For a house to be considered affordable, the rent couldn’t be more than 30% of a family’s pre-tax income each month
A new number from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) shows that there are almost no private rental units in Ottawa that are affordable for households with the lowest incomes.
CMHC looked at the share of rental market housing that doesn’t cost more than 30% of a household’s pre-tax income if they are in the bottom 20% of income earners.
The indicator found that there were so few units that met those criteria in Ottawa and nine other Ontario cities that it couldn’t even give a reliable number.
Even in Vancouver, where only 1% of units were affordable by that measure, there were more units that fit the bill.
“What this first measure tells us is worrisome, to say the least,” the CMHC report said.
The numbers were much better in the cities of Québec. Gatineau had 8% of units that were affordable for the poorest 20% of households, but new data shows that rents in the city have gone up a lot in the last four years.
The CMHC report only looks at rental properties on the private market with at least three rental units. It doesn’t look at social housing units.
Units with high turnover have much higher rents
In the same report, CMHC compared the rents of units where new people moved in over the past year to those where people had lived there for a long time.
It found that the difference between the two groups in Ottawa was more than $300 per month.
The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment for new renters was $1,831. The average rent for people who had been renting for more than a year was $1,520.
Gatineau followed the same pattern, but the difference was only a little more than $100.