Statement by Phil Pothen, Counsel, and Ontario Environment Program Manager

Toronto | Traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat – To actually deliver more homes, faster, long-term, Canada and Ontario should strictly focus their investments on reducing development charges upon new mid-rise and multiplex infill homes, especially those built within existing, currently-lowrise neighbourhoods. As research, including our own Midrise Manual shows, focusing construction to midrise and multiplex within existing neighbourhoods is the only approach efficient enough to catch up with the need for housing. By slashing development charges indiscriminately, rather than selectively federal, provincial, and municipal governments would be choosing to maintain the decades-old, perverse incentives that caused Ontario’s housing shortage by squandering construction on the least efficient formats.

Focusing development charge cuts on mid-rise multiplex homes within existing, currently-lowrise neighbourhoods would be a much more effective use of public money, because these developments rely largely upon existing infrastructure. Those homes would mostly make use of the existing capacity freed up in residential neighbourhoods’ parks, schools, water pipes and sewage drains as the result of our smaller family-sizes and increased water-efficiency. That means the same amount of government investment in replacing revenue from development charges could be used to unlock a lot more new homes across a lot more development sites, by targeting specific bottlenecks in infrastructure, rather than having to building completely new water, sewer, and street networks from scratch.

Background Information

  • Ontario’s housing shortage is not the result of recent economic headwinds or stalled construction.  It developed at a time when our construction labour, equipment and materials were all being put to full use, because government policies incentivized squandering that capacity the least inefficient forms of housing, worst of all highway sprawl.
  • In order to fix the housing shortage quickly, as the Ontario government has promised, it must focus on changing the formats and locations we rely on for new family homes.  That means that it must fix the perverse laws that have artificially made it more expensive to build what should be the most efficient kinds of housing, mid-rise and multiplex within existing, currently lowrise neighbourhoods.  That starts with implementing the recommendations of the Midrise Manual, which identifies provincial laws and policies as the main barriers to developing mid-rise homes at scale and ending Ontario’s housing shortage. 
  • Absent artificial restrictions (like restrictive zoning, parking requirements and outdated egress rules), mid-rise buildings of six storeys allow builders to safely combine the land-efficiency of greater density and the process-efficiency of building multiple homes at once, with the same pool of labour, equipment, materials that currently get squandered on single- and semi-detached sprawl and McMansion rebuilds. 

ABOUT ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENCE (environmentaldefence.ca): Environmental Defence is a leading Canadian advocacy organization that works with government, industry and individuals to defend clean water, a safe climate and healthy communities.

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For more information or to request an interview, please contact:

Karishma Porwal, media@environmentaldefence.ca