Ford caused Ontario’s housing shortage. Now he’s making it worse

Despite construction capacity constraints and interest rate hikes, Ontario has still had enough labour, equipment, materials, investment and land within municipal settlement boundaries to keep up with the growing number of new households. 

The government has always known that shifting construction to more labour-efficient building formats and construction methods — such as wood frame midrise buildings — and building on infill sites with existing streets and infrastructure would allow those same limited resources to produce a lot more housing.  

It is the government’s own NIMBY zoning, outdated construction rules and subsidies for inefficient sprawl development that have prevented both market and non-market builders from making that shift.

So why, years after the Premier promised legal reforms that would deliver “more homes faster” and 1.5 million net new homes by 2030, is the housing shortage even worse? Why are housing starts actually down, year over year? It’s because rather than ending restrictions on midrise housing and slamming the brakes on sprawl and highway schemes that squander construction, Ontario’s changes to land use planning, environmental and transportation laws and policies have done the opposite.

Soon after Premier Doug Ford took office, his government began to dismantle even the modest measures the previous government had taken to promote more efficient housing construction. Among those changes, his government:

• Reduced the amount of housing that municipalities are required to zone for inside existing neighborhoods;
• Nearly halved the number of homes required to be built for each hectare of new development land consumed; 
• Pressured regional governments to expand the pre-existing glut of farmland and habitat marked for development (there were already 350km2 designated in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area alone) far beyond what consumed by building at reasonable densities;
• Committed billions of dollars to subsidize the most inefficient, low-density development by reviving the proposed Highway 413 and the Bradford Bypass; and,
• Tried to push sprawl into the Greenbelt itself.

Despite calls from housing and environmental experts across the political spectrum — and its own housing task force — to scrap outdated rules such as minimum parking requirements and to permit mid-rise housing on major streets throughout existing residential neighbourhoods, Ford intervened. He personally blocked efforts to legalize even 4-storey “4-plex” apartment buildings.

Ontario’s lingering and worsening housing shortage is exactly what housing and environmental advocates warned would happen if the government didn’t abandon this course. This government knew their sprawl and highway approach would make the housing crisis worse, because the experts told them, and chose to do it anyway.

In recent months, as his government’s failure on housing has become more obvious, Ford has tried to pass the buck by blaming everyone from immigrants to the Bank of Canada. What he glosses over is that the housing market could easily have adapted to population and rate changes, but has instead turned the challenge of high interest rates and the opportunity of a growing population into a housing crisis by willfully sabotaging the solutions.

The elimination of the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe seems calculated to snuff out some of the only rays of hope that had been penetrating the Ontario government’s obstruction on housing. 

Without the Growth Plan:

1. Suburban municipalities will no longer be required to ensure that even 50 homes and jobs are created for each hectare of “greenfield” farmland or natural habitat sacrificed to sprawl. The current government had previously reduced the number from 80 people to 50 people;
2. Suburban municipalities will no longer be obligated to legalize enough infill housing to accommodate half (or any significant share) of their expected population growth within built-up areas; and,
3. A growing share of the scarce construction labour, equipment and materials needed to deliver labour-efficient and low-cost homes — like the hundreds of thousands of mid-rise apartments Toronto recently approved on its major residential streets — will be diverted to distant sprawl subdivisions that house far fewer people.

In short, the repeal of the Growth Plan signals the end of any serious hope of addressing the housing shortage. It pushes “1.5 million homes by 2030” beyond the realm of possibility. Without a swift and radical reversal of this government’s policies, things may even get much worse.

It’s no surprise that Ford is rumored to be planning an early election before the rest of his housing policy chickens come home to roost.

Phil Pothen is a land use planning and environmental lawyer with a background in landscape ecology, landscape architecture and 10 years of experience advising and representing provincial policy-makers, select small builders, and concerned residents. He currently works as Counsel and Land Use and Land Development program manager at Environmental Defence.