The Cost of Mistrust in Housing
My youngest son is a voracious reader.
The kind of reader that makes you say things as a parent that feel more than a little absurd. “If you don’t do your chores, you won’t be able to keep reading your book,” or “No, you can’t bring your book with you.”
He’s the kind of reader my parents could only dream I’d become one day. I never really caught that bug myself and so I’ve never been much of a novel reader.
But my son recently finished the Harry Potter series and we’ve moved on to watching the movies together, which, truth be told, is a little more my speed.
In the final story, Harry and his friends are consumed by a problem they cannot solve. They possess one of Voldemort’s Horcruxes. They know it is dangerous. They know it must be destroyed. They can hold it in their hands, stare directly at it and name exactly what it is.
But they still do not know how to defeat it.
Housing feels a little like that right now.
There is no shortage of explanations for why we are in a housing crisis. We have been in one for so long that most people can recite the causes by memory. Land speculation. Rising taxes and fees. Investor driven financial models. Construction costs. Bureaucracy. Greed.
We can see the problem clearly. We can point directly at it. And yet, despite all that understanding, we remain stuck.
Why?
Because beneath all the policies and economics lies something much harder to repair: trust.
The housing system is not just made up of regulations and approvals. It is made up of people. Developers. Municipalities. Builders. Bankers. Investors. Bureaucrats. Politicians. And increasingly, all of them operate as though the others cannot be trusted.
Developers assume municipalities will delay and obstruct. Municipalities assume developers will prioritize profit above all else. Banks reduce risk. Governments add layers of oversight. Contractors protect margins. Everyone tightens control because everyone assumes someone else is acting only in their own interest.
Over time, that mistrust hardens into process.
That is how systems become heavy. Why approvals become endless. Why costs rise before a shovel even enters the ground. Red tape is often what mistrust looks like when it becomes policy. One professional reviews another professional before a third professional weighs in because somewhere along the way, confidence in one another eroded.
To be clear, trust did not disappear without reason. Every part of the system played a role in breaking it. This is not a story with heroes on one side and villains on the other. Everyone has spent years protecting their own interests.
A new fee here. An upcharge there. Less risk for one side. More cost for another. Individually, each decision may seem rational. Collectively, they have created a housing system fewer and fewer people believe is working for them.
And the people carrying the greatest burden are the very people the system is supposed to serve. Families trying to buy their first home. Young people wondering if stability is even possible. Seniors watching affordability disappear from the communities they helped build.
We understand the housing crisis. The real challenge now is whether we can rebuild enough trust to solve it together.
Because no government can fix this alone. No developer can fix it alone. No non profit, bank or builder can either.
The only way forward is together
-Philip Mills
Philip Mills, CEO Habitat Waterloo Region
