Homing Instincts
FROM JUNE 2023 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX
Our new mayor must put the housing issue first, writes TIM HARPER, who scoured the frontrunners' plans for proof of a progressive, workable way forward
The missing middle. Purpose-built rentals. Exclusionary zoning, inclusionary zoning and intensification. These are the rather wonky terms favoured by urban planners and, increasingly, by the men and women who would be mayor of Toronto on June 26.
Move beyond the jargon, however, and these catchalls signal something deeper and far more urgent: The very survival of Toronto as we have known it is at stake. A city facing an affordable housing crisis has been handed the opportunity to elect someone who can deliver bold, brave and transformative solutions before it becomes simply unable to properly house its population. That failure would lead to unending traffic gridlock, longer commutes, an exodus of young people, and would deliver a body blow to the local economy, and by extension the national economy. When Toronto suffers economically, Canada suffers.
It all comes back to affordable housing.
For too long, city council, aided and abetted by the indifference of the two senior levels of government, has appeared unable to take meaningful action, debating and delaying while an entire generation of Torontonians has been denied the opportunity to stay in the neighbourhoods where they grew up and has simply given up any expectation of owning a modest home or finding a stable, affordable rental unit in a liveable city. Instead, Toronto has become a city of single-family homes that sell for at least $1 million and condo units that go for almost as much – in May the average condo price in Toronto was $784,914 – leaving the middle with no anchor. Exasperation is giving way to anger.
“We can change this city,” says Cherise Burda, the executive director of City Building Research and Innovation at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Burda says the city needs to shake the belief that the only way to build homes is by working with the private sector to build market housing – an assumption that hasn’t yielded truly affordable dwellings. “We have lost sight of how to do something different.”
Ricardo Tranjan, a senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and author of The Tenant Class, says a new mayor must lose the fear of developers, which has slowed progress in the city. “He or she needs to use their regulatory power to build the type of housing we need – not the type of housing developers need.”
“What has been lacking in Toronto over the past years,” he continues, “is a clear vision, the clear political choice on housing. We continue to talk about little tweaks and piecemeal policy. This makes it hard for the ordinary voter to know what is good and what is bad.”
A new mayor can grab hold of this issue, Trajan adds, and build a city-wide consensus on what needs to be done while standing firm against any provincial interference. “Tell voters you are going to build 200,000 affordable units over five years, and you will mobilize the support you need.” Having built that consensus at the city level, a new mayor would have the muscle to deal with senior governments in search of funding, he says.
Matti Siemiatycki, a professor of geography and planning at the University of Toronto, says the city is facing at least two crises: The first affects people who have a decent income but can’t buy or rent because of skyrocketing prices. The other is the dearth of “deeply affordable” housing for those facing homelessness. Increasing supply alone, he says, is not the solution for homelessness or housing precarity.
Fully 70 per cent of the city was zoned as single-family residential, freezing Toronto in time, Siemiatycki says. That changed in May when Toronto city council voted 18–7 to legalize multiplexes of up to four-unit across the city. It is a move that many urban planners say was long overdue because it could help restore the so-called “missing middle,” housing stock between single-family dwellings and highrise buildings. The long-standing fealty to single-family dwellings has meant lower density and left infrastructure underused in some neighbourhoods.
“With the election, Toronto has been handed the opportunity to deliver bold, brave, transformative solutions before it becomes unable to house its population”
A city report that recommended cracking the “yellowbelt,” so named for the colour used to denote single-family-zoned areas on zoning maps, said multiplexes would provide housing serving greater diversity and need, but there is no guarantee the housing will be affordable, and opposition to the measure remains strong in many pockets of the city.
The city has a Toronto Housing Action Plan endorsing Ontario’s target of creating 285,000 market, non-market and mixed market homes over the next 10 years. It focuses on removing zoning barriers and using public lands for new housing, preserving existing rental homes and strengthening policies to develop purpose-built rentals – a form of housing that all but disappeared after the 1980s. A provincial government study called Housing Needs in Ontario shows more than 85 per cent of Canada’s rental housing stock was built before 1980, and since 2000, only 6.1 per cent of all Ontario housing completions have been purpose-built rentals.
But the Toronto plan is imperilled by provincial legislation that waives development charges to speed building. Without that revenue, which the city estimates at $120 million per year, planned housing starts will grind to a halt because the city will not have the money to build infrastructure needed for new home construction, it says in a report to council. In May, the Doug Ford government said it would proceed with a third-party audit of Toronto’s claim “to reach a shared understanding of any potential or perceived impacts” on housing-enabling infrastructure.
Toronto is not unique, but as the economic engine driving the country, its crisis should be a national concern. A Scotiabank study found the country’s stock of subsidized housing units was 3.5 per cent of total housing, among the lowest in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The bank called for doubling the stock to bring Canada up to G7 averages.
“Where is the beacon of hope?” asks Burda. “It is our public land, but right now our model for public land is no different than our model for private land – it’s all partnerships with developers, giving them concessions and handing over our land, which is our greatest asset.
“We need to use 100 per cent of our public land for affordable housing. We did this for decades in Canada, and jurisdictions have done it elsewhere,” she says.
U.S. jurisdictions including Washington, D.C., Montgomery County, Md. (just outside the U.S. capital) and King County (Seattle), Wash., all have legislation mandating percentages of surplus land be dedicated to affordable housing.
But in Toronto’s case, an aggressive approach to affordable housing on all public lands needs provincial buy-in, so Burda suggests a “provincial workaround. We need to work closely with the federal government and tell them, ‘We’ve got public land, and you, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and the National Housing Strategy, have to figure out how to finance this.”
As Toronto chooses a new mayor, many solutions to the housing shortfall have bubbled to the surface. Candidates all agree we are in crisis, but their ways out are variations on themes identified by city officials, differing in priorities and ambition. There is, however, agreement on unlocking underused city-owned land (at least three candidates offer duelling plans), speeding the approval process, protecting renters and providing “deeply affordable” rent-geared-to-income housing.
The question is, who should build affordable housing, defined as housing that costs the renter or mortgagee no more than 30 per cent of their before-tax monthly income? How can developers be convinced to build purpose-built rentals and affordable units? Will they use new zoning freedom to build at below-market rates? And can the city protect renters, who make up almost half of Toronto’s households?
As nominations closed, there were 102 official candidates running in the by-election set in motion by John Tory’s surprise resignation. The top tier includes former MP Olivia Chow, former councillor Ana Bailão, current councillors Josh Matlow, Brad Bradford and Anthony Perruzza, former MPP Mitzie Hunter, former police chief Mark Saunders and activist Chloe Brown, who finished third in last fall’s mayoral race. Are any of them thinking beyond the traditional tweaks which have left this city in such a lamentable state? Here’s what they’re pitching:
ANA BAILÃO
Her plan: Build more and build it faster
Bailão, the former councillor for Davenport and housing czar under Tory, has promised that 20 per cent of the 285,000 new home builds targeted by 2031, or 57,000 homes, would be purpose-built rentals. She says developers will provide those homes if the city uses its planning and zoning tools and provides financing incentives.
She would also jolt Toronto’s moribund Housing Now program by requiring all approved projects to have a building permit within a year of her election and begin construction by Dec. 31, 2024. If those conditions are not met, she says, the city will have the right to cancel funding approvals and put the sites out to tender again.
Bailão says Housing Now will have shovels in the ground over the next few months. “The use of city land to create affordable housing is imperative, and we need the provincial and federal government to do the same thing.”
BRAD BRADFORD
His plan: Further advance what Tory was working on
Beaches-East York Councillor Bradford, an urban planner, has advertised himself as John Tory in a hurry. He would break down city hall silos and streamline the approvals processes. He would also take unused city land and build there, guaranteeing 33 per cent of the new units be classified as affordable. He also wants to “rescue and accelerate” the city’s moribund Housing Now plan.
Building on a Tory initiative, Bradford would empower a Development and Growth Division that will have a mandate to review and approve housing faster, and he would make it easier to convert vacant office space into rental accommodation, promising 20 per cent of those conversions would be affordable units.
“The promise of Toronto is predicated on that idea that if you want to build your life here, we want to have you,” he says.
CHLOE BROWN
Her plan: Focus on public housing
As part of her Housing First plan, Brown would establish the Shelter Support and Housing Authority to manage the building of non-market rate housing and social housing, and to license landlords that want to use their private properties as a public good. Housing is a social service and the city needs to be a willing and active partner with churches and other social organizations to build purpose-built rentals, Brown says.
Brown, a policy analyst, says the city all but gave up on building public housing because it was becoming stigmatized, seen as a “dirty plantation ... a storehouse for the unwanted,” so it outsourced its responsibility to developers that built for-profit condos with luxury amenities. The city has frozen out people like Brown, who is not a profit-generator, she says.
She is trying to shake up the status quo and she has lived experience with what she is campaigning to fix, having spent a decade in a rooming house. “As a kid of immigrants, public housing was a reality for me,” she says. “I didn’t know it was public housing until I was an adult and looked up where I grew up and learned it was public housing and began to understand why people talked about kids like me in a certain way – ‘Oh, you’re from Islington and Finch ...’ – and that’s where the politicization of housing begins.”
OLIVIA CHOW
Her plan: Expand the number of rent-controlled units
Chow, a former NDP MP who has returned from political retirement, aims to transform 8,446 city-owned properties spread over 28,823 acres into 25,000 rent-controlled homes over eight years.
She would guarantee that 7,500 units will be affordable, including 2,500 at rent geared to income. She estimates she can raise $404 million for her program by tapping financing initiatives and an accelerator fund from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, as well as a modest 0.33 per cent increase in the City Building Fund levy.
She also wants to create a Secure Affordable Homes Fund, spending $100 million annually to acquire homes for approximately 1,000 people each year. The fund would remove at-risk affordable rental units from the private market and transfer them to not-for-profit, community land trusts, and Indigenous housing providers. She also wants to double the Toronto Rent Bank and extend the reach of the Eviction Protection in the Community (EPIC) program to protect renters from threat of evictions.
Chow may have to make up a funding shortfall, however. She would use revenue raised by increasing the city’s Vacant Home Tax from 1 to 3 per cent, claiming that could raise $354 million over three years. But the city has reported only 2,100 Toronto properties, or 0.3 per cent of the total, were listed as vacant, leaving it well short of the $55 million the city had expected to collect.
“We will go back into mixed income rental housing,” she says. “It’s been successful in the past. We know we can do it. It only takes political will.”
MITZIE HUNTER
Her plan: Focus on building affordable units
Hunter, a former provincial Liberal cabinet minister and chief administrative officer for the Toronto Community Housing Corporation, wants to establish the Toronto Affordable Housing Corporation, with a goal of building 22,700 affordable ownership units and below-market purpose-built rent-controlled units over six years, starting with 12 towers of 10 to 20 storeys in year one.
The start-up cost for the corporation would be recouped in four years, with earnings from rental operations and profits from the sales of shared equity units being plowed back into it, Hunter says, adding that she would issue a mayoral proclamation on day one that there is “no longer surplus city land.” It would all be potential housing sites.
“We have to be a city that treats its people as humans with dignity,” she says.
JOSH MATLOW
His plan: Create an agency that makes the city the builder of affordable housing
Matlow, who has represented Toronto–St. Paul’s ward since 2010, had the earliest – and for a time, the most ambitious – plan. Under his proposal, the city would be the builder under Public Build Toronto, which he says would build 15,000 new affordable housing units on 25 million square feet of city-owned lands. The program would provide a mix of “deeply affordable” and rent-geared-to-income housing, along with market-rate rental units subject to rent controls.
The $300 million in seed financing, he says, will come from savings realized by building the Gardiner Expressway east of Jarvis Street at grade instead of completing it as a raised highway. Matlow says he will not need “strong mayor” powers to convince council of his way on the Gardiner. His critics say revisiting the Gardiner is a lost cause and they claim he has underestimated the cost of building units.
The city’s Housing Now strategy, adopted in 2019, has not resulted in a single shovel in the ground – “the definition of failure,” Matlow says.
If a city doesn’t deal with its affordable housing crisis, Matlow adds, it will suffer the loss of its best and brightest. “There will be an economic brain drain, fewer companies will want to set up shop or headquarters here because employees won’t want to come here. Traffic gets worse. You have over-crowded subways, people have to drive farther to work. Our quality of life deteriorates.”
ANTHONY PERRUZZA
His plan: Encourage builders to erect affordable housing by giving them a break on taxes and fees
Perruzza, who has represented Humber River–Black Creek for 17 years, is seeking support for his Smart Housing Plan, which he says can address three urgent needs: independent living for seniors, transitional housing and shelter for the homeless.
He would give builders a break on property taxes and city fees and develop long-term leases on city-owned land to build single units that he says could fetch rents of $1,000 per month. And he’s flexible – the land can be developed by the city or private developers.
He has vowed to build “humane” housing for the homeless, rather than sheltering them in hotels, a policy that Perruzza claims has cost the city nearly $1 billion over three years and did nothing to alleviate the homeless crisis.
MARK SAUNDERS
His plan: Speed up the approvals process for developers; remove taxes for owners of affordable units; sell city land to builders in exchange for a commitment to build affordable housing
Saunders, the former police chief who is running primarily on a law-and-order agenda, says he came to his housing policy after talking to both developers and people seeking affordable housing, and finding frustration on both sides. He wants to streamline the approvals process for projects, bringing the timeline down to a year for an approval from a current bottlenecked process that can take as long as five years. At that rate, he says, it will take almost half a century for city council to reach its 10-year goal of 40,000 affordable units.
He would use a series of performance metrics for both the city and builders so that both are account- able. He wants to assign a point person for all projects. In order to build purpose-built rentals, he would remove the property tax on affordable units in future developments, press the federal government to waive the HST on all new large-scale purpose-built rentals and use the Toronto Community Housing model to provide city land to builders in return for a commitment to build affordable and supportive housing.
“For a multitude of years, mayors have come and gone, councillors have come and gone, and the process has remained virtually the same,” he said. “Developers are leaving the city.”
There are subtle differences in housing solutions and some substantial overlap among candidates, but also unanimity in identifying housing affordability as a top voter concern in this election. Polling data confirms that appraisal.
Voters will have to decide whether they are looking at the public or private sector to provide the first steps toward a solution and how much weight to give to increased supply as part of that solution. And they will have to decide whether they are prepared to look beyond their neighbourhood for a city-wide fix.
A city planning document cited polling data showing that 75 per cent of Torontonians support neighbourhood triplexes and fourplexes, but in their neighbourhood? Not so much. A recent Mainstreet Research poll found 47 per cent of Torontonians agreed the city was not building enough housing, but only 27 per cent said their neighbourhood could handle more.
NIMBYism is a tough opponent to slay, but both Matlow and Bailão would lean on personal appeals to sway opponents – while explaining that new multiplexes, approved by council in May, will make neighbourhoods more liveable and help fill that “missing middle.”
“Sure, change is hard,” Matlow says. “I know people have concerns, but I tell them we are talking about your kids. Where are they going to live?”
Bailão also knows the challenge. “What does it really mean to have some of these regulations changed? When you bring in laneway housing, does it mean now your parents are being looked after nearby while maintaining their independence? Do you have your kids with an independent unit instead of having to live with you?"
She continues: “The social benefits are there. It means we are taking advantage of the infrastructure in neighbourhoods with dwindling populations and are allowing people who grew up there and lived there for decades to continue to live there.”
“Adding just a single unit to 15 per cent of detached homes would yield the equivalent of 100 condo towers. California
has added 20 per cent of its new housing supply in five years this way”
Some urban planners believe changing the zoning for low-rise neighbourhoods in Toronto could have potentially game-changing results. Burda points to a study for the Urban Land Institute Technical Assistance Panel, in which architect Jaegap Chung estimated that adding three units to just 18 per cent of existing single detached homes would create 146,064 units, the equivalent of 365 highrises. Adding just a single unit to a more conservative 15 per cent of detached homes would yield the equivalent of 100 condo towers. California has added 20 per cent of its new housing supply in five years by allowing a single additional unit to existing single-family homes.
But does that make these units affordable? The next logical step is ensuring that a portion of newly created housing is affordable. Burda says the next mayor, on day one, should tap into a federal housing accelerator fund to help cities plan to add new housing supply. Included in that ask, she says, should be a request to provide a tax credit and favourable financing for homeowners who want to add two units, providing one of them is below market rate.
Opponents of intensification have had a loud voice, Siemiatycki says, but now those who see the merit of denser communities must be heard. “The NIMBYs are there, but those who need this housing are not there yet,” he observes. “Their voice is not being heard.”
This story is part of a year-long multi-media partnership with Maytree, an organization devoted to finding systemic solutions to poverty through a human rights-based approach. WEP is grateful to Maytree for its financial support. All stories, video series and artwork created through the partnership are being independently produced by West End Phoenix.