住房短缺成了加拿大的国家灾难（英文）

本文所述的是Montreal 的情况，但Toronto 的情况似乎更严重：事实上，Toronto 的房租比Montreal 要贵不少。

Housing shortage becoming a national crisis, group says
Insist governments do more to provide affordable solutions

Hundreds of homeless Canadian families may stay that way unless governments step in to ease a countrywide shortage of affordable housing, social advocates said yesterday.

Montreal housing group FRAPRU said renters in Quebec, who generally move on July 1, will find the dearth of accommodation even more acute this year than last.

"If concrete measures aren't taken, there's a strong risk that there will be hundreds of (Quebec) families and people without a place to live," FRAPRU spokeswoman Marie-Josee Latour said at a news conference.

FRAPU, which is the group's commonly known French acronym, loosely translates as Popular Action Front for Urban Reorganization.

The group said more than 380 Montreal-area families and individuals are currently living in shelters or with family or friends because they can't find a place to live.

The group said those numbers could increase unless up to 500 affordable housing units are freed up across the province.

Montrealer Amanda White said she and her two young children would be homeless had a friend not agreed to take her family in last year.

White, 21, said her apartment hunt has gone nowhere since last July, when she was evicted because she didn't pay her rent.

She said landlords haven't been sympathetic to her plight.

"I'm a young, single parent, I have children, I'm on welfare, and I have funny hair," she said of her bright orange-dyed carrot top.

"I'm pretty much restricted to areas that I don't want to bring the children up in."

About the only consolation for White and other Montrealers is that rising urban rents and low vacancy rates are a countrywide problem.

Thom Armstrong of the Co-operative Housing Federation of British Columbia said private developers simply will not build affordable housing, because it's not profitable.

"You can't make any money building rental housing at the low end of the income scale," Armstrong said in an interview.

"Your costs of building are much more than you can collect in rent."