The housing crisis in Toronto has many faces, all of them looking at the city and seeing no place for themselves. There are older tenants being displaced as their apartment buildings are torn down. There are low-income families forced to share small apartments. There are middle-class families moving to Guelph when the second baby arrives.
The problem is both mammoth and nuanced. And the city’s next mayor will be called upon to fix it.
On this, there is good news and bad news. The City of Toronto has huge power to effect change. It can bring down rents and home prices, increase its own tax revenues and dramatically reduce the carbon emissions of the Toronto region, all at the same time. The bad news is that doing this will require a lot of large buildings – and a strong mayoral backbone.
This spring’s unexpected election campaign for mayor has featured much talk about housing. Some of it has even been useful. On the left, Josh Matlow, front-runner Olivia Chow and Mitzie Hunter have all announced ambitious public-housing construction plans. This is laudable and necessary. The city should indeed leverage land it owns to build housing for as many people as possible.
On the other hand, the mixed-income Housing Now initiative has demonstrated the pitfalls of such an approach over the past four years. Put simply, it has been a disaster. Not a single project has started construction yet. The pandemic was one obstacle, but the city has created many others for itself. City staff refused to understand the economics and logistics of development and tried to impose a crushing burden on the new buildings. Lessons must be learned.
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But even if they are, a public housing builder can only do so much. Mr. Matlow’s plan, which is the most serious, aims to deliver 15,000 apartments total. Right now, Toronto’s population is likely to grow by that much this summer alone. The Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area is the fastest-growing city region in the Western Hemisphere, and for decades it has built nowhere near enough housing to keep up with demand. Ontario’s Housing Task Force, led by a range of credible experts, concluded that the GTHA needs to build much more housing – and fast.
The hard truth is that most Torontonians – more than 90 per cent – live in privately owned homes, either as homeowners or as renters. And if the municipal government wants to improve their lives, it must alter the trajectory of the market.
And this is where a powerful but controversial solution comes in: reform city planning and let more housing get built.
In the mayoral campaign, this is being framed by right-wing candidates such as Mark Saunders as cutting red tape. But this issue should not belong to the right. Government is shaping the housing market right now: It is illegal to build apartment buildings in most of Toronto. After a decade of debate across North America and the world, this is beginning to change. Toronto passed a reform this spring allowing “multiplexes” – housing with two, three or four apartments – on any lot in the city.
The new mayor will need to take that ball and run with it, fast and forcefully. Apartment buildings of 50 units or more should be legal everywhere in the city – immediately.
These should be straightforward buildings with straightforward architecture. (The city may want to introduce simple design rules – all red brick for the front façade, for instance.) But the keywords need to be “ease” and “simplicity.” Zoning needs to be radically simplified. It should not require years of public consultation to get a small building approved.
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Beyond planning, city departments need to get on board with the objective of delivering housing. Engineering, water, certainly urban design and heritage – each group within City Hall creates its own hurdles to building housing. These have become more numerous and complex each year, and not all are actually necessary. A culture of no must be uprooted from top to bottom.
Why? Because a scarcity of housing is bad for everyone, especially those who have the least. Today in Toronto, tenants are fighting over the few available vacant homes. Landlords have the power to boost rents and every incentive to push out older tenants, legally or illegally. Wealthier people continue to move into lower-rent neighbourhoods and displace existing residents.
The extremes are grotesque. Upper-income neighbourhoods such as Cabbagetown are losing people by the year, their quaint homes occupied by fewer and richer people each decade. Meanwhile, high-rise apartment buildings have become targets for teardowns. Because planning makes “development sites” so rare, they are incredibly valuable. This makes it economically logical to tear down a 100-unit building and build a bigger one.
Loosen up the rules, provide more housing, and all of this begins to reverse itself.
This, broadly, has been the analysis put forward by a movement known as YIMBY (for “yes in my back yard.”) Toronto recently got its own YIMBY group, the very effective More Neighbours Toronto.
And they are right. Their argument for housing supply is supported by a raft of economic studies. A meta-analysis from the Pew Charitable Trusts, based on some very modest policy changes in the U.S., summarizes the issue: “The evidence indicates that adding more housing of any kind helps slow rent growth.” And in New Zealand, Auckland changed its zoning in 2016 to allow significantly more apartments. One study suggests rents for large apartments are dramatically lower than they would be otherwise.
The social benefits of new building are broad and come quickly. Residents of new buildings will often vacate existing apartments, making space for others. This process, known as “filtering,” is also supported by empirical evidence. A study of the Helsinki housing market, using specific data, found that “moving chains” quickly branched out across the city and benefited low-income households.
So while housing economics are complex, the broad strokes of a policy solution are clear enough: Make apartments legal and encourage their construction.
Ontario policy has favoured building within cities for almost 20 years. A Liberal government created the Greenbelt, the protected area of Southern Ontario, in 2005 and a new Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe a year later.
This has clear implications for the climate. Academic studies consistently show that households in urban neighbourhoods have far lower carbon emissions than suburbanites.
This is true in Toronto, too, but the city – despite its climate-change mitigation policies – is happy to ignore that fact and send more would-be residents to suburbs such as Milton. Indeed, Toronto’s institutional response to the Growth Plan has been to slow-walk and resist at every turn. There are almost no places in the city where planning regulations explicitly allow an apartment building.
Instead, the city chose to cram new apartments into thinly populated corners of the downtown or in industrial zones. City planning leaders and city council chose to protect “neighbourhood character” from new apartment buildings.
As a result, the main mechanisms of getting housing built have been the Ontario Municipal Board and its successor, the Ontario Land Tribunal. City government – especially on the left – has defined itself as standing up for local interests, against evil developers and against Queen’s Park. But in truth it is city government, not the province, that is in the wrong.
Leave that aside. What if Toronto was about something else? What if Toronto raised its growth targets to add another million people? What if it aimed to be a city of abundance, with more people in its walkable neighbourhoods, better social services, parks and pools and more customers in its corner cafés? What if it aimed to welcome as many people as possible, bringing their contributions into the life of the city? What if Toronto aimed to be a place of high density and high amenity?
At this moment in history, Toronto has the opportunity to be that sort of place. It just needs a leader who will aim for more, not less.
Alex Bozikovic