Toronto’s housing affordability crisis

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.82191/lseidr.106

Keywords:

Housing, Human rights, Right to housing

Abstract

This article explores the challenge of housing affordability in Toronto, Canada. It gives a rough overview of the city’s response to this challenge before undertaking a critical analysis of the effectiveness of City of Toronto’s housing plan “HousingTO – 2020-2030 Action Plan” from the lens of Mariana Mazzucato and Leilani Farha's “The right to housing: A mission-oriented and human-rights based approach”. The paper concludes with reflections on key gaps related to marginalized groups whose housing needs continue to be neglected as well as in the city’s inability to attract the needed funding and systems and policy change at provincial and federal levels that will allow it to act in a more entrepreneurial approach to address the issue. A more urgent approach needs to be adopted by the city to accelerate the progress on the targets set in the HousingTo Plan and a more entrepreneurial attitude needs to be adopted to allow for more creative solutions to come up from bottom-up; especially by those most impacted by this crisis.

Author Biography

Aline Rahbany, LSE Cities

Aline is the technical director for urban programming at World Vision International, a global non-profit organization that works to improve the wellbeing of children impacted by poverty, violence, conflicts and other crises. In her current role, she is responsible for integrating and operationalising urban programming in the organisation’s strategies at all levels, from local to global, supporting in building organizational capabilities for responding to urban challenges, building, and managing an urban community of practice and representing the organization externally in opportunities for positioning children in the global urban discourse.

Based out of Toronto, Aline holds a global portfolio while in the past she worked in multiple roles within the offices of World Vision in Lebanon and Middle East/ Eastern Europe region. She brings over 15 years of experience in the international humanitarian and development field focused mostly on research and learning, strategy development, program innovation and technical support for the NGO’s work in urban contexts, including in fragile cities. She holds a Masters degree in

Public Health from the American University of Beirut and is pursuing a Master of Science in Cities degree from the London School of Economics.

Aline is a passionate public speaker and advocate for inclusive cities and advocating for groups who are “deliberately silenced or preferably unheard”.

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Published

2025-06-09

Issue

Vol. 4 No. 1 (2025): LSE International Development Review

Section

Academic Commentary

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