Here is an interesting chart, from Mike Moffat, that looks at housing completions -- both ownership and rental -- in the province of Ontario. The way to read this chart is that, for each date, you are looking at completions for the previous 10 years. (It says 12, but that seems to be a mistake.) For example, Q4-1964, which is the start of this chart, equals all homes built between Q1-1955 and Q4-1964.
Three things will probably immediately stand out to you:
We built a lot of multi-family housing in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, we built more than we're building right now and that wasn't just the case in Toronto and Ontario. In Canada as a whole, the majority of building permits (60%) issued between 1962 and 1973 were for multi-family buildings. More specifically though, this was a rental apartment boom, as opposed to a condominium boom.
We then said: "Nah, let's not build so many apartments anymore. Let's go back to building more single-family houses."
And that's what we did -- by a fairly wide margin -- until the early 2000s when the next great multi-family boom started to take hold. This time, though, it developed into a condominium boom.
Both multi-family booms have mirrored periods of overall economic expansion. But you also need to look at what government was doing. In the 1960s and 1970s we made it attractive to build rental housing (whereas today it's a very challenging asset class to underwrite). And then more recently, we decided that much of our growth should happen in existing built-up urban areas. That generally means more multi.
But multi-family is a fairly broad term. Are we talking about 4-storey walk-ups or are we talking about 40-storey tall buildings? For those of you who are able to look through this chart to what's happening in the market, you'll know that we are far more effective at the latter. We have a lot of work to do when it comes to the in-between housing scales.
Yesterday I wrote about our housing doom loop.
Today, the province of Ontario responded (maybe not to my post) by publishing this Housing Affordability Task Force report. In it, are 55 recommendations to improve overall housing supply across the province, with the end goal of adding 1.5 million homes over the next 10 years.
I'm still making my way through the report, but the recommendations can basically be grouped into these five main buckets (taken verbatim from this press release):
Make changes to planning policies and zoning to allow for greater density and increase the variety of housing.
Reduce and streamline urban design rules to lower costs of development.
Depoliticize the approvals process to address NIMBYism and cut red tape to speed up housing.
Prevent abuse of the appeal process and address the backlog at the Ontario Land Tribunal by prioritizing cases that increase housing.
Align efforts between all levels of government to incentivize more housing.
Reform is badly needed. And I have gone on and on and on and on over the years about a number of the problems associated with how we build new homes and how we expect them to suddenly become more affordable.
Still, I think that most of the general public would be shocked to learn how long things take, how complicated we have decided to make land use approvals, and how a single person with a vested interested in seeing no development can hold up the delivery of thousands of new homes.
Progress is measured in years and decades. Months simply evaporate while you wait for the next PDF document to grant you access to some other labyrinthian planning hurdle. It doesn't need to be this way.
The big news this week in Toronto planning & development is the province's decision to approve three downtown development projects using a tool known as a "ministerial zoning order." The impetus for doing this was to speed up the approval and delivery of about 1,000 affordable housing units (along with about 2,000 market-rate units).
The province has made it clear that it wants to do what it can to reduce red tape and unnecessary delays when it comes to building new affordable housing. But this, not surprisingly, upset a number of local councillors who feel the province is overstepping and not allowing the city to govern its own city building affairs.
Alex Bozikovic's view in the Globe and Mail this week was: hey, maybe that's not so bad. The planning process is painfully slow (and political). And Toronto is going to need a lot more housing over the coming years and decades. So why not speed up its delivery? Especially when there's an affordable housing component and the architecture is exemplary.
The reality is that our housing delivery system is rife with tensions. A big part of the process is predicated on local voters, who already live in a particular place, opining on their own interests and on the interests of people who don't yet live there. The incentives in place are anything but aligned.
We can debate which level of government should have more power and what might be considered an unnecessary delay, but what is clear to me is that it should not take 2-5 years to get new housing approved in this city.