Call him the premier of no, if you want. On Thursday, Doug Ford confirmed to reporters what the housing-policy rumour mill had been buzzing about for a week: that the premier and his cabinet had ruled out allowing fourplexes — four homes in a single building — as a basic possibility on residential lots across the province. This policy had been recommended by the premier’s own Housing Affordability Task Force, the Ontario Real Estate Association (headed by Ford’s predecessor as PC party leader, Tim Hudak), and the opposition parties at Queen’s Park. It’s simply run aground on the shoals of the Progressive Conservative caucus and cabinet.
For those inclined to optimism — or simply desperate to grasp onto the thinnest reed of hope that this government will address the housing crisis seriously — there’s still room for that after Ford’s remarks this week. The premier said that the government would “build single-dwelling homes, town homes: that’s what we’re gonna focus on.”
Read charitably, this could still mean we’ll see policies that lead to substantial housing growth. One of the most substantial housing reforms in North America happened in Houston in the late 1990s, when that Texas city allowed residential lots in the central part of the city to be subdivided into townhomes much skinnier than previous rules had allowed. Nearly 80,000 homes have been built since, which is particularly impressive in the context of Texas policy statewide, where the scales are still tipped overwhelmingly in favour of suburban and exurban sprawl. In the Ontario context, a similar measure would very likely pay even higher dividends.
Unfortunately, that thin reed of optimism utterly fails under the strain of everything else the premier said on Thursday.
“I can assure you, 1,000 per cent, you go in the middle of communities and start putting up four storeys, six storeys, eight-storey buildings deep in the communities, there’s gonna be a lot of shouting and screaming,” Ford said. “That’s a massive mistake.”
Ford is undoubtedly correct that (some) people would scream about four-storey plexes being built in their neighbourhoods. Here’s the thing though: (some) people scream about townhomes, too. In my part of Toronto, (some) people scream about two-storey detached homes being built in post-war bungalow neighbourhoods. Heck, (some) people scream about garden suites, the least obtrusive form of new construction imaginable. Politics is about disagreement, and governing is about how we structure our disagreements in big, complicated communities. But planning politics is where we’ve deliberately, explicitly institutionalized the power of noisy minorities to determine outcomes as the rule and not the exception.
Ford and his cabinet might have convinced themselves that there’s some magic bright line, a threshold below which people will welcome new construction that changes the visual appearance of their neighbourhoods. This is not a new idea: for decades, North American planners have been trying to find the magic “gentle density” that incumbent homeowners will accept in their communities without lighting their hair on fire. They’ve largely failed to do so, because this isn’t a question that can be answered with some kind of architectural or engineering merit — it’s planners being asked to strike a political compromise while the folks on the anti-side have all the motivation in the world not to compromise and a planning system that privileges their voices over those of the people who don’t currently live in the homes that opponents keep from being built.
Given the comprehensive, continent-wide failure to find the illusory “gentle density,” the answer is to stop trying to do the impossible. We are not going to get unanimous, enthusiastic support for any of the housing policies that might work in our current context, and that’s fine — because there’s no other area of public policy where we expect unanimity. In the context of an economy-smothering housing crisis, it’s actually nuts.
To put this in more concrete terms: the provincial government could absolutely duplicate a policy like the townhome reforms in Houston with clear black-and-white rules allowing large suburban lots to be subdivided into skinnier, taller townouses. But (a) it would absolutely result in “shouting and screaming” the moment anyone started actually building, and (b) in order for it to work, the law would need to allow those new homes to be built anyway. And to belabour the point just a little, (c) if Ford isn’t willing to endure some shouting and screaming, then he’s not going to get townhouses built either.
Ford likes being popular. Who doesn’t? That he doesn’t want to face the ire of comfortable suburban voters in the GTA for disrupting their bucolic neighbourhoods is understandable. But it’s also totally detached from reality. The government has correctly diagnosed the housing crisis as a housing shortage. That means getting more homes built. The government’s wrong-headed Plan A was to try to sprawl into the Greenbelt. Having wasted a year on that, they’re scrambling to figure out a Plan B that doesn’t harm their re-election chances.
Solving the housing crisis will involve picking winners and losers; any hard choice in government always does. And those choices carry political risks. But if the PCs are quailing at the risks involved in addressing the housing crisis, they should remember that the risks of not addressing the crisis — of asking voters to endorse what will, by the next election, be eight years of failure — would be at least as severe.
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