Ontario’s housing crisis is the kind of multi-headed hydra of a problem that, if it’s ever to be addressed, will probably require a massive reform of both local and provincial rules and potentially a total rethink of how we deliver new homes in this province. Yet the one and only attempt we’ve seen thus far to come up with a wide-ranging plan to ease the housing crisis — the 2022 report from the Housing Affordability Task Force — has largely gathered dust on the desk of two different ministers of municipal affairs while the Ford government does almost anything else.
So instead of a shotgun blast, one opposition MPP is proposing a sniper’s bullet. Kanata–Carleton MPP Karen McCrimmon has a private-member’s bill up for debate Tuesday evening that is one of the most precisely targeted bills I’ve seen from someone outside the government benches who’s trying to make a substantive change in policy.
Bill 201, the Commercial to Residential Conversion Act, is intended to make it easier for developers to repurpose vacant office buildings for residential purposes. This is a thorny problem for developers since it intersects with all sorts of questions involving urban planning, land-use rules, and even taxation, but McCrimmon has her sights set on one specific problem. A provincial regulation made under the Environmental Protection Act requires that any conversion to a building over six storeys can occur only after something called a “record of site condition” has been properly conducted and filed with the government.
It’s an expensive and time-consuming process. And while there are obvious cases in which the government has an interest in recording this kind of thing — for example, making sure someone doesn’t build a daycare on a former toxic-waste site — the six-storey rule (O. reg 153/04, s. 15 (1) 2. iv, for the curious) applies in all cases, even where there’s no history of anyone handling dangerous substances. McCrimmon’s act, if it were passed by the legislature, would forbid the government from requiring a record of site condition on the basis of the height of a building.
“It’s about as simple and straightforward and achievable a change as we can make it,” McCrimmon said in the legislature media studio Tuesday morning. “This government has said it wants to remove arbitrary red tape that serves no function. That piece of legislation… I cannot find the function it serves.”
McCrimmon’s bill has merit, but it’s worth noting that, even if MPPs vote to endorse the bill this evening, the next step would be a committee hearing — not passage into law. The Tory majority controls the committee schedule and further controls whether and when a bill that’s survived committee review gets called for third and final reading before being signed by the lieutenant-governor. On the other hand, this is also a problem the government could fix without the bill even being necessary: the problem at hand is a regulation that the government could amend on its own without having its hand forced by a private-member’s bill. (McCrimmon told reporters Tuesday that informal outreach to the government hasn’t worked so far. Hence the bill.)
The bigger problem for McCrimmon’s bill — and for the idea of converting defunct office buildings into homes — is that, while office buildings and residential buildings are both “buildings” in a generic sense, they’re built according to fundamentally different principles. Offices need electricity and decent HVAC and lighting, but they economize by centralizing the plumbing in kitchenettes and bathroom cores. Residential buildings run plumbing to each individual unit, which makes them more expensive per square foot. Office floors also tend to be larger, with much greater distances from the windows to the centre of the building — efficient for offices, but difficult to fit conventional apartments into.
The problem becomes easier if we think differently about what we want these buildings to do, however. A new report from the architecture and design firm Gensler suggests that, while offices are a challenge to refit as conventional apartments, they’re a more natural fit for, well, dorms. “Single room occupancy” homes (SROs) were common in cities big and small until 20th-century planning rules were adopted in the name of chasing the poor out of sight. These days, the idea of small private living spaces with shared kitchen and bathroom spaces is largely confined to student housing.
Nobody argues that SROs are everyone’s idea of a perfect forever home, but they could serve a need in the housing market and do so more affordably than other options, particularly if it’s possible to refit underused offices economically. Gensler’s report suggests that, in some cases — depending a great deal on local conditions and starting assumptions, so caveats abound — it would be possible to deliver units that cost less than USD$1,000 per month to rent, meaning they’d be substantially below-market in big cities. The best places to start would therefore be cities with a combination of a large number of vacant offices and persistently high market rents, so places like Toronto and Ottawa would be good candidates.
There’s no magic here: SROs, if they deliver more affordable housing, will do so because they’re less housing — literally fewer square feet for people to call their own. But they could open up new possibilities when it comes to refitting office buildings. All of this, however, will be a moot point unless the government can clear out the thicket of rules that prevent developers from taking a serious look at the option. McCrimmon’s private-member’s bill is a start, but only if the majority in the legislature is willing to take it seriously.
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