this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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If this were happening under Poilievre instead of Trudeau then he would take away funding from municipalities. That would show these developers
I mean I hate Poilievre but he's not wrong there. Municipalities are a big part of the reason they're not building.
I follow my local municipal gov't closely. They talk a good game about housing, but their actions speak louder. A developer wanted to build two huge towers on a parking lot, next to an existing huge tower of the same size. City staff said no, 39 storeys is too tall for the urban core of Hamilton, 4 storeys is too tall for a pedestal.
A charity wanted to convert an underused park into a tiny-home homeless shelter. City council said no.
Before the pandemic, developers wanted to sprawl out more suburbia. City council ran a referendum. The public said no.
Now, you can disagree with any of those three solutions -- personally I strongly hate building more suburban sprawl. But if you block all 3, the evidence shows you just don't want housing, regardless of what you say.
At every turn, municpal governments say "yes, we want more housing, but not this housing".
Interest rates have jumped, which means buildings aren't as profitable to make. The way to get back some of that profitability is to make them bigger. If a 10 storey building won't best the cost of the loans taken to build it under the new lending conditions, a 20 storey building probably will. And the municipality says "no".
I hate Poilievre. I care about trans people. I care about climate change. But he's the only one talking about giving city governments the ball-busting they deserve.
He absolutely is wrong there; municipalities can’t reach housing targets if they only get funding after reaching them
He also wants those targets to increase by 15% every year
And having municipalities no longer able to support their current populations isn’t going to entice them to bring in more people
His housing plan also gets rid of transit because municipalities have to have an undisclosed (read the bill) amount of occupied high density housing at every stop. People use transit to get to work/stores/entertainment not to get from apartment block to apartment block
The whole point of his bill/policy is to have unreasonable asks so he can get rid of funding. I don’t think anyone is dumb enough to think it will accomplish anything
As for Hamilton the developer was told to amend their proposal but didn’t submit it until after the deadline
Municipalities can absolutely reach housing targets, they just have to stop saying "no" to infill developers. The Hamilton example is not spurious - the only reason it's going through this multi-year delay is because the building is too tall and needs to get a variance for being too tall.
The concept of "too tall for downtown Hamilton" is absurd on its face. Cities should have amended their official plans years ago and streamlined approvals for large, high-density infill developments. They choose not to. So they must be forced to do so.
It's not just reptilian amoral for-profit developers facing this, it's the heroic affordable housing builders too. You'll hear the same complaints from Housing Now TO and Jen Keesmaat.
Watch this video presentation at Toronto City Hall by Mark Richardson of Housing Now:
https://mastodon.social/@Pxtl/110300343308877005 (yes, that is my mastodon)
"$20 billion dollar intersection in Forest Hill; somebody said that should be a 7-storey and 70-unit building in 2018. How...where did that number come from? Somebody picked that number. Because it "conformed to the current planning policy for Forest Hill"
he explains it very clearly: the housing crisis is a self-inflicted wound caused by municipal governments. He and his org have an endless list of buildings they want to construct, and they're being told "no" by city hall.
Want to increase units by 15% per year? Stop saying no.
I know it's creepy to see somebody defend home-builders, since most developers are crooks. You know why most developers are crooks? Because municipal governments made building housing a crime.
Okay, let’s take Ford’s target of 1.5m over 10 years or 150 000 a year
Next year it would be 172500, followed by 198375, followed by 228131 and so on
As we know it’s illegal for municipalities to operate in the red. So how high are your property taxes going to be to accommodate that when the city loses funding to cover those costs because they don’t make it
A realistic solution for other levels of government to intervene would be to build housing on land that they own