Ontario has received a middling grade in a new report ranking provincial and federal government efforts to get more housing built.
The report, released Thursday by housing think tank Missing Middle Initiative, gave Ontario a “C” grade for its overall housing efforts, placing the province behind Quebec, PEI and British Columbia in the ranking.
“Ontario gets dinged in this report quite heavily for their high development charges and slow approval speeds, and the province itself has acknowledged that's an issue,” said the ranking’s author, Mike Moffatt, an economist and founder of the Missing Middle Initiative.
The report graded provinces and the federal government on five criteria deemed to be housing “game-changers,” including measures to allow more density in cities, investments in factory-built units and efforts to fill in gaps left by private home builders.
Funding modular homes and municipal infrastructure projects earned the federal government a “B” grade overall, topping the Missing Middle Initiative list of 11 jurisdictions.
Quebec, PEI and British Columbia were each given “C+” grades, while Alberta was at the bottom of the ranking with a “D+”
The ranking didn’t factor in Ontario’s Bill 17, the Ford government’s recent legislation aimed at speeding up housing builds, Moffatt said, because it hasn’t yet passed.
The Ford government’s pledge in the recent Ontario budget to spend $50 million over five years to expand the province’s modular home industry is referred to in the report, which gave the province a “C” grade in its factory-built housing category.
Moffatt said the provincial government has been talking about support for modular homes for a while and suggested Ontario’s grade could improve when the $50-million pledge is implemented.
The report also doesn’t rank municipal efforts to boost housing, in part, Moffatt said, because he believes provinces “hold the key” to building more homes.
“They have the most policy levers, and in many cases, they've actually done the least.”
What are Ontario’s lowest and highest marks?
Ontario’s lowest scores in the report were D-minuses in efforts to allow more density in urban areas and in creating more adequate, affordable and suitable housing.
The report says Ontario hasn’t “prioritized” non-market dwellings and measures evaluating housing affordability and rental costs are among the worst in the country.
Ontario’s pledge to match a federal GST cut on purpose-built rentals, however, was noted as a positive move.
PEI, on the other hand, was given an “A” in the report for its Building Together plan. The five-year strategy got marks for its focus on boosting affordable units and housing those experiencing homelessness.
In the “legalizing density” category, the report says it’s “economically prohibitive” to build new gentle density dwellings in Ontario due to the highest development fees in Canada and slow approval speeds.
Housing advocates and experts have recently pointed to development charges, which builders pay to municipalities to fund infrastructure, as one of the causes of escalating housing costs.
“It's absolutely the case that government processes have become expensive and cumbersome and need to be streamlined,” said Prof. Matti Siemiatycki, who is the director of the Infrastructure Institute at the University of Toronto.
He said Bill 17 reflects the Ford government’s laser focus on lowering housing development charges and tightening planning timelines, but more attention needs to be paid to efficiency and cost savings in the private building sector.
“We need to be thinking really holistically about this if we're actually going to bring down the cost of building housing units in a meaningful way.”
Bill 17 does not mandate cuts to development charges for most housing projects, but proposes to defer when they can be collected.
Before introducing the bill, Housing Minister Rob Flack told reporters that development charges were important tools for funding infrastructure such as drinking and waste water systems and would not be cut, except those for new long-term care units.
Moffatt said he doesn’t believe a provincial mandate to cut municipal development charges is the way forward and that Ontario needs a more concrete plan to figure out how infrastructure costs are covered without forcing new homebuyers to pay.
“I think we need more substantial reform to the Development Charges Act, and a larger conversation about how we fund various types of infrastructure,” he said.
Ontario also got one of five “A” grades given to the governments in the report.
The province received the high mark for avoiding home builds in high-risk areas, which the report defines as lands prone to floods, wildfires and other climate-related hazards.
“Ontario has some of the strongest regulations in Canada to prevent building in areas prone to flooding,” the report says.
