Here's how the housing landscape could change under a newly re-elected Liberal government

The dust has settled on an election that did little to change the parliamentary makeup in Ottawa, as thefederal Liberals againtake their seatsas a minority government.

One of the cornerstone campaignissues was the housing crisis. But it is not a new issue.Many have argued there was little improvement under the previous government, and are skepticalit will be anydifferent under the new one.

According to the Canadian Real Estate Association, the average price of a home in this countryhas gone up more than 50 per cent over the last five years. And it's not slowing. Nationally, theaverage home pricein August wasup 13.3 per centfrom the same month last year.

The key, say experts, is delving deep into the promises made inthe partyplatforms.If they come to passand do sosoon they havereason for some optimism.

"There are a number of ideas from the Liberals that I'm looking forward to seeing come to fruition," said Paul Kershaw, founder and lead researcher of Generation Squeeze, an advocacy group billed as a voice for younger Canadians.

The thing that I liked [about] what the Liberals said explicitly in their platform was that there's a problem with NIMBY'ism.- Tom Davidoff, UBC Sauder School of Business

He points to new policies thatpromise to discourage renovictions and demovictions, plus details ofwhat he calls a "boutique" rent-to-own program,as well as the two-year moratorium on foreign ownership (first proposed by the Conservatives), and howthe Liberals intend to discourage home-buying solely as an investment.

However, he alsoflags what he sees as afundamental problem: none of the parties said out loud that if they're going to restore housing affordability for all, they need home prices to pauseso that earnings can catch up and keep pace.

"We're currently on an escalator of rising home pricesthat's going up really quickly ... but unless we stall that escalator, the politicians aren't going to be able to run down fast enough to restore affordability," said Kershaw, also a professorat the University of British Columbia'sschool of population and public health.

In the 1970s, it took a typical young person five years offull-time work to save up for a 20 per cent down payment on an average-priced home, according to his research. Now, it would take that same person 28 years in Metro Vancouver.

Kershaw says that's where the campaigningends and reality begins:by getting down to the business of governing and having hard conversations about true affordability.

"[Politicians] need to say, 'Look, we tried to get two things out of housing for awhile:a place to call home and a really good investment opportunity. The latter, though, keeps driving home prices out of what locals earn and thatleaves less affordability.'"

Municipalities hold akey

The overarching solution that's long been put forward, and is being repeated more loudlyby policy experts now,is tosaturate the market with moresupply to try to catchthe pace of demand and moderate prices.

"While housing affordability has been a challenging situation, we don't see any relief in sight under the current trajectory," said Trevor Hargreaves, vice-president of government relations and stakeholder engagement for the B.C. Real Estate Association.

"What we're seeing is the result of multiple years of undersupply our government really hasn't focused on supply as an overall priority," he said. "We've been producing much fewer homes than most of the other countries in the G7."

Pair that with up to 400,000 people a year moving to Canada under very intensive immigration targets, he says,withoutOttawa coming up with a comprehensive plan to house all those people.

"I think one ofthe root causes of the housing affordability problem is the fact that we have three levels of government in this country, and they're not all aligned," said Hargreaves, adding that federal, provincial, and municipal governments do not operate under one single national housingplan.

What does getbuilt is largely controlled throughlocal zoning and other regulatory processes, and as such,municipalities are often tied to public hearings many of them involving long, drawn-out meetings featuring an often vocal minority of residents saying: "not in my backyard."

"The Liberals explicitly mentionedNIMBY'ismin their platform, and I suspect that was the first time that's been done in a Canadian platform;so they named an important issue and outlined action on it," said Tom Davidoff, real estate expert andassociateprofessor at UBC'sSauder School of Business.

The party'saction plan detailsan application-basedfund formunicipalities that "grow housing supply faster than their historical average, increase densification, speed up approval times, and tackle NIMBY'ism."

Broadly speaking, Davidoff doesn't believe any of the parties put anything on the table in this election that would revolutionize housing costs in Canada.

"The Liberals have been trying to find ways to help first-time buyers. Unfortunately, the more you help first-time buyers the more you tend to push up housing prices," he said.

"But some of the measures they talked about lower insurance costs, tweaking amortization rules might make it a little bit easier for some people to get into ownership than it was before."