Last week, Mayor Olivia Chow received a personal delivery from Premier Doug Ford and Minister of Housing Minister Paul Calandra: a comically large novelty cheque marking the fact that Toronto had beaten provincially set housing targets. But she’s not resting on her laurels. At this week’s meeting of Chow’s mostly handpicked executive committee, the mayor and her allies approved a proposal designed to address both the city’s crushing housing crisis and its fiscal crisis.
If it’s approved by the full city council later this month, city staff would be directed to identify a list of city-owned properties that could be redeveloped into better and higher uses. Such redevelopment could involve adding square footage on top of existing TTC stations, city-owned community centres, and libraries — as well more comprehensive and (hopefully) aggressive action to redevelop transit-proximate parking lots owned by the Toronto Parking Authority.
It’s fair to ask why, in the year 2024, the city operates an agency (the TPA) whose sole purpose is to subsidize car ownership. But it beggars belief that a city council that not too long ago declared a “climate emergency” is still, by the reckoning of the municipal civil service, operating 74 parking lots close to provincially designated major-transit-system areas (MTSAs). A further 56 are already in areas of the city that are designated for housing but are not part of this recommended plan — one obvious way for council to improve this proposal would be to add those as well.
The city has relied on its parking authority in order to generate a hefty amount of relatively uncontroversial non-tax revenue and, occasionally, to stifle residential development: the TPA formally needs to report its property acquisitions to the city, but they’re handled quietly by an unglamorous committee — and, crucially, the city’s zoning bylaw allows the TPA to put a parking lot anywhere it wants, meaning it doesn’t need to hold a public meeting before it starts paving and painting. (Bike lanes, meanwhile, are still subjected to multiple, often vitriolic public show trials.)
What’s been most galling about the city’s reliance on the parking authority is that, viewed in the wider context, the city absolutely does not profit from giving valuable land over to parking, at least not relative to any kind of reasonable counterfactual. As a Toronto Region Board of Trade report concluded years ago, councillors worried about losing ongoing parking revenue to one-time asset sales were missing the forest for the trees: “Even the modest development of city-owned land can generate significant revenue through property tax growth, over and above any one-time sale proceeds and municipal land transfer taxes. The property tax from development of just two commercial stories on a surface lot may be enough to offset the revenue generated from parking on that lot.”
And, of course, there’s the obvious point that, if the city simply cannot imagine a world in which it isn’t doling out publicly provided car parking into the indefinite future, we don’t actually need to choose: parking lots can be buried underground while we construct mixed-use buildings above them. This would be a costly choice (underground parking lots are more expensive the surface lots), but it’s at least conceivable that, in some cases, those costs could be offset by more aggressive development. And, again, the status quo is already costing the city dearly; we’re simply shutting our eyes to math and pretending otherwise.
For years now, various advocacy groups (boards of trade, NGOs, and even governments themselves) have said that a key way to address the housing crisis is to use lands already owned by the public and to redevelop them with new housing, ideally making it as affordable as other fiscal challenges will allow. The measure passed by Chow’s executive this week is what taking that idea seriously looks like, and the mayor deserves kudos for not punting it or watering the item down to meaninglessness.
What’s frustrating is that, even in the context of the current crisis, Toronto seems to lack the ability to do anything in less than a year’s time: the timetable approved by the committee would see staff report back with a list of potential redevelopment sites in the fourth quarter of this year; it’s now only March 1.
Toronto’s staff are perpetually overburdened thanks to a council that has under-invested in the city’s basic capacity to implement and enforce its own policies, and even if nobody is wasting time in a literal sense, this timetable raises obvious questions: Is this a crisis or not? Are we serious about addressing it urgently or not?
“Q4 2024” is the kind of deadline that can easily slip into “mid-2025” if we aren’t diligent, and if it slips much beyond that, Chow will face the same choice her predecessor did: whether to deal with a potentially acrimonious housing-policy debate on the eve of a re-election bid or to put it off until sometime after voters have had their say. That would be a disaster and would needlessly make the current crisis worse.
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