NDP leader Marit Stiles and her party’s housing critic, University–Rosedale MPP Jessica Bell, unveiled on Monday the party’s latest idea to combat the housing crisis: the official Opposition would, if it’s promoted to government after the next election, create a purpose-built provincial agency to leverage Ontario’s financial and real-estate assets to get the provincial government back in the business of building affordable housing, a role it’s largely abdicated for many decades now.
Stiles told reporters that the housing market is broken and that the government needs to take on the role of fixing it.
“At a time when we need to build more, this government is building less,” Stiles said. “If the Ford government can’t deliver the basics, if they can’t get home built, then they should get out of the way and let New Democrats build.”
Cue the sad trombone noise: the non-binding motion the NDP offered in the legislature on the topic was voted down Monday by the Tory majority, with the Liberals abstaining and Green MPP Aislinn Clancy voting with the NDP.
Liberal housing critic Adil Shamji, when asked about the Liberal abstentions, said in an email statement to TVO Today that “we believe in empowering homebuilders to build the homes families need. The reality is that Marit Stiles’ plan will add red tape and create new layers of bureaucracy. For example, you don’t need to add more people to the Sunshine List to legalize fourplexes.”
“Relying on an NDP-led government superagency is not the way to get to 1.5M homes by 2031,” Shamji added.
There’s a reasonable enough philosophical disagreement here: the Liberals believe they can get the province’s housing sector working faster and better by providing regulatory clarity and otherwise getting out of the way; the NDP thinks that a more activist role for the state is necessary.
(This, of course, charitably walks past the political context that the NDP and the Liberals are fishing for many of the same voters in an upcoming election, and neither party is inclined to endorse the other’s ideas. We’ll also ignore, for now, the fact that the Liberal-NDP acrimony involves a substantial debate over housing policy, while the actual government — Premier Doug Ford and his PC party — is largely absent.)
We can give the Liberals points for specificity here, for a moment. The NDP offered a motion with little in the way of policy details; it didn’t, for, example, indicate how many billions the party would be willing to spend on this measure. (Anything less than a number that ends in “billion” isn’t a serious housing policy in 2024.) Shamji, elsewhere in his statement, said the legislature should simply pass Bill 175, the BUILD Ontario Act, which would amend provincial planning laws to legalize more types of housing.
As someone who has enjoyed the spread of the phrase “legalize housing” as shorthand for the need to liberalize housing rules, I think there’s a lot of merit to Bill 175. But the NDP is also committed to its aims — Stiles reiterated her party’s commitment to legalizing fourplexes as well on Monday. The catch is that I don’t think Bill 175 would do the trick, because I don’t think MPPs at Queen’s Park understand just how many obstacles exist between “good intentions in a bill passed by the legislature” and the actual construction of new homes.
I could go into a lengthy explanation here about how provincial planning law shapes official plans, zoning bylaws, and building permits and why changes in provincial law don’t quickly or efficiently turn into changes to municipal planning rules. But it might be simpler to point to a recent example from Toronto, where small-scale developers who had been excited by the city’s move to legalize fourplexes — exactly the goal that Bill 175 seeks — have now been stymied by an interpretation of the city’s planning rules that effectively sends one of the most promising forms of “missing middle” through the same onerous and time-consuming process that larger apartment buildings are subjected to.
To put it another way: if housing-minded MPPs think it’s as simple as “legalizing housing,” consider that Toronto city council did exactly that, facing real political risk, but the city’s zoning rules are so baroque and complicated that, in a real sense, they don’t even know how to legalize what they say they want. The council’s planning and housing committee has asked staff to revisit this issue and others, and we might see council vote to fix it — sometime in the second quarter of 2025.
How to solve a housing crisis | Nerds on Politics
For the NDP at least, there’s a way around this problem, if it wants to take it. A public agency overseen by elected officials or their appointees can plausibly be exempted from provincial planning law. Ontario’s Planning Act already exempts hospitals, school boards, and most forms of energy infrastructure from municipal planning rules, and the Ford government expanded that exemption to include universities in this spring’s Bill 185, the Cutting Red Tape to Build More Homes Act. Stiles and Bell, asked about this on Monday, declined to get dragged into commitments on the precise design of the agency.
The problem is, however, even harder for the Liberals if they’re serious about letting liberalization do the hard work of expanding housing options. In other jurisdictions, as in Ontario, higher orders of government often have to engage in a kind of procedural trench warfare with recalcitrant municipalities, swatting down attempts to thwart more expansive, liberal, and humane building permissions. (The attorney general of California, for example, is suing the town of Norwalk for trying to ban housing for people on low incomes.)
To be clear, there are plausible ways forward for the Liberals if they form government and want to let the market lead the way on new housing. But anyone who wants to make a material change in the housing market in the lifespan of the next legislature will need to go big and fast early on. And, while the sentiment behind Bill 175 is good, the machinery won’t deliver the results the Liberals want — or at least not fast enough.
“Legalize housing” is still the right attitude for the next government. But it’s a harder job, I fear, than anyone at Queen’s Park is ready for.
Donate