A long-running joke in politics is the definition of the words “middle class”: when asked in opinion surveys, huge super-majorities of people self-identify as members of the middle class, and that fraction has amusingly stayed relatively stable even as people simultaneously believe that the middle class is shrinking. Elected leaders promise to deliver relief to the long-suffering middle class, even as they’re often evasive as to who, exactly, qualifies.
So it was actually a little novel when the Ontario Liberals released their latest housing policy earlier this month which included a concrete definition of the kind of “middle-class homes” the party will exempt from development charges: any new home under 3,000 square feet. Ontario municipalities have used these charges in recent decades to pay for infrastructure in lieu of property tax increases; the Liberals say that the lost revenue will be made up for with a new Better Communities Fund paid for by the province.
This is the latest chapter in the party’s housing journey. The Liberals had already adopted a pledge to allow four-storey buildings and fourplexes across Ontario and introduced a private member’s bill that would do some of the work needed for that. (“Allow” here means a municipality’s official plan or zoning by-laws cannot prevent a development due to its height or unit count within those parameters.)
The party has also been receptive to arguments that development charges and other fees — which have been used for decades but have exploded in cost since 2010 — are directly linked to sluggish housing starts and higher costs for homebuyers. Ottawa Centre MP Yasir Naqvi proposed a very similar policy in his unsuccessful leadership bid last year.
There are plenty of unanswered questions about the Liberal proposal. It would largely eliminate a major source of income for Toronto: most new homes built in the city have been under the 3,000-square-foot threshold. Even outside of Toronto, development charges are a major part of the budgeting process and eliminating them would undoubtedly cause headaches for municipal treasurers.
The threshold for new homes in this proposal is obviously up for debate — is 3,000 square feet more “middle class” than 2,500, or 2,750? But Bonnie Crombie has been making the case for months now that her priority will be building the kinds of larger homes people can raise children in, so the prescription is at least coherent with the party’s stated goals. It also happens to be pretty close to the size of the median new detached home in the Toronto census metropolitan area (StatCan’s definition of the broad region around Toronto) during the 2010s.
More important than the precise number is the fact that the Liberals have chosen a number at all. If the party were to actually form government, the next steps would be to draw on the work of the aforementioned private member’s bill from Don Valley East MPP Adil Shamji and do for 3,000-square-foot homes what they’ve already done for four-storey buildings and fourplexes: create province-wide rules that make it quick and easy to build the kinds of homes they want to see. Instead of being a threshold for a financial rule, the chosen size for their “middle-class home” should be a pillar around which they build the rest of their planning policy.
(It’s worth noting here that allowing 3,000-square-foot homes is not the same thing as making them compulsory — any set of rules that allows for these homes will also allow for more modest abodes as well.)
The planning rules surrounding new homes are often incredibly finicky. It’s not enough to simply allow fourplexes, four-storey builds, or even 3,000-square-foot homes and leave it at that. Cities in Ontario literally measure the height of buildings in different ways, often choosing metrics specifically to make it harder to build taller homes. Or a city might nominally have very permissive rules in one part of its zoning by-law because the real binding constraint lies elsewhere: they might not formally have a height limit in residential neighbourhoods, but mandate larger and larger requirements for vacant green space around any new home as it gets taller so that nothing but a bungalow is plausibly going to be approved.
Queen’s Park’s approach historically has been to insert vague language into the Planning Act or other policies and then let the Ontario Land Tribunal (formerly the Ontario Municipal Board) do the dirty work of enforcing the province’s rules. That was neither consistent nor particularly effective at achieving the outcomes governments said they wanted. The Ford government has taken a more direct approach, albeit still too timidly: they’ve prohibited certain planning controls on so-called secondary units such as laneway or garden suites.
The point is that it’s not sufficient to say that we want to see new homes built, or even that we want to see more “middle-class homes” built, as the Liberals have. They need to imagine the kind of homes they want to see built — the real structure with four walls and a roof they’d be happy to see on their street or any other street in Ontario — and then work backwards from that to create a set of rules that will make it not just possible but easy and quick to build that home.
Of course, it’s easy to say: the politics of writing that rule set and sticking to it when builders start disrupting neighbourhoods will be another thing altogether. Most municipal councils reliably fail this test. If nothing else it would be interesting to see a provincial government try.
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