One of the recurring themes of my columns is that the world of policymaking doesn’t give governments an infinite number of possible solutions. Most of the time, governments confront questions for which there are a strictly limited number of answers; at the very least, we can say the eventual solution will probably fall into a small number of categories. That’s true whether it’s an opposition leader promising to solve a long-standing issue for municipalities or a brand-new finance minister announcing that, gosh, the province’s finances are worse than they thought, and tough choices will need to be made.
That’s true in general, and it’s extremely true about housing in particular. Planners and policymakers can get lost in the vague language around “housing units,” but it’s important to stay grounded: whatever else we can say about them, houses and apartments are real, physical objects that need to exist somewhere in space. If you want homes to be built, and if you want them to be built faster, you actually need to figure out where they’re going to go.
This is almost tautological it’s so obvious, but it seems to somehow evade Premier Doug Ford and his government. The latest evidence for this comes from Global News, which reported this week that the government had been considering “massive density” around transit stations and been ready to unveil a major new piece of legislation before the proposal died somewhere at the cabinet table. The government was also, Global reports, considering allowing fourplexes provincewide — a measure supported by housing advocates, opposition parties, and the government’s own public-service experts — before the measure was similarly deep-sixed at cabinet.
As far as new infill housing goes, this is absolutely one of those cases in which there are only a small number of possible solutions. The first is the “massive density around transit” option, which happens to be the one that Toronto has pursued for much of the last generation. The actual planning or economic merits of this are debatable, but it’s been politically palatable for elected officials: it quarantines new construction in the hundred meters or so closest to transit stations and leaves Toronto’s sacred single-family-home neighbourhoods (the so-called Yellowbelt) largely untouched. And when the city builds new transit lines — that Eglinton Crosstown will open any day now, promise — voters have mostly accepted the logic that new housing is part of the bargain.
The other option is to allow gentler intensification over a much wider area. There’s no way around disrupting neighbourhoods of bungalows, here: if you’re going to generate a sizeable number of new homes, the expanded permissions have to be generous enough to be useful. Tiny homes are cute but not a real solution to the housing crisis. This is precisely why fourplexes and four storeys have become the shorthand for housing advocates — this is the bare minimum we should be pushing for serious planning reform.
That’s more or less the exhaustive list of big-picture options available to governments trying to build new homes within a reasonable commuting distance of job centres. The Ford government, in its expansive wisdom, has surveyed these options and has chosen… neither. Increased density near transit stations? That would mean the premier taking political responsibility for big changes in his political heartland as major transit projects open in the suburban parts of the GTA in coming years. Under the status quo, these fights all take place at the municipal level (or, at most, the Ontario Land Tribunal). And ever since the Ontario Liberals adopted the idea of legalized fourplexes as a part of their housing platform, the Tories have polarized themselves into endorsing the most intrusive vision of the government telling landowners what they can and cannot do with their property.
In the almost full year since the government reversed itself on the Greenbelt, it’s done almost nothing on infill housing. Its efforts on housing policy have been consumed by damage control, and it’s quietly committed itself even more forcefully to a vision of greenfield sprawl — except that, in contrast with its politically toxic attempt to carve up the Greenbelt for campaign donors, it’s using lower-profiles means, such as making appeals of urban-boundary expansions easier and revising more obscure provincial planning rules.
To be fair, this is an answer to the question “where will the houses go?” But it locks Ontarians into a future of longer commutes, more gridlock, and less green space, and the government isn’t being straight with voters about the choices it’s making. If you’re someone who’d prefer a different future — one without punishing commutes to the exurban fringe — this government has offered you basically nothing since it was re-elected just over two years ago.
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