Toronto failing on affordable housing, Board of Trade says

The City of Toronto’s efforts to turn its own surplus land into affordable housing have stalled despite the creation of a special agency meant to consolidate and sell some of the city’s massive real estate portfolio, a new report from the Toronto Region Board of Trade says.

Since 2015, the city has only sold off six of its more than 8,400 properties, according to the Board of Trade’s Better Housing Policy Playbook, which was released this week as part of a series of brief papers aimed at sparking debate in advance of the Oct. 22 municipal election.

The setting up of the agency called CreateTO in 2016 has actually “stalled the process of redeveloping public land for housing,” the report reads, as has infighting between city departments and agencies over what to do with the proceeds of land sales.

Taking underused city-owned land and turning it into affordable housing is supported by city council and is a key plank in the campaign platforms of Mayor John Tory and his challenger, former chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat.

Mr. Tory has for years routinely promoted the selling off of government land for affordable housing, urging the provincial and federal governments to cough up their own land and praising the previous Liberal government at Queen’s Park for putting forward two properties last year.

In its report, the Board of Trade says the issue of affordable housing has now moved from a social or political issue to a front-of-mind concern for business, as a lack of places to live in Toronto harms the city’s ability to attract and retain new talent.

“The ability to have accessible housing for professionals is becoming our big competitive disadvantage,” said Brian Kelcey, the board’s vice-president of public affairs. “If we’re a talent-driven city, you can’t have talent if there is nowhere for that talent to live.”

The report says city council should give CreateTO its own redevelopment target of 3,300 homes a year, but says only some of that target should be reserved for “affordable housing,” which is typically defined as 80 per cent of market rent. The board says increasing supply overall will also make make Toronto’s housing market more affordable.

But the report also calls on the city to ditch its policy of demanding full price from developers to whom it sells land and offer steep discount to builders who promise to produce affordable units.

The paper also echoes other long-standing complaints from the development industry, saying Toronto’s planning department needs to speed up its approval process and standardize the so-called Section 37 payments for parks and other public benefits that developers must hand over, rather than allowing them to be bogged down in talks with local councillors.

The board also says the city should set up a dedicated team to develop what are known as “secondary plans” that rezone areas to allow for more density. Right now, the report says, the planners in charge of these rezonings are also swamped with other duties.

The board also says it supports calls from developers and the real estate business to eliminate “not in my backyard” policy barriers that have resulted in what it calls a “de facto ban” to build even “gentle density,” such as townhomes or small apartments in established low-rise residential neighbourhoods.

It notes that so far, along the under-construction Eglinton Crosstown light-rail line, 10 of the line’s 25 stations have no residential development applications within a 10-minute walk at all. However, there are 13 applications within that distance near Yonge Street and Eglington Avenue, at the line’s centre.

Mr. Tory’s first pledge of his re-election campaign was to accelerate efforts and have 40,000 affordable units built across the city over the next 12 years – or about 3,500 a year, much more than the 1,650 units approved this year.

Asked about the board’s report, his campaign argued the city had made clear progress with Mr. Tory at the helm.

“The City only started meeting and exceeding its own targets on affordable housing once Mayor Tory took office,” spokeswoman Keerthana Kamalavasan said in an e-mail. “And now he’s set out a realistic and achievable target of 40,000 new affordable housing units over the next 12 years, in consultation with City staff, experts and industry stakeholders.”

Mr. Tory has also launched a review to try to speed up the planning department – the very department, his campaign points out, that rival Ms. Keesmaat ran for five years.

Ms. Keesmaat has promised 10,000 units a year for a total of 100,000 over the next decade. Mr. Tory’s supporters have called that unrealistic, but Ms. Keesmaat has said her plan would involve stricter targets for the incentives offered to developers in order to ensure they actually build the units they promise, and a faster turnover of city lands.

Ms. Keesmaat’s campaign did not respond to the details of the report, but sent a statement promising leadership to create more rental housing: “Toronto doesn’t have to settle for less, we need decisive leadership to create high-quality rentals in this city. We can act now to unlock the land we need to build 100,000 affordable high-quality rentals.”