John Tory is elected for a third term as the mayor of Toronto at his campaign headquarters on Oct. 24, 2022.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
The Ontario municipal elections are over, and some things in Toronto haven’t changed. It has the same mayor – and the same housing crisis. The city now faces a turning point. Will its leaders address that crisis and finally, belatedly, make dramatic change?
The city government has the power to allow much more housing to be built in Toronto, and that is exactly what it should do.
On this, Mayor John Tory has to lead. Re-elected for a third term, Mr. Tory has extraordinary political capital. He has promised to take action on building more housing.
He’s got to be decisive to meet the moment. Toronto’s economic and social success have made it punishingly expensive. People with low incomes are being displaced by those who can afford to pay more. Most tenants, who make up half the city, are struggling.
Over the past few decades, Toronto (like every other big city on the continent) has not built enough housing for the people who want to move there. This shortage isn’t the only cause of high prices, but housing economists now agree that it has to be dealt with.
The right response is to dramatically increase the amount of new housing in the city, but that can only be done by changing the rules that prevent it from being built.
Right now, Toronto bans apartment buildings almost everywhere. That may sound incredible if you’ve noticed those new condos going up. But generally these are approved with the help of the Ontario Land Tribunal, which trumps the city’s obstructionist rules.
Even then, new housing is heavily concentrated in less than 5 per cent of the city. Everywhere else, there is slow or zero growth. Many Toronto neighbourhoods are actually shedding people.
This is madness. Many people want to live in the city. It should want to welcome them, not least for the taxes some would pay as homebuyers and homeowners. Instead, Toronto has pushed them out to suburban municipalities, driving up prices there and forcing them into long commutes.
Toronto’s government can do much to change this. The city should update its official plan and radically increase its targets for growth. The planning department should get a mandate to change zoning – the detailed regulations that govern each site – and allow apartment buildings to be built everywhere.
Housing politics across the continent are trending in that direction. And the new Toronto council seems receptive to a pro-housing agenda. Some new progressive faces, including Jamaal Myers and Chris Moise, have signalled that they understand the importance of building more housing. Dianne Saxe has been vocal on this issue in her previous work as Ontario’s environmental commissioner.
Ontario’s new “strong mayor” legislation gives Mr. Tory unprecedented power to push provincial policy. And among planning reforms announced by the province on Tuesday is a new target for 285,000 new homes in Toronto by 2031 – an increase from the recent average of 17,000 home completions per year to about 28,000.
If the city has any hope of reaching that goal, it will have to go big. It will need many more towers. These days, small “missing middle” apartment buildings are coming into fashion. They should be allowed everywhere, but they still wouldn’t be enough. Twenty-eight thousand is a daunting number.
Equally daunting are the politics. For half a century now, municipal leaders in Toronto and elsewhere have been united by hatred of the development industry and a fundamental hostility to new residents. That attitude has helped create the mess in which we now find ourselves: a city-region stuck in traffic and struggling to pay the rent, exporting its problems to the rest of the province. If there was ever a time for political courage and novel thinking, it is now.