Toronto's next mayor must be 'really focused on implementation' to build affordable housing, expert says.
All candidates have promised to find ways to boost housing supply. Many have proposed finding more efficient ways to build affordable housing on vacant, city-owned land. Speeding up the notoriously slow permitting approvals process is another popular promise. Some have vowed to stand up for renters by setting higher targets for purpose-built rentals and halting the demolition of older, rental apartment buildings.
"Rescuing and accelerating” the city’s Housing Now program, which aims to make city-owned land available for affordable housing, is a pillar of Brad Bradford's housing plan. But when it comes to tackling housing affordability in Toronto, ideas tend to be bountiful, while money is scarce.Matti Siemiatycki, the director of the Infrastructure Institute at the University of Toronto and a professor with the department of geography and planning, said the incoming mayor and current city council will realistically need an infusion of cash from the provincial and federal governments to catch up on building the affordable housing the city desperately needs.
“Housing is at the core of a variety of different challenges that our city is facing; issues around mental health and addiction, issues around public safety, issues around public transit,” Siemiatycki said.The cost of a one-bedroom rental, for example, was up 17.5 per cent year-over-year in June, according to Rentals.ca data.
“What the multiplex does is it allows for gentle intensification of our neighbourhoods, growth in population in neighbourhoods that have been shrinking, the ability to make them much more vibrant and lively and in so doing, also making public services more efficient and cheaper to provide and making important public transit potentially viable in areas where the density of population couldn’t support it,” he said.
“The idea of trickle down supply that will lead to affordability, that is a decades-long process and requires huge amounts of supply and getting that amount of supply built in our environment is a challenge,” Siemiatycki said. “There were federal programs to support private development, there were programs to support coops and even to some extent, to support public housing and non-profit housing,” he said.
“Really that’s where the policy piece comes in and where public funding is going need to augment the private investment in order to make sure there are affordable units and deeply affordable and supportive housing with wrap-around services, and that the mix of units, supports a complete community.
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