There was a moment, somewhere around 2020 and 2021, when it genuinely felt like the housing problem had a solution. Not a policy solution. Not a government solution. Just a practical one that millions of Canadians stumbled into at the same time.

Work from home.

If you didn't have to commute to a Bay Street office or a Burnaby tech campus five days a week, you didn't have to live within forty minutes of one. You could leave. Go somewhere with actual square footage, actual yards, actual breathing room. Go to Ottawa. Go to Halifax. Go to the Okanagan. Let Toronto and Vancouver keep their $1.5 million semis and their bidding wars. You were out.

It was, for a brief window, a reasonable plan.

CMHC released its new Housing Affordability Composite Index this week, and what it tells you, in careful bureaucratic language, is that the escape route closed. The cities people fled to are now unaffordable too. The crisis didn't get solved by remote work. It got redistributed.

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What Actually Happened

When hundreds of thousands of people simultaneously decided to leave Canada's two most expensive cities, they didn't land in places that were built for that kind of demand. Ottawa, Montreal, and Halifax had reasonable housing stock for the populations they had. They were not prepared for a sudden, sustained influx of buyers arriving with Toronto and Vancouver equity in their pockets and a willingness to pay prices the local market had never seen.

CMHC's data traces three distinct waves of affordability erosion since 2001. The first two, 2001 to 2007 and 2015 to 2020, were driven almost entirely by Vancouver and Toronto. The rest of Canada watched. Then the third wave hit: 2020 to 2023. And for the first time, Ottawa, Montreal, and Halifax were the story. Not because of local factors. Because they became the destination.

It's worth sitting with that for a second. The affordability crisis in those cities wasn't caused by their own growth, their own economy, their own failures of housing policy. It was imported by the people trying to escape it somewhere else.

Kelowna knows this story. Anyone who tried to buy here in 2021 or 2022 felt it in real time. Metro Vancouver buyers arrived with pre-approvals sized to a market that made Kelowna look like a bargain. They paid what the market asked. The market asked for more.

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The Promise That Didn't Deliver

The argument for remote work as a housing solution was always a bit optimistic. The idea was that spreading demand across more cities would relieve pressure everywhere. More buyers in Halifax, fewer in Toronto, everyone comes out ahead.

What the theory missed is that housing supply doesn't scale fast. You can redirect demand in months. You cannot build new supply in months. So when thousands of remote workers hit secondary markets simultaneously, they hit markets with finite inventory, and prices did exactly what prices do when demand outpaces supply.

CMHC's chief economist Mathieu Laberge put it plainly: affordability eroded in Ottawa, Montreal, and Halifax specifically because remote work enabled labour mobility into markets that hadn't previously faced that kind of pressure. The escape route worked for the people who got out early. For everyone already living in those cities, and for everyone who arrived slightly too late, it made things worse.

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The Two-Tier Rental Market Nobody Talks About

Here's the part of the CMHC report that deserves more attention than it's getting.

At the top of the rental market, things are actually improving. In Toronto and Vancouver, unsold condos have been flooding into the rental supply as investors redirect inventory they can't sell. Vacancy rates are rising for premium units. Rent growth is slowing for newer, higher-end purpose-built rentals. If you can afford a $3,000/month one-bedroom with in-suite laundry and a rooftop patio, the market is becoming more competitive in your favour.

At the bottom of the rental market, none of that is true. More affordable units face slower supply growth, no direct substitute, and demand that hasn't eased. The people who most need relief are the people least likely to get it from current market dynamics. And CMHC is direct about why: renters carry less discretionary income than owners, which means their housing budgets compress faster when costs rise. They have less room to absorb increases. They have less ability to wait.

The condo glut helps renters who were already relatively comfortable. It does almost nothing for renters who weren't.

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So Where Does That Leave Things Now

The honest answer is that affordability has improved slightly since its worst point in Q2 2022, when homeownership affordability nationally hit its lowest level since the 1990s. Rate cuts from the Bank of Canada helped. Cooling prices in some markets helped. But improved from the worst point in thirty years is not the same as good. Ottawa, Montreal, and Halifax stabilized at a level that would have been considered a crisis five years ago.

And the cities that were supposed to receive the overflow, the Okanagans and the Halifaxes and the Ottawas, are now dealing with the structural consequences of that demand wave. Some will recover faster than others. But the idea that you can simply route around an affordability crisis by moving somewhere cheaper only works if not everyone has the same idea at the same time.

They did. And here we are.

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What This Means If You're Buying or Renting Right Now

If you moved to Kelowna or any secondary market in the last five years expecting to land permanently in the "affordable" column, this CMHC report is confirmation that the column you landed in is more complicated than the one you left. You didn't escape the problem. You may have moved it with you.

That's not a reason to panic or regret the decision. Kelowna has real advantages that Toronto doesn't, and no data set changes that. But it is a reason to stop benchmarking your housing costs against wherever you came from and start understanding what the local market actually looks like now.

For anyone still renting and waiting for relief: the supply fix at the affordable end of the market is moving slowly. Historically slowly. Policy frameworks exist, but delivery doesn't match the scale of what's needed. Waiting for the market to solve this particular problem is a long wait.

For buyers, the marginal improvement since 2023 is real. Conditions are better than the peak. But they're not running back to 2019 levels either, and anyone pricing a purchase on that assumption is going to be disappointed.

The escape route was real, for a while, for some people. The data is now clear that it closed. The question is what comes next, and the honest answer is that nobody has fully figured that out yet.

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Coldwell Banker Horizon Realty is a full-service brokerage in Kelowna, BC. If you want to talk through what any of this means for your specific situation, we're here for that conversation.