Housing report prepared for Big City Mayors sets out six core challenges - can they be met?

By Staff

August 19^th, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

A lengthy, very data filled report was released days before the AMO conference taking place in London this week.

This report was written by Mike Moffatt, with funding from Ontario’s Big City Mayors (OBCM).

About the PLACE Centre

Released by The PLACE Centre, which stands for Propelling Locally Accelerated Clean Economies, focuses on the complex challenges limiting clean economic growth in Canadian communities. The core approach is “place-based,” meaning the PLACE team works with all levels of government, industry, and civil society organizations to ensure regions across Canada have the solutions needed to overcome the challenges they face in advancing clean economic growth.

With this approach, the PLACE team creates practical, place-based recommendations where everyone involved can collaborate and work towards making progress in solving these problems. That way, every region and community across the country can be included in, and benefit from, Canada’s growing clean economy.

The report PLACE address the six core challenges identified in the report as slowing down or making unviable the building of new homes:

Coordination –  A lack of coordination between all partners involved, no one actor in the system can ensure that housing completions keep pace with  population growth.

Ability – Shortages in materials, financing, and skilled labour, from electricians to planners 

Viability – High costs, including interest rates, taxes and fees 

Productivity – Slow-to-no productivity growth in the home building sector

Permission – A regulatory environment that prevents many high-quality, climate-friendly, homes from being built

Non-Market Housing – A lack of non-market housing, from co-op housing to on-campus student rentals.

Municipalities recognize that they play a big part in getting homes built, through the application approval process and providing the needed infrastructure to create complete communities. Municipalities have been working in the last few years on improving these processes to get homes and communities built faster, including by focusing on implementing multiple government changes.

Municipalities however do not build homes, and even with our improved processes we are seeing productivity issues impacted by labour shortages, supply chain delays and financing. Municipalities cannot control these outside factors that are delaying already approved projects from being built, but we want to be part of the solution to help get shovels in the ground. We want to work together with our partners in the building industry as well as other levels of government to identify these barriers and find solutions to these challenges.

To get a sense as to the size of the challenge – set out below is the population growth that is expected to take place:

This level of growth is close to being beyond comprehension.

As highlighted in the report, all partners in the home building process play an important role and municipalities want to ensure that each partner is doing their part to reach our housing goals.

OBCM is calling on both the federal and provincial governments to hold an annual meeting for all partners in the home building process to establish an accountability framework that helps us identify barriers and find solutions to meeting our housing goals.

We are going to need a day or two to read the report in detail; we will get back to you on this one on what it means to Burlington where the growth that takes place will consist of high rise towers – a lot of them.