Ask a preschooler what they’ve been up to all day, and they’ll likely show you a drawing or craft project. Those crayon scrawls and pasta collages are meant to become treasured keepsakes but also carry a subtle message from the school: See? Your kid has been busy.
Some of Canada’s housing policy makers seem to have adopted a similar strategy. To show the public they’re hard at work tackling the country’s persistent shortage of affordable, livable dwellings, they’ve come up with some drawings.
There’s no better example of this than recent Toronto politics. There, council recently watered down a proposal to build sixplexes on single lots anywhere in the city, a move that could now cause Ottawa to claw back $30-million in funding.
But when The Globe’s editorial board asked Mayor Olivia Chow why she didn’t fight recalcitrant councillors on the issue, she largely spoke instead of the city’s recently published design templates for garden and laneway homes.
Similarly, in March, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation released a catalogue of 50 low-density housing templates to build anything from granny suites to small multiplexes in cities from coast to coast.
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Notably, the federal housing Crown corporation has so far produced only a public relations-friendly version of the templates. It has yet to release the technical drawings that architects or developers would actually rely on.
Others have taken a page from the same book, or rather, catalogue. In British Columbia, for example, the provincial government now provides a collection of ready-made home designs, as do cities such as Burnaby and Kelowna.
The concept harks back to the Sears catalogue homes of the early 20th century and, later, to Canada’s postwar housing crunch, when Ottawa created standardized designs for inexpensive single-family homes to alleviate the shortage.
The idea, which at the federal level was championed by the Trudeau government and later adopted by Prime Minister Mark Carney, is that design templates that align with building codes and zoning rules will help simplify approvals. This, in turn, will make it both faster and cheaper to build new low-rise housing.
In reality, the design is hardly what holds back homebuilding or runs up costs. Broadly speaking, a new residential project must meet two sets of requirements. There is a building approval process and a development, or planning, approval process. The first is about ensuring that a new structure complies with building codes and safety standards. The second is about what one can build on a given piece of land – and that is by far the bigger set of hurdles.
Template designs alone do little to simplify or fast track the most painful part of the permitting process.
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Nor do they significantly lower the cost of homebuilding. What would really help with that is cutting development charges, which now account for a substantial slice of the final price faced by homebuyers.
Developers say they often find that catalogue homes would not pass municipal review on many residential lots. Have an oddly shaped property? Chances are, only a custom design will ensure a new home is sufficiently set back from lot lines.
Would a template-design garden home require cutting down an old tree in your back yard? In Toronto, the project would have a slim chance of approval. A 2022 city council decision encourages permit applicants to consider design changes that would protect the venerable arbour. At the same time, any modifications to one of the city’s template designs would cause the plan to no longer be pre-approved.
Building templates are a nice-to-have when paired with quick and predictable permits. Kelowna, for example, which promises approvals in 10 business days for ready-made template-based buildings of up to six units, has the right idea.
Yet, in too many cases, policy makers are pushing drawings without taking the axe to the real bureaucratic knot that ties up homebuilding. Why?
The cynical hypothesis is that template designs are primarily what one might call performative public policy: politically painless tinkering at the edges that allows policy makers to look busy without having to pick tough battles.
To encourage homebuilding, Canada needs to streamline permits and lower taxes on new construction. Measures that promise more housing without tackling those two issues are little more than make-believe policy.