It costs more than $3,300 a month to rent an average two-bedroom Toronto apartment. For people looking to buy, a typical condo requires $745,000. Those with no other use for $1.6-million can buy the average detached home.
Toronto has never been a cheap place to live, but in recent years it’s become prohibitively expensive. While house prices have ticked down this year, they’re still up about 40 per cent since late 2019, before the pandemic buying mania. With ownership out of reach of many, the cost to rent in the past year has surged almost 25 per cent.
Toronto risks becoming a city of privilege, like London or San Francisco, instead of what it has been, and should always be: a city of opportunity. “Our competitiveness in attracting talent [and] driving innovation,” the Toronto Region Board of Trade said a year ago, “depends on solving the housing shortfall.”
The city may finally be on the cusp of real action, and could blaze a trail for other cities across the country. Mayor John Tory proposes an across-the-board rewrite of the rules to address the root cause of the housing shortage: a deliberately sclerotic planning process that has slowed construction amid a fast-growing population.
There is no shortage of land within Toronto city limits. You just can’t build much of anything on a lot of it. In Toronto, like other cities across Canada, much of residential land is reserved for detached homes. Over the past two decades, Toronto’s population in total has climbed by more than 300,000 – but the number of people living in the many neighbourhoods zoned for detached houses declined by 220,000.
That has a corrosive effect, from underutilized schools – a majority are at about only half of capacity – to the usefulness of transit. And the scarcity of housing has stoked an out-of-control real estate market, one that hurts the city’s future. The lack of enough affordable housing makes it difficult, or impossible, to move or stay there, whether for students, or teachers and police officers, or even young lawyers and doctors. That’s the difference between a city of privilege and one of opportunity.
Mr. Tory’s framework, tabled last Friday, will be debated at city council on Wednesday and if approved, as it should be, city staff are supposed to deliver the details by next March. The Toronto mayor said he believes he will get majority backing from councillors – meaning he won’t need the controversial “strong mayor” powers the province provided last week that would allow him to push through such plans with just one-third of votes.
After years of ponderous debate, on Mr. Tory’s watch, he’s shifted gears. The solution has long been clear: A major loosening of all the restrictive laws, starting with zoning, that prevent the building of new housing. The board of trade and numerous others have urged such changes to, over time, significantly boost supply and ease prices.
Mr. Tory’s plan has many of the main ingredients: updated zoning across Toronto “to be more permissive,” including multifamily homes where only detached houses are allowed; more density near commercial areas; taller buildings on major streets; a rethink of housing plans in the Port Lands and elsewhere on the waterfront; better use of lands owned by schools; legalized rooming houses, an important source of homes for lower-income people.
The goal is to achieve or exceed 285,000 new homes over the next decade – a gain of more than 20 per cent from 1.25 million dwellings in the 2021 census. It is a bold target, Toronto’s share of the 1.5 million new homes goal promoted by the provincial government, but Ontario’s new legislation has many flaws. Most of all it’s too timid in its density details. Toronto has a big goal and a road map to get there.
A few other cities are moving to rework their housing rules. Edmonton will finalize its citywide zoning overhaul in 2023. Victoria is mulling similar changes. Vancouver this year approved a new citywide plan but it’s conceptual so far, with actual details potentially years away.
Toronto’s housing framework could suddenly be country-leading. It is absolutely the blueprint the city needs. Housing is stretched everywhere but Toronto is an economic engine of the country, one of the largest cities in North America. The population will keep growing, fuelled by immigration.
Canada’s big cities have failed to keep pace with population growth. Toronto might, at long last, be constructing a new standard.