National Housing Strategy Solutions Labs

Funding to tackle persistent and complex housing issues, enabling the rapid development of potential solutions.

NEW!

The National Housing Strategy Solutions Labs program follows a continuous intake process, allowing applicants to submit proposals that meet the eligibility criteria. While there is no deadline for applying, please note that the application portal will close once all funding has been allocated.

Applications Are Now Open

The National Housing Strategy Solutions Labs is seeking proposals related to specific themes to achieve a broader impact. Your solution may be eligible for funding up to $250,000.

For the 2024-2025 funding opportunity, the theme of focus is: “Supporting the Community Housing Sector to Increase and Preserve the Affordable Housing Supply”.

What is the National Housing Strategy Solutions Labs Program?

Solutions Labs are an innovative approach to tackling complex societal challenges that require systems change. They provide a safe space for diverse perspectives to come together, for assumptions to be questioned and to experiment with housing solutions.

Fund details

Community housing providers face unique challenges in creating affordable housing and deepening or preserving affordability compared to private sector developers. These challenges exist in:

financing
acquisition of land or existing affordable housing
development
construction
operation
replication

If you have a solution that helps community housing providers overcome these barriers your solution may be eligible. Additionally, if you’re a community housing provider with a solution that can be replicated by others and results in the creation of affordable units or enhances or preserves affordability, your solution may qualify.

Ideal candidates need to demonstrate a commitment to generating affordable housing units within 1 to 3 years following the solution lab and roadmap.

See the Applicant Guide for details. CMHC reserves the right to decide if a proposed solution is in scope for this call for proposals.

Successful projects are eligible for funding up to a maximum of $250,000*.

*Note: CMHC may grant larger amounts based on the rationale and expected impact provided by applicants. For more details, please see the Applicant Guide.

About the National Housing Strategy Solutions Labs Program

Solutions Labs are also called social innovation labs, design labs or change labs. They’re an innovative approach to tackling complex societal challenges that require systems change.

Housing challenges may include:

affordability
social inclusion
northern and remote supports
Indigenous housing
environmental sustainability

They provide a safe space for diverse perspectives to come together, for assumptions to be questioned and to experiment with housing solutions.

Housing solutions may include:

emerging technologies
best practices
innovative policies
programs

Organizations receiving funding to create project teams. They are encouraged to bring together a variety of stakeholders to gather diverse perspectives on an issue. The funding recipients also need to work with expert innovation consultants who have experience in the design and implementation of Solutions Labs.

Together, they will:

examine and reframe current housing issues
use innovative problem-solving best practices and tools
co-develop potential solutions to be prototyped and tested
create a roadmap that clearly describes how the solution(s) can be implemented

Am I eligible?

Application steps

SELECTION PROCESS

Application Resources

APPLY TODAY

Successful projects

2021 Successful Projects

Co-Creating Housing Solutions: Enacting Opportunities for Individuals with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder
This Solutions Lab will address the barriers, strengths and opportunities for improving the housing tenure among youth with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Its innovative approach will engage youth with lived experience and blend an existing housing framework with community-based expertise to develop implementable solutions.

Advancing the Right to Housing for Women and Gender-Diverse Persons: Developing National Rights-Based Shelter Standard using a GBA+ Framework
This Solutions Lab brings together major Violence Against Women and homelessness stakeholders from across the country, It will explore a rights-based, gender-based analysis plus (GBA+) model for service delivery in emergency shelters. The Lab will co-develop and prototype “Rights-Based, GBA+ National Shelter Standards” to guide the transformation of service delivery.

Shelter in the Storm: Pathways to Generationally-Secure Housing in Southern New Brunswick
Skyrocketing property costs, overstretched social services and over 2 years of a pandemic have deepened housing barriers for vulnerable people. This Solutions Lab will co-develop solutions to improve housing accessibility and security in urban southern New Brunswick for people who need complex supports.

Supporting Saskatoon's Most Vulnerable: A Systems Approach to Individuals Facing an Intersection of Challenges
This Solutions Lab will focus on enhancing culturally appropriate and relevant support for people with complex needs. It will strengthen partnerships among housing support organizations. The project will co-develop a new way of working and collaborating that can have positive impacts in other areas of the community’s housing sector.

Gender Transformative Housing Supporting Women Leaving Violent Relationships: Co-creating Safe-at-Home Hamilton
“Safe at Home” programs enable women to stay in their homes while recovering from violence. The perpetrators of violence are relocated. This Solutions Lab challenges the conventional supports for women and children escaping violence by co-developing solutions for implementing the Safe at Home housing model in Canada.

2SLGBTQIA+ Seniors Co-living Apartment
This Solutions Lab uses an innovative approach to better understand the unique life experiences of 2SLGBTQIA+ seniors. By better understanding their needs and the systems that influence their lived experience, this Lab will co-develop innovative and supportive solutions to housing for 2SLGBTQIA+ seniors.

Seniors' Hidden Housing Solutions
Many seniors are “over housed” in single-detached homes that are unaffordable and hard to maintain. This Solutions Lab will explore housing solutions for in-need seniors through home sharing, secondary suites and accessory dwellings. It will analyze challenges holistically by looking at issues such as social isolation, risk of homelessness, affordability and per capita greenhouse gas emissions. Best practices will inform the lab to co-develop policy and program solutions across British Columbia and Canada.

Toward Mutual Gain: Boosting Housing Supply by Unlocking Trapped Value in Racialized Neighborhoods
This Solution Lab will provide pathways to simplify, decentralize and accelerate the creation of housing. It aims to co-develop solutions and empower 300 property owners with the necessary tools and resources in a consolidated, user-friendly platform so they can each bring 1 unit to market within 18 to 24 months.

Green Violin Veterans Village Lab
This Solutions Lab will explore increasing the housing supply for low-income veterans who are disproportionately impacted by homelessness. This project will co-develop a faster and more affordable solution for housing and build an innovative modular tiny home community infill project.

Social Financing for Social Inclusion
This Solutions Lab will co-develop solutions for social isolation and the lack of inclusive housing options for people with developmental disabilities through a social financing model. This project aims to implement its solution(s) on a large, cross-country scale using community connectors or facilitators in existing housing.

Understanding and Estimating Hidden Homelessness in Saskatoon
This Solutions Lab will co-develop a framework that strengthens decision-maker understanding of hidden homelessness in Saskatoon. It will bring together people with lived experience and service providers with existing relationships with people experiencing homelessness. The project team will develop a framework for policy and decision-making that addresses the self-identified needs of hidden homeless populations.

Transforming Policy Responses to Homeless Encampments in Canada: Implementing a Rights-Based, GBA+ Approach
The National Protocol on Homeless Encampments in Canada – A Human Rights Approach Protocol is a series of rights-based principles. It is being increasingly used by municipalities, stakeholder groups and encampment residents. This Solutions Lab will co-develop an effective approach to fostering inter- and intra-governmental collaboration in response to encampments. It will build on the Protocol and implement it at the local level.

Mechanisms for Funnelling Institutional ESG funds into Affordable Housing Development Projects
This Solutions Lab will co-develop a platform that provides a consistent, comparable and transparent funding market for affordable housing projects. It uses environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria to evaluate desired environmental, social and financial outcomes. It will enable the rapid scaling of private and institutional capital flows to projects and create stronger partnerships between developers, lenders, investors, regulators and the community.

Halal Housing Lab: Utilizing Untapped Restricted Philanthropic Capital to House Marginalized Ethno-Cultural Communities
Racialized, minority or newcomer women fleeing violence often need housing for larger and extended families, culturally appropriate supports for mental health and pathways into market housing that align with their values. This Solutions Lab aims to co-develop solutions to building affordable housing that meets their unique needs.

African Canadian Affordable Housing
This Solutions Lab will co-develop and deliver a more appropriate affordable housing solution for African Canadian communities. It will focus on creating a multigenerational affordable housing program that provides a traditional and sustainable environment for community members. It will give residents the necessary tools and support for success. Solutions will be transferable to communities with shared features.

2020 Successful Projects

YWCA Building Sector Resiliency to Address Housing Needs of Most Vulnerable Canadians
This Solutions Lab brings housing and community leaders together to think collectively about how to best access and use capital to achieve more desirable outcomes. That is, delivering new housing at deeply subsidized rents (Social Assistance-level rates) for some of the most vulnerable populations.

A Home in a Neighbourhood Where I Belong
This Solutions Lab connects stakeholders from different sectors with people with disabilities and their families. Participants identify challenges to building inclusive housing. They share their knowledge and co-create and test solutions for creating inclusive, affordable housing.

Nunavut Condominium Corporation Insurance Solutions Lab
This Solutions Lab works with our partners to identify and engage key stakeholders exploring relevant issues and challenges with denied or expensive building insurance. It also identifies and prototypes potential solutions to this problem. The goal is to prevent loss of the structures and continue to house vulnerable populations.

Affordable Housing for Social Inclusion
This Solutions Lab creates innovative, inclusive housing options for individuals with developmental disabilities nationwide. Through a collaborative process, potential solutions will be piloted. A key tool to be built is a detailed journey/experience map of the process for developing new housing that could embed the principles of "reverse inclusion".

Creating Home Together: Supporting Women+ Through Housing Transitions
This Solutions Lab creates a roadmap on solutions to remove barriers to shelters and other services in the homelessness and violence against women sectors. Women and transgender people with lived expertise and nationwide partners will participate in workshops. The ideas and materials generated will help to develop adaptable housing and support solutions.

Housing Journeys Reimagined: Toward a Supportive Affordable Homeownership Opportunity
The Solutions Lab aims to introduce a new supportive, affordable ownership model that can help end chronic homelessness and generational poverty. The replication of this model across Canada would help decrease chronic homelessness by increasing options for affordable, stable housing. This approach could also reduce returns to homelessness by developing a wealth- and equity-generating opportunity for individuals experiencing homelessness.

Housing through an Autism Lens: A Pathway from Crisis to Solutions
The Solutions Lab develops a pathway to independent and affordable living for autistic adults. It includes an integrated set of flexible housing-related supports and services (based on functional ability and the spectrum of Autism Spectrum Disorder or ASD needs). It also proposes actual brick and mortar solutions.

Building with Mission
This Solutions Lab tries to reduce pressures on hospitals and long-term care homes by determining and addressing the causes. The key is to impact social determinants of health and creating housing based on local needs. The goal is to create a collaborative playbook by documenting insights and learnings to develop affordable and supportive housing campuses.

Developing easy-to-use community decision-making tools to help achieve National Housing Strategy Goals
This Solutions lab opens the perceived black box of housing data to be easily used by decision makers. This project will be completed through a series of online workshops. The result will be a better understanding of the initial problems that will allow us to provide and support evidence-based consensus on solutions. It will also help teams to assess end-results for accountability, and identify further innovative opportunities.

2019 Successful Projects

Accessible, Affordable, Inclusive: Housing Solutions that Meet the Needs of People with Developmental Disabilities
The Solutions Lab will examine 3 significant barriers to housing that people with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities face: (1) availability, (2) accessibility, and (3) cost.

Fundamentally integrating environmental performance into affordable housing solutions
The Solutions Lab will examine how to integrate environmental performance into the economic model of housing projects in order to enhance the long-term livability and viability of affordable housing.

Medicine Hat Systems Transformation Solutions Lab
The Solutions Lab will examine how to co-design a Systems Transformation Initiative that results in an integrated prevention, homelessness, housing, corrections, and health systems design and transformation process.

Balanced Housing Lab
The Solutions Lab will examine the emerging housing issues facing middle-income earners to be able to live and work within the City of North Vancouver, Squamish Nation, and District of West Vancouver.

Indigenous Housing Solutions Lab
The Solutions Lab will examine solutions to answer the question: What if we could co-create Indigenous homes to be sources of health, wealth and connection in tune with culture and the environment?

Surfacing our Strengths
The Solutions Lab will examine cross-sectoral, culturally appropriate, person-centered responses to housing needs and experiences of homelessness for women+. This includes women and people of marginalized gender identities (herein: “women+”) experiencing homelessness – including women+ and children fleeing violence.

Skookum Lab: Urban Housing Solutions for Indigenous Youth and Families
The Solutions Lab will be one of the first Indigenous-led, social innovation labs in Canada. Skookum Lab utilizes an Indigenous driven and Indigenous led methodology that incorporates Indigenous ways of knowing and being throughout.

Social wellbeing in modular housing: co-creating designs to nurture health and social support for vulnerable people
The Solutions Lab will examine modular housing as a promising rapid response to homelessness.

Indigenous Housing and Home-Lands Solutions Lab
The Solutions Lab will examine the economic development and employment opportunity related to a growing Indigenous population with legally recognized territorial assets and capital, and a need for housing.

Affordable Housing+: Solutions in an effort to shift the affordable housing baseline
The Solutions Lab will examine the important question: How does an individual or family unit move from a situation where affordable housing is required to a situation where it is no longer required?

Community Housing in Nunavut: New Approaches for Affordable, Appropriate Indigenous Housing Development
The Solutions Lab will examine the question: How can we seed and strengthen the community-housing sector’s participation in housing development and management in Nunavut?

Developing a model to leverage retail-level investments to finance affordable housing partnership for refugees
The Solutions Lab will examine the need for a replicable local investment option that is suitable for retail-level investors and is capable of financing the development of additional affordable housing for refugees and other vulnerable groups.

Reimagining Skills Training: Developing a complete housing systems approach in First Nations in Ontario
The Solutions Lab will examine the skills gaps most relevant to creating change in Ontario First Nation communities by identifying, addressing and overcoming skills barriers faced in controlling their housing systems.

Enabling Citizen-Led Housing: New Models for Seniors’ Housing Design and Development
The Solutions Lab seeks to engage seniors in co-designing a set of planning approaches and processes to enable a more balanced framework for the development of seniors’ housing between citizens, community organizations, and the private sector.

Igniting Housing Possibilities for Older Adults: Collaborative Solutions for Urban and Rural Communities in Peel Region
The Solutions Lab will examine the question: “How might we enable seniors from diverse backgrounds living in urban and rural settings and system stakeholders to participate in a design process that increases the suite of innovative and diverse affordable housing options available to seniors that promote community inclusion and proactive responses to affordability issues?”

Let’s Talk… Home and Community
The Solutions Lab will examine the Question: How might we promote social and economic inclusion through a housing model with individuals with developmental disabilities and newcomers to Canada by leveraging existing community assets and hosting conversations for each group to co-design “good community”?

Accessing Affordable Home Ownership Opportunities for Community Housing Tenants
The Solutions Lab will examine opportunities to maximize the movement into and out of Community Housing in the Waterloo Region.

From Prison to Homelessness: Ending a Perilous Trajectory
The Solutions Lab will examine how we can help increase the availability and access to suitable housing for Canadians who leave the prison system, while also providing opportunities for offenders to gain employment skills training to improve their opportunities of finding meaningful employment.

Addressing Family Homelessness at the Neighbourhood Level
The Solutions Lab will examine scalable, neighbourhood-level solutions to the problem of homeless families (parents and children), and the overwhelmed emergency shelter system.

Seniors and Inter-generational Purpose-Driven Housing Solutions
The Solutions Lab will examine purpose driven housing solutions that facilitate social inclusion, education and community collaboration for seniors and newcomers.

Affordable Housing Hackathon Solutions Lab
The Solutions Lab will examine new and practical solutions to the construction of more affordable housing stock by removing barriers and opening new paths for innovation in planning, construction and regulation so that private industry and the not-for-profit industry can meet the needs of the community.

Beyond Shelter: A Relationship-Based Approach to Emergency Housing and Health Care
The Solutions Lab will examine the question: How might we bring together health care and housing supports in a responsive and relationship-based way that helps more people in Waterloo Region transition out of homelessness?

Community Studios
The Solutions Lab will examine the creation of a new model of supportive and shared modular housing.

Affordable housing and sustainable development, two compatible ideas
The Solutions Lab will examine the need for an innovative approach to address affordability issues related to sustainable community development.

Housing Financialization (Directed Solutions Lab)
In partnership with the Social Innovation Institute, this directed Solutions Lab will explore the financialization of housing.

The Missing Middle Housing Delivery Solutions Lab (Directed Solutions Lab)
The Solutions Lab will explore how to bring missing middle housing models to Toronto’s Yellow Belt that will also be applicable to other municipalities in Canada.

2018 Successful Projects

Developing Appropriate First Nations Housing Metrics: Nishnawbe Aski Nation
The Solutions Lab aims to create housing measures for local housing programs rooted in northern Indigenous knowledge and experience.

Affordable Housing Renewal
The Solutions Lab will develop net zero or net-zero ready retrofit design options and prototype 4 to 6 low-rise wood-frame multi-unit residential buildings.

Journeys In and Out: Youth Homelessness Solutions Lab
The Solutions Lab is mapping youths’ journeys in and out of homelessness to identify solutions to support youth along their journey to find a home.

Retrofits in Occupied Residential Buildings
The Solutions Lab will bring together key players to identify and co-create solutions for energy retrofits in occupied multi-unit residential buildings.

Affordable Transit-Oriented Development (TOD): Leveraging Government Assets for Affordable Housing
The Solutions Lab will examine solutions to lever and align municipal, provincial and federal government resources to increase affordable housing opportunities along transit corridors.

Modelling Transitional Housing for Vulnerable Youth
The Solutions Lab will develop transformative, transitional housing designs that meet the needs of vulnerable homeless youth at a time when they are most at risk.

Seniors Housing Stability Solutions Lab: Creating Stability for Seniors who rent using a community-based approach
The Solutions Lab will develop solutions to enable low-income senior renters to “age in the right place” successfully, and even thrive.

Developing the Resiliency of Affordable Housing for Newcomers
The Solutions Lab will identify environmentally sustainable solutions to improve and maintain access to quality housing for newcomers.

Exploring the RDSP for Homeownership and Housing Stability
The Solutions Lab will explore how Registered Disability Savings Plans (RDSPs) can help address the housing challenges of people with developmental disabilities.

Housing Solutions for Indigenous Youth Aging Out of Care in Winnipeg
The Solutions Lab will address the issues of housing insecurity and homelessness that Indigenous youth face when they age out of the child welfare system.

Best Practices for Healthy Housing Quality in Toronto
The Solutions Lab will seek to address housing disrepair and the worsening quality of housing in older rental apartment buildings in Toronto.

Wealth and the Problem of Inequity Across Generations (Directed Solutions Lab)
In partnership with Generation Squeeze, this directed Solutions Lab will examine issues related to housing affordability, wealth and inequality.

Still have questions about the National Housing Strategy’s Solutions Labs Program or need technical support?

1-800-668-2642

Innovation-Research@cmhc-schl.gc.ca

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Date Published: September 5, 2024

National Housing Strategy Solutions Labs

Online Application Portal

Applications Are Now Open