The City of Toronto is fitfully, after extensive delays, finally getting ready to build a supportive housing project in North York, at the municipal address of 175 Cummer Avenue. This project was initially announced in 2021 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the city was struggling to find alternative ways of housing the city’s homeless population outside of the shelter system. Announced alongside two other projects, the city asked for ministerial zoning orders for all three to accelerate the process of getting them built.
Then-minister of municipal affairs and housing Steve Clark issued MZOs for two of the requested projects — but not 175 Cummer. The local Progressive Conservative MPP Stan Cho (now the minister of tourism, culture, and gaming) aligned himself with local NIMBYs and opposed the project, and somehow, gosh, wouldn’t you know it, the MZO never materialized.
City council, to its credit, didn’t take no for an answer. It proceeded to go through the normal, MZO-free process of changing its zoning rules and approving the project the old-fashioned way. The local NIMBYs, equally undaunted, dragged the project to the Ontario Land Tribunal and even tried to launch a court case to review the tribunal’s decision, all in vain. But now, three years later, the cost of the project has more than doubled according to the Toronto Star: instead of $14.6 million, the project will now cost $36 million.
The immediate villains of this story are Clark, Cho, and the premier they both answer to. Clark could have issued the MZO at any time (at a time in his political career when he was dispensing them nearly at will) and he chose not to, undoubtedly with the premier’s assent. There’s a direct financial and human toll to the delays they imposed on this project, and in a just world they’d have to apologize to the scores of people they denied four walls and a roof — all so they could cater to some of the worst political instincts among the electorate.
But this story would be too neat and tidy, and too comforting to progressive Toronto’s nostrums about local democracy, if we ignored what actually happened. After all, Clark didn’t throw up novel roadblocks or actively obstruct the construction of this project. The only thing Doug Ford’s cabinet did was nothing. Instead, they let it proceed through the normal planning process that nearly every other residential project in this city must go through. It’s just that the consequences of having to engage the planning process have been catastrophically expensive.
Indeed, the case of 175 Cummer exposes all the self-interested lies that anti-housing forces tell themselves about the nature of our current housing crisis. Is it the fault of land speculators? No, this was land the city already owned. Are local residents simply hostile to for-profit developers? No, this was a publicly funded project that will be operated by a non-profit. Is opposition reserved for massive skyscraping towers? This project is three storeys.
It is true that similar modular housing projects that did get MZOs also faced large overruns, as found by the city’s Auditor General. That’s unsurprising given the urgency and unavoidable haste the city faced in trying to get these projects built. But the scope of the cost inflation at 175 Cummer is substantially larger than even in those cases, on the order of millions of dollars.
The explanation for how the cost of this project exploded is simple: it would have been cheaper if it had skipped any engagement with Toronto’s own planning processes, that turned out not to be possible, so now it’s much more expensive. Delays that would be costly at any time were doubly and triply so in a period of high inflation; and the city was on the hook for storing the unused residential modules while the case worked its way through the appeals process.
And this was a case where the City did everything it could to accommodate this project within the normal process: council voted its support promptly, and continued to support it in the face of local opposition. Very few private developments get that kind of support and consequently face a much more antagonistic process.
For their part, the opponents of the 175 Cummer project did nothing more than engage all of the procedural rights that Ontario law entitles them to, even if those appeals were spurious (and even if the Ontario Land Tribunal took its sweet time eventually dismissing them.) This is, literally, local democracy (as it’s defined by its adherents!) at work. But this is the point: the results of the system, operating as it’s designed to do, routinely create outcomes like this. It’s simply that in the case of this project, we can see precisely how costly the system is.
Lots of people will spend a great deal of cognitive energy refusing to believe this, but the facts are plain as day: the single biggest reason for the high cost of housing in Toronto, and in other big cities in Ontario, is a planning process that’s fundamentally toxic to delivering homes affordably. It’s not a problem isolated to supportive housing projects: Toronto wants to encourage more small infill in neighbourhoods traditionally reserved for single-family homes, but even optimistic developers tell the Globe and Mail what any longtime observer could have assumed: the margins on these projects will be so thin that effectively anything other than the lightest touch from the planning department will doom them.
Ford, Clark, and Cho are all housing villains. But it’s remarkable that they could cause so much harm by doing nothing more than engaging the normal processes of Ontario’s planning system, a system that’s failing to meet one of the most basic physical needs we have: a safe place to call home. People who want to end the housing crisis should stop defending a failed system and join the work to build something better.
Donate