largest decline in birth rates. The decline in fertility rates is a global phenomenon which has occurred due to a variety of factors, but one of those factors is almost certainly the availability of family-friendly housing.
The core housing metric need makes it clear that families should have access to suitable housing that is less than 30% of their pre-tax income. If families are having to forego housing because it is too expensive, that constitutes a violation of the right to housing as a human right. Additionally, suppose families are forced to forgo having children or have more children due to a lack of suitable housing. In that case, this also constitutes a violation of the right to housing as a human right. Of course, a reasonableness test should be applied; a family of 47 may not be able to find a home with 30 bedrooms. But a family having two or three children, when the replacement fertility rate is 2.1, should hardly be considered unreasonable!
That family should also be able to obtain a three-bedroom home in any community in Canada
“Location” is one of the seven criteria in the UN’s right to adequate housing, noting that housing must be in locations that grant families “access to employment options, health‑care services, schools, childcare centres and other social facilities”. The UN also considers “[t]he right to choose one’s residence, to determine where to live and to freedom of movement” as included as part of the right to housing, through the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Mobility rights are not explicitly included in Canada’s definition of core housing need, although the metric is calculated at the local level. However, Section 4(b) of the National Housing Strategy Act recognizes that “housing is essential to the inherent dignity and well-being of the person and to building sustainable and inclusive communities”.
If families are forced to choose between living in unsuitable housing in an expensive community or forgoing employment and other opportunities to access suitable housing, this certainly violates the United Nations’ conception of housing as a human right and inhibits their freedom of movement. Furthermore, pricing the middle class out of particular cities is both damaging to the well-being of those priced out and does not create sustainable and inclusive communities. A reasonableness test must be applied, of course; there will be neighbourhoods that lack suitable housing for families at a given level of income. But it would seem unreasonable to price the middle class out of entire municipalities.
Putting it together: young, middle-class families should have reasonable access to a three-bedroom home in any community in Canada is a human right
The UN conception of housing as a human right and the Canadian implementation through the NHSA, make it clear that, at a minimum, families must be able to access housing that they can afford and that meets their needs. The human right to housing is violated when families are forced to live in expensive or overcrowded conditions, when they must forego having a child due to a lack of adequate housing, or are prevented from moving to a community due to a lack of adequate housing.
We should be clear that the human right to housing does not imply that governments provide free housing to all; no one would suggest that the right to free expression implies that the federal government must give everyone a free copy of Asha’s Mums. Rather, it requires that governments institute “reasonable policies and programs which will ensure that everyone has access to adequate housing by one means or another”. This also means that governments should not enact policies or programs that prevent access to adequate housing.
Numerous policies and programs hinder access to adequate housing, particularly for middle-class families. These can include, but are not limited to, development charges and other taxes that make housing prohibitively expensive, as well as zoning and land use rules that prevent an adequate number of three-bedroom homes from being built. Note that because the National Housing Strategy Act is a federal piece of legislation, it does not apply to provinces or municipalities. Given the importance of housing as a human right, we believe that all orders of government should adopt a rights-based approach to housing. We are encouraged that advocacy groups, such as the National Right to Housing Network, are working diligently to make this happen.
Finally, we should note that the human right to housing does not require that families have the right to own adequate housing; it simply requires that they have access to it in some form. Here at the Missing Middle Initiative, we believe that “every middle-class individual or family, in every city, has a high-quality of life and access to both market-rate rental and market-rate ownership housing options that are affordable, adequate, suitable, resilient, and climate-friendly.” However, this particular conception of option-freedom in housing, where families have both options, originates from us, not from the UN or the NHSA.
Currently, this right can only be achieved through building large quantities of ground-oriented housing. That should change.
For various regulatory, tax, and economic reasons, very few three-bedroom apartments are constructed in most provinces, particularly Ontario. Between 2016 and 2021, the number of homes in the province with three bedrooms or more increased by 154,000 units. Almost all of this increase, 92%, came from single-detached houses, semi-detached houses, and townhouses, collectively known as ground-oriented housing. Environmental Defence’s Mid-Rise Manual gives a fantastic primer on the issue, as well as providing a series of policy prescriptions. We encourage all orders of government to review the report and implement immediate reforms.
Until the prescriptions outlined in the Mid-Rise Manual are implemented, Ontario will need to permit the construction of large quantities of ground-oriented homes, ensuring that housing is a human right for all families. We estimate that the Greater Toronto Area will need to ensure that 30,000 ground-oriented homes and 20,000 apartment units are built annually to provide adequate housing for all. This represents a tripling of ground-oriented housing starts from current levels. Governments that take housing as a human right seriously must ensure there is enough suitable housing for families with children. To achieve this, governments need to facilitate significant increases in the rate of ground-oriented housing construction or make the necessary adjustments to accommodate the type of apartment units that comply with housing as a human right for families with children.
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