Infrastructure for Housing Initiative

The IHI aims to address Canada’s housing affordability challenges by investing in essential public infrastructure to enable and accelerate new housing construction across the country. This infrastructure will benefit all Canadians, including municipalities, universities, and Indigenous communities, amongst others, and may be built by either the public or private sector.

Eligible projects are last-mile and net-new large-scale enabling infrastructure within the CIB’s existing priority sectors, which include:

• Water: Water, wastewater, stormwater, and conveyance
• Local civil works: Roads, bridges, sidewalks, and accompanying earthworks
• Local transit: Stations, stops, hubs, rail, right of ways, and terminals
• Connectivity: District energy, electricity distribution, storage, broadband, and EV charging stations

The CIB’s lending product offers low-cost financing while sharing in risks related to the timing of growth. Repayments are linked to the increase in housing units as growth materializes.

Additionally, the CIB can provide loans directly to developers to unlock new housing growth when the public entity (municipality, university, Indigenous community, or other public sector entity) relies on developers to deliver the necessary enabling infrastructure.

The initiative is committed to four main benefits:

• Unlocking net new, incremental housing that would not be possible at the same pace without investment in the enabling infrastructure;
• Enabling the build out of critical public infrastructure in advance of growth while reducing the burden on rate and tax payers;
• Giving access to credit and lower interest rates for smaller municipalities that do not have access to capital markets or a provincial borrowing program; and
• Allowing wholly-owned municipal subsidiary corporations to take financing off-balance sheet

IHI will work alongside existing federal supports for housing as part of the broader federal approach to address the housing shortage.

IHI Project Eligibility Summary

1. The project must require an investment of at least $50 million, net of grants.
2. The project must create incremental revenues from resulting growth that are sufficient to repay the loan. 
3. The borrower must be responsible for delivering public infrastructure (municipal, Indigenous*, university, or other public sector entity) or must be a developer that is endorsed by that entity. 
4. The project must be new or involve significant necessary upgrades to existing infrastructure. 
5. The project must enable growth of residential housing units in Canada.