Before the last municipal election, thousands of “housing voters” and “environment voters” joined Environmental Defence in demanding a major pro-housing, pro-environment overhaul of Toronto City Council’s approach to zoning, transit, taxes, electricity and roads.
We have great news: that pressure has been WORKING! After more than a decade of making things worse, Toronto City Council has spent the last couple of years making encouraging progress on the municipal reforms required to end our region’s housing shortage. Toronto now scores 324.5 out of 500 on our More Homes Faster Municipal Scoresheet, better than any other Ontario municipality we’ve examined so far, and well ahead of the two other municipalities whose scores we’ve published to date.
Tell your Candidates for Mayor & Council to Keep Going
Continuing on this brand new path is Toronto’s only hope of restarting homebuilding and catching up with the need for low-cost, family-sized homes. It’s also the most impactful thing Toronto can do for the environment — to help safeguard the Greenbelt, reduce Ontario’s greenhouse gas emissions, improve our quality of life, and save our remaining farms, forests, wetlands and wildlife habitats.
Not Just Zoning: Pro-Housing, Pro-Environment Improvements to Transit, Taxes, Fees
Toronto City Council’s governing majority has spent the last couple of years fixing the municipal laws and policies that were helping fuel sprawl and worsening car-dependency by blocking the most efficient kinds of family homes: midrise and fourplex flats on our existing neighbourhood streets.
Toronto has put the provincial government and its 905 peers to shame by acting fast on some of the biggest, most controversial “asks” in our Midrise Manual and More Homes Faster Scoresheet. For example:
- Council recently rezoned most of Toronto’s major “neighbourhood” residential streets for environmentally friendly six-storey midrise buildings, unlocking more than 31,000 building sites for family homes that can be built using timber and without adding more cars. Then it slashed development charges on new family-sized flats (2+ bedrooms) by 60 per cent.
- Toronto unlocked much more of the city for lower-cost, car-free construction, reversing TTC service cuts, funding the Scarborough Busway, removing minimum parking requirements, adding cost-effective, quick-installation RapidTO/transit lanes to Bathurst, Eglinton East, Kingston Road and Dufferin, and approving the RapidTO Surface Transit Network Plan.
- Toronto bit the bullet and increased residential property taxes to fund these improvements while reducing the city’s reliance on revenues that target new homes and families. That’s precisely what housing experts called for in the Midrise Manual.
- Toronto legalized family-friendly fourplex apartments, car-free, on virtually all of the city’s low-rise residential lots (sixplex in the highest-need neighbourhoods), while preventing McMansions from exploiting the same permissions. Then, it eliminated development charges for these multiplex homes entirely.
These are huge steps forward, but Torontonians could miss out on the housing and environmental rewards if our post-election mayor and council don’t stick to this new path, completing the parts of our More Homes Faster Checklist that remain unfinished and resisting any rollback of the changes we’ve already made.
In particular they’ll need to:
- Fill the remaining geographic gaps in the legalization of midrises on avenues and major streets, and four-storey fourplexes/sixplexes in neighbourhoods, by approving the “as-of-right” zoning packages for Major Transit Station Areas and the Avenues.
- Expand frequent, reliable, surface rapid transit lanes to the rest of the 20 priority roadways identified in the RapidTO Surface Transit Network Plan, and block any removal of existing Bike or RapidTO lanes.
- Block any reintroduction of minimum parking requirements for infill homes and accelerate the rollout of on-street electric vehicle chargers.
- Reject any freeze or reduction of residential property taxes, which would increase reliance on development charges.
- Preserve and use the City of Toronto’s direct control over Toronto Water to support the removal of infrastructure “bottlenecks” in neighbourhoods that need more family homes.
Returning to any part of the old status quo, or abandoning the current council’s in-progress reforms, would be a disaster for the environment and housing.
Tell your candidates for Toronto’s mayor and city council that they won’t get your vote unless they commit to continuing Toronto’s new, pro-housing, pro-environment U-turn.
