John Lorinc is a Toronto-based journalist and senior editor for Spacing Magazine.
With its new sprawling housing reform bill, Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government has pulled out all the regulatory stops in its bid to build 1.5 million homes over the next decade. The question is, will this gambit succeed in relieving housing affordability pressures in Ontario, and especially across the Greater Golden Horseshoe, or merely enrich developers and promote sprawl?
In several key respects, the legislation will make certain types of high-rise development easier and more straightforward, especially on major arterials and around transit stations. For decades, the City of Toronto dragged its heels with increasing density around dozens of subway stations, either because of local opposition or sclerotic bureaucratic approvals processes established in another era that today do little more than slow virtually inevitable outcomes.
That change is long overdue, and will lead to better utilization of the subway, LRT and GO Train networks, and thus reduce car usage.
But the government’s hyped promise to short-circuit NIMBYism and greenlight duplexes and triplexes in the house neighbourhoods that dominate most southern Ontario cities is more of a mixed bag. (House neighbourhoods are also known, incorrectly, as neighbourhoods zoned for single family housing – typically large areas built after the Second World War that excluded duplexes, triplexes and small apartment buildings.)
Planning law, by its nature, applies to the entire province, from semi-rural Ancaster to the intensely urban Annex neighbourhood in Toronto.
The new rules say that residential properties can now be retrofitted with up to three dwelling units, provided the footprint of the home doesn’t change. In smaller cities, this change marks a departure. But in the City of Toronto, council in the past few years has already passed “missing middle” policies that allow, in addition to the main dwelling, a secondary suite, and a laneway house or a so-called garden suite.
The next council, in fact, will be debating a change in Toronto’s official plan to allow “multiplexes” in neighbourhoods – duplexes and triplexes, but also fourplexes and small-scale apartments. That proposal goes well past Queen’s Park’s reforms and aims to retrofit house neighbourhoods with a broader range of housing options to staunch population loss.
Indeed, Mayor John Tory and the members of Toronto city council won’t be able to look for a helping legislative hand from the province when they sit down to debate these changes, which essentially represent a sweeping and historic up-zoning of every house neighbourhood in the city, including all the post-war areas that were long zoned exclusively for detached homes.
However, whether all these changes expand the availability of moderate or deeply affordable housing is open to debate.
The new legislation significantly waters down “inclusionary zoning” requirements meant to ensure that developers add affordable units to high-rises near transit stops. As well, changes to allow duplexes and triplexes won’t add large volumes of new housing, and what is built will likely fetch high rents, as has been the case with Toronto’s laneway rental units.
Lastly, the cities of Toronto and Mississauga both face a potential challenge to their respective “rental replacement” rules, which currently require that builders redeveloping larger apartment buildings replace every rental unit with another of a similar size.
These rules, which date back a generation and are enshrined in provincial law, were intended to provide protection for vulnerable tenants who find themselves evicted from apartments when their landlords sell. Queen’s Park says it plans to spend a year consulting on proposals to change the rental replacement regulations; the onus will be on mayors John Tory and Bonnie Crombie to make a case for protecting them.
It’s worth noting that the province can exercise its power to alter land-use planning law, but its powers are far more limited when it comes to the other factors that exacerbate the affordability crisis: worsening shortages of skilled trades construction workers who have to build all this new housing; spiking interest rates that have sidelined both market and non-profit housing projects; and supply chain snafus that drive up the price of construction materials.
Ultimately, the entire effort is premised on an orthodox reading of market economics: that by increasing the supply of a scarce commodity (housing), prices will fall, and some measure of equilibrium will be restored.
The problem is that these macro-economic assumptions don’t ensure that each newly completed condo tower or apartment building will be affordable to the ever-expanding swath of urban society that is priced out of the housing market. Those guarantees require not just government funding, but also targeted regulatory protections.
What remains to be seen is whether these reforms, in the short term, create more bureaucratic confusion and trigger a market frenzy that gobbles up the tens of thousands of affordable rental apartments, inadvertently making the Ford government’s cure to the housing crisis worse than the disease.