Discussion Paper – March 2026 The world faces an affordable housing crisis of unprecedented scale. Some 2.8 billion people[1] — 40% of humanity — lack access to adequate housing, and for the first time in the 21-year history of the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, not a single major housing market across eight high-income nations qualifies as ‘affordable.’ [2] The International Finance Corporation estimates a $16 trillion global financing gap[3] in affordable housing, and UN-Habitat calculates the world must build 96,000 new homes every day[4] to meet demand by 2030.
Seven Best Practice Projects
The following seven projects have been selected from across the globe for their innovation, scale, replicability, and depth of social impact. Spanning Canada, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, and South Africa, they collectively demonstrate that high-quality affordable housing can be built, financed, and sustained for the people who need it most — and that the private sector, civil society, government, and international development finance can achieve far more together than any one actor can alone.
THE DANIELS CORPORATION + TORONTO COMMUNITY HOUSING
Regent Park Revitalization, Toronto, Canada
Context and Challenge
Regent Park was Canada’s oldest and largest social housing project — 69 acres in Toronto’s Downtown East, built in the late 1940s as a self-contained enclave of low-rise public housing. By the early 2000s, decades of underinvestment had left it physically deteriorating and socially isolated, with no commercial spaces, no street-level connections to the wider city, and 7,500 residents living in 2,083 rent-geared-to-income units that had fallen into disrepair.