Everyone is going to have a different opinion on when Ontario’s housing crisis began. For many people under the age of 40, it will be roughly “when we started looking for a house to buy” — much in the same way that a recession is when you lose your job, but a depression is when I lose mine. Where you draw the line is somewhat arbitrary. For me, it's around 2015-2016 (about the last time the Jays were this deep in the postseason, Go Jays) when we started seeing stories of rapid price increases in places like Hamilton: Toronto’s housing shortage had escaped containment and started driving inflation further beyond the immediate GTA.
Well, it’s been a decade, three elections, and a global pandemic later, and Ontario’s housing crisis has gotten worse by nearly every measure. It’s likely to get worse still as Toronto’s condo market implodes. If it were just a Toronto story, then everyone not inside the city limits could have a good chuckle at our expense, but the experience of the last decade is that when Toronto doesn’t take care of its chores, it becomes a problem for the rest of the province.
That grim future is spelled out in a new report from the University of Ottawa’s Missing Middle Initiative. It finds that eastern Ontario (primarily the National Capital Region but including smaller cities like Kingston as well as more rural areas) is dramatically underestimating the number of new homes it will need to build in the coming decades because policymakers are still blind to how many people are moving into the region from elsewhere in Ontario — largely but not exclusively exiles from the GTA looking for more affordable housing.
From 2015-2020 the MMI report finds that 68,970 people moved east from other parts of Ontario (“intraprovincial migration”) while about 75,000 combined were new additions from immigration or non-permanent residents. The feds have temporarily tamped down the levels of international immigration, but there’s little reason to think that rates of intraprovincial migration have slowed at all — or are likely to in the future.
The reason for despair in this story is simply that the state of the GTA housing shortage really can’t be overstated. Particularly when it comes to types of low-rise homes traditionally made to accommodate families with children, we haven’t been building enough, and the accumulated deficit is enormous. MMI estimates the GTA will need one million new family-oriented homes by 2051 to both clear our backlog and to accommodate new growth; we’ve been building 10,000 or so annually. It’s that key deficit — a century’s worth of building left undone — they argue is driving migration out of the GTA.
A small quibble with MMI: for understandable reasons, they emphasize that “ground-oriented housing” has historically best suited growing families, but their report could be misread as advocating for sprawl; in fact they’re reasonably clear that what’s needed more than anything is size and bedrooms. Those have historically been correlated with detached homes, but some creative developers in the U.S. are starting to clue in to the possibilities of family-shaped apartments as well.
The majority of eastern Ontario’s growth between now and 2051 will be from simple demographic growth, but MMI estimates that one in five of the new ground-oriented homes needed before then will be due to “drive until you qualify” migrants priced out of the GTA. That’s a huge number not adequately projected by local governments or, more critically, the provincial finance ministry. And this isn’t going to be a story limited to eastern Ontario: the spillover from unmet demand in the GTA is going to splash everywhere it can find pockets of affordability that it hasn’t yet extinguished.
The province’s response is probably going to need to be twofold. First, this growth is already happening and is going to keep happening on the timescale of any Ontario government, so it ought to prioritize making money available to regions outside the GTA to expand their housing as quickly as possible. More vexing for Queen’s Park has been seriously tackling planning reform inside the GTA to get more housing built — of more variety and in more places. This means, yes, legalizing things like fourplexes and other forms of low-rise apartments, as well as skinny, tall townhouses. Any solution that can plausibly offer families a combination of square feet and bedrooms.
The municipalities of the GTA could do this on their own, but with few exceptions, they’ve dragged their feet. Their inaction is causing problems everywhere else in the province and will continue to. That ought to be all the reason any premier needs to act. Maybe someday some premier will.
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