So why, years after the Premier promised legal reforms that would deliver “more homes faster” and 1.5 million net new homes by 2030, is the housing shortage even worse? Why are housing starts actually down, year over year? It’s because rather than ending restrictions on midrise housing and slamming the brakes on sprawl and highway schemes that squander construction, Ontario’s changes to land use planning, environmental and transportation laws and policies have done the opposite.
Soon after Premier Doug Ford took office, his government began to dismantle even the modest measures the previous government had taken to promote more efficient housing construction.
Despite calls from housing and environmental experts across the political spectrum — and its own housing task force — to scrap outdated rules such as minimum parking requirements and to permit mid-rise housing on major streets throughout existing residential neighbourhoods, Ford intervened. He personally blocked efforts to legalize even 4-storey “4-plex” apartment buildings.
In recent months, as his government’s failure on housing has become more obvious, Ford has tried to pass the buck by blaming everyone from immigrants to the Bank of Canada. What he glosses over is that the housing market could easily have adapted to population and rate changes, but has instead turned the challenge of high interest rates and the opportunity of a growing population into a housing crisis by willfully sabotaging the solutions.
I hate Ford as much or more than the average progressive Ontarian, but the origins of the housing crisis predates him by at least fifteen years, if not twenty-five. Many federal and provincial governments have comprehensively failed to address this problem, choosing to do as little as possible to fix it because, dammit, there was so much money to be made allowing the wound to fester.
Now, he's totally helped throw gasoline on the fire, true, but again, he's not alone in that, either.