Schreiner: Ford’s latest housing bill got it wrong. Here’s what it’s really going to take to solve the housing crisis
If the housing crisis is a raging forest fire, the bill was the equivalent of showing up with a garden hose to try to put it out, says Green leader Mike Schreiner
Last month, the Ford government tabled its latest so-called housing bill. As many have pointed out, it was a piece of lukewarm legislation that, in many ways, felt like the government admitting defeat after six full years of housing failures.
Faced with the opportunity to take big and bold leadership to build more homes that ordinary people can afford to live in, the Ford government instead chose to tinker around the edges — putting forward a handful of meagre changes that won’t make much of a difference for average Ontarian’s day-to-day affordability challenges.
If the housing crisis is a raging forest fire, this bill was the equivalent of showing up with a garden hose to try to put it out.
This failure to launch can feel discouraging to the many, many Ontarians who have spent years begging the Ford government to step up with real housing solutions that put real people before insider profits.
Here are five solutions Greens have recently put forward that would do just that.
Legalizing gentle density. For years, Greens have been calling on the government to get rid of outdated planning laws that keep us from building the mix of housing types we need in the communities we already spend our time in. Fourplexes is one piece of the puzzle, but we also need to go further — for example, by legalizing four stories in all neighbourhoods and six-to-11 story midrises on transit corridors.
It’s a common-sense solution to build more homes and bring down soaring housing costs without sprawling onto our farmland, wetlands and green space — but the Ford government has repeatedly refused this simple solution that was recommended by their own housing affordability task force more than two years ago.
Creating more ownership opportunities. Greens recently put forward a motion to develop a framework that would allow for single-family homes and multiplexes to be easily stratified into multiple ownership units. This is already in place in provinces like BC, where the divided homes are known as stratas. Implementing a similar policy in Ontario would create more opportunities for home ownership in existing neighbourhoods, especially for young Ontarians who are currently locked out of the market entirely.
Protecting renters. Over the past ten years, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Ontario has gone up by almost 50 percent. Average workers and families just can’t keep up, and as a result more and more people are spending more than half of their income on rent alone. That’s not sustainable, and it makes it impossible for the majority of Ontarians to do things like save up for a down payment, start a business, or put money aside for their kids’ education.
Earlier this year, my colleague Aislinn Clancy put forward a bill that would have strengthened protections for Ontario renters by reimplementing rent and vacancy control, cracking down on illegal renovictions and creating a rental replacement policy to ensure that any affordable rental units demolished in Ontario are replaced with units of the same size and rent. Together, these measures would bring some semblance of control back to our rental market and stop the disappearance of affordable rents from our communities.
Building affordable housing. Up until the mid-nineties, non-profits and co-ops were building tens of thousands of homes a year in Canada, thanks to partnerships with provincial and federal governments. When those governments (including Ontario) pulled out, the building stopped. Right now, 93 percent of Ontario’s below-market rental housing supply was built before 1995. It’s long past time for the province to get back in the business of building affordable and deeply affordable housing so that everyone has a safe and affordable place to call home.
Our province owns a lot of land. Some of it is currently sitting vacant or underused, and some of it is perfectly situated near growing communities and existing transit stations. Making better use of this land to build affordable homes will go a long way in helping us meet the goal of 250,000 affordable homes that housing advocates have called for.
Getting speculation out of the housing market. A recent report showed that 24 percent of Ontario homes are owned by investors. More and more, young people are being priced out of the housing market by deep-pocketed speculators that buy up homes in unprecedented numbers.
We want to get back to building homes for people, not speculators. That’s why we’ve put forward a plan to crack down on rampant speculation by implementing a multiple-property speculation tax for investors who own three or more properties.
These are the kinds of practical solutions that our province needs if we want to bring down soaring housing costs and get more homes built.
Instead of waving the white flag, the Ford government would do well to listen to the millions of Ontarians repeatedly calling for bigger and bolder change from this government, and for a housing market that works for all of us — not just the wealthiest.
Mike Schreiner is the leader of the Green Party of Ontario. We’ve invited Ontario’s three opposition leaders to submit an op ed on a topic of their choice for launch week.