The picture-perfect Alberta town of Canmore, surrounded by Rocky Mountains and rich with pristine lakes, opens its doors to millions of visitors each year. Yet in recent years, the high cost of housing has many of its 17,200 residents feeling left out in the cold.
“We have a very low vacancy rate of below 1 per cent, rents are astronomical, and the cost of housing is so high that the average person can’t get into owning a property,” says Sean Krausert, mayor of Canmore, which is located near the southeast border of Banff National Park, less than an hour’s drive from Calgary. “Whether it’s to rent or own, we just do not have the housing inventory that the average person can access.”
That’s starting to change, thanks to public- and private-sector partners working together to build affordable housing in this community. Last year, Partners for Affordable Housing soft-launched a “Great Expectations” campaign – in collaboration with local government and Canmore Community Housing – to help solve the town’s affordable housing problem.
While still in its early stages, the collaboration-focused campaign has already made progress, starting with a project to build new non-market homes in the town’s Palliser Trail area. The campaign’s first flagship project – 100 Palliser Trail – will deliver 144 purpose-built rentals, with near-net-zero features and family-friendly design, at rental rates set at 25 to 40 per cent below market.
“We just broke ground at 100 Palliser Trail, and we expect to be breaking ground within the next few months on another project that will have 270 units,” says Mayor Krausert. “These are all rental units and they’ll be rented at non-market rates. We’re moving forward to meet an objective of having 2,000 new non-market units within the next 10 years.”
The idea of partnerships to build affordable housing isn’t new. In Canada, governments and private-sector partners have teamed up towards this goal since the end of the Second World War. More of these collaborations are urgently needed today, as the widening housing supply gap continues to drive real estate and rental prices way out of reach for millions of Canadians.
According to a 2024 report by housing policy expert and University of Toronto professor Carolyn Whitzman, Canada is missing 4.4 million affordable homes. Since 2017, the country’s builders have put up only 4,000 to 6,000 non-market priced homes each year – a mere 3 per cent of new home construction – while chronic homelessness has risen by 22 per cent.
“The housing situation in our country is just so dire,” says Amy Bolt, director of programs at Partners for Affordable Housing, a national non-profit organization that brings public, private and philanthropic partners together with community housing providers to advance affordable housing projects.
“There are millions of Canadians who don’t have homes or who have homes but are precariously housed. We need to build more affordable housing.”
Recognizing the importance of collaboration in affordable housing projects, Partners for Affordable Housing helps non-profit housing providers and community-based organizations unite under co-ordinated, large-scale fundraising campaigns. Partners’ Collaborative Campaigns are rooted in the idea that when disparate organizations combine local leadership and shared missions with national capacity, they gain access to larger pools of philanthropic, private and public funding – accelerating affordable housing projects and strengthening a nationwide movement for housing affordability.
John Landry, president and CEO at Peoples Group, a Canadian financial institution with a strategic focus on multi-family mortgage financing, says the most sustainable solutions to the country’s affordable housing shortage come from partnerships and programs that stimulate private, corporate and financial sector investment.
“While affordable housing has traditionally been the responsibility of government, government on its own isn’t a sustainable driver of the right housing for Canadians,” he says. “We welcome the opportunity to partner and contribute to a more co-ordinated response in driving sustainable impact, including public to private programs that can serve as effective distribution channels for housing investment.”
From the perspective that “the housing crisis is so huge that no single entity is going to fix it alone,” Jen Harrop, senior vice president at Peakhill Capital, also welcomes the collaborative approach led by Partners for Affordable Housing. “Our existing business model pairs well with this work, and this gives us an opportunity to support non-profits.”
As a leading CMHC-approved lender, Peakhill has funded $1.7-billion in mortgages to properties with affordability components in 2024, “a figure we expect to surpass in 2025,” says Ms. Harrop. “Part of our ongoing work with for-profit developers and operators is to educate them that affordability components are a good investment strategy that comes with operational benefits of lower turnover and stable returns.”
A co-ordinated response of another kind is taking shape in Hamilton, Ont., where eight non-profit providers formed a coalition – called Hamilton is Home – to co-ordinate efforts to build affordable housing.
“We all used to do our own thing – as friends, not rivals, but still competing for the same small piece of pie,” says Graham Cubitt, the coalition’s chair and president of Flourish, which provides real estate development services to clients pursuing affordable housing and social-purpose projects. “Five years ago, we formed Hamilton is Home to co-ordinate strengths, build a shared database of potential housing sites and funding needs, and advocate together.”
Over the past decade, this city of close to 600,000 residents experienced a surge in new housing – specifically, a condo boom that at its peak saw condominiums accounting for as high as 75 per cent of all new builds. The problem was, most units weren’t priced for “everyday people with regular incomes,” says Mr. Cubitt.
Hamilton is Home has identified about 1,400 affordable housing units that can be built in the city, and is working with municipal and federal governments, as well as with the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation to move towards planning, funding and construction.
“By working together, we’re making a bigger pie,” says Mr. Cubitt. “By co-ordinating our efforts and advocacy, we created that bigger picture that we’ve been able to communicate to the community, particularly to civic stakeholders like the various levels of government, so we can build something that will have broader impact.”
Out west in Canmore, Mayor Krausert says non-market housing is the most viable solution for the town’s housing crisis – and collaboration between public, private and philanthropic and non-profit housing partners is the model that can make it happen.
He says, “Canmore attracts people from around the world, but its beauty is in its people. If we can’t house our residents, then the experience that people come here for is at risk.”
This article was originally published on November 20, 2025, as part of the National Housing Day special feature in The Globe and Mail, produced by Randall Anthony Communications.