Parade of Homes | Spring 2017

Home Economics Cont’d from page 31

Mortgage loan insurance is available from both CMHC and pri vate insurers and is backed by the federal government. In the ’70s, CMHC introduced the Assisted Home Ownership Program

Until 1954, mortgages were issued by life insurance and trust and loans companies, often over rela tively short terms, and they could be hard to come by in rural areas. When the NHA was amended in 1954 to allow chartered banks to is sue mortgages, CMHC introduced mortgage loan insurance that let buyers qualify for mortgages with a 25% down payment. Today, mortgage insurance is normally required when a down payment is less than 20% of the purchase price, and since 1999, first-time buyers may qualify with a 5% down payment on homes costing less than $500,000. “The Canadian housing finance sys tem has benefited over the years from the simplicity and stabilizing effect of mandatory mortgage loan insurance,” says CMHC media rela tions officer Karine LeBlanc.

for low-income home buyers, and when interest rates were sky high in the 1980s, CMHC’s Mortgage Rate Pro tection Program essentially allowed homeowners to insure themselves against rising interest rates. On the construction front, CMHC has collaborated with builders and other government agencies to improve air quality, energy efficiency and materi als. New building methods that incor porated prefab components drasti cally reduced the time it took to build a house, from seven months in the 1940s to just eight weeks by the mid- 1960s. On the design front, CMHC home

‘The Canadian housing finance

system has benefited over the years from the simplicity and stabilizing effect of mandatory mortgage loan insurance.’

plans have shaped the Canadian housing landscape. It’s easy to date development in neighbourhoods dominated by the one- and-a-half storey designs of the 1940s, the split levels of the 1950s and the 1960s bungalows that ushered in a new era of

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32 Parade of Homes Spring 2017