The province announced changes to Toronto’s official plan on Friday, allowing more homes to be built around major transit stations. If you want a short story that (partly) explains why Ontario’s planning system struggles to get enough homes built, you could do a lot worse. Before going further, it’s fair to say this is legitimately a good news item for a bunch of reasons — building lots of new homes near subway, GO, and LRT stations makes tons of sense. It just comes years too late.
This story starts back in 2019 when the Ford government at Queen’s Park introduced the concept of “major transit station areas” into Ontario planning law, as well as “protected major transit station areas.” The difference between them is that the latter allows a municipality to implement an inclusionary zoning policy that requires developers to provide affordable housing as part of a project.
Toronto started the process of delineating MTSAs on its official plan map in 2020 and submitted its PMTSA map to the province by the summer of 2022. The city’s formal submission was incredibly weak at the time (we said as much), made weaker by the crassest form of local NIMBYism in the city’s southwest. But it was something, and the official act put the ball in the province’s court: cabinet had the power to accept Toronto’s policies or amend them to its heart’s content. Housing wonks waited to see whether the Ford government would match its pro-housing rhetoric with policy action.
And waited.
And waited.
Finally, last Friday, more than 1,100 days since council voted, Toronto mayor Olivia Chow and municipal affairs and housing minister Rob Flack announced that the province was approving a substantially improved version of the city’s MTSA plan, which will allow for, the mayor asserted, 1.5 million new homes to be built in coming years.
So to recap: the province announced a pretty uncontroversially good planning policy in 2019; four elections (two provincial, two municipal), three housing ministers (Steve Clark, Paul Calandra, and now Flack) two mayors (John Tory and Olivia Chow) and an entire global pandemic later, the policy is finally being implemented by the provincial government that legislated it in the first place.
(Toronto will still need to match its zoning rules to fit its new official plan policies to really generate the housing liftoff the city and province needs.)
Notwithstanding the need to dot the Is and cross the Ts, this genuinely is good news. The new policy approved by Flack and Chow addresses at least some of the weaknesses of the plan submitted under then-mayor John Tory. In particular, on top of clear language allowing higher and denser apartment towers in the areas closest to major stations, there’s also new language allowing for the so-called “missing middle” forms of housing: four-storey multiplexes within MTSAs, even if they’re otherwise designated “neighbourhoods.” This builds on planning work the city was already doing outside of the MTSA process, but the province’s imprimatur won’t hurt.
(Is it churlish to point out that Premier Ford is still opposing this policy elsewhere as a general principle? At a housing announcement in Windsor last week, he thanked Mayor Drew Dilkens for his help opposing fourplexes, something Dilkens has disparaged as “really left” housing policy.)
When asked on Friday about the policy’s delayed implementation, Flack said that the province needed time to get it right. That would be a reasonable explanation for a delay of a few weeks or months; these papers have been gathering dust for literal years. And it’s not like in the meantime this government has been measured and detail-oriented in its planning policies: an entire Greenbelt scandal has come and not-quite-gone since 2022.
The province has been in the driver’s seat of this policy since it was announced in 2019. Certainly no later than 2022 it could have opted to move it forward aggressively. It is simply not credible to claim that the government that made liberal use of ministerial zoning orders and has re-written planning law repeatedly in the name of getting more homes built has been modestly deferring to municipal leadership. An announcement identical to last week’s could and should have been made years ago.
Relative to the other policies the Ford government could have chosen – or even just compared to some of its previous misadventures that it thankfully abandoned – Friday’s announcement is good news. It’s just incredibly late.
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