The Ford government has been promising for years to build "attainable housing," but documents show it still isn't sure what that means.
In Fall 2022, Ontario said it would develop an attainable housing program that would see homes built on surplus lands owned by the province or municipalities, using quick-build strategies like modular housing when possible. Some units would be exempt from municipal fees, making them even cheaper.
Unlike affordable housing, which the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation defines as costing less than 30 per cent of a household's income, attainable housing is a Ford government term and has no definition. (Ontario has its own definition of "affordable" which differs from the CMHC's).
On Dec. 13, 2023, the government said it would consult with stakeholders to define attainable.
The Ministry of Housing is still working on it, according to a transition binder prepared last month for new Associate Housing Minister Vijay Thanigasalam.
Ontario is still "defining attainable housing, identifying potential program levers and completing site-specific business cases to advance surplus government lands as demonstration sites, including the potential use of modular building technologies," Thanigasalam's binder notes.
Housing Minister Paul Calandra's office said the decision to restrict the program to government lands was at the request of municipalities who raised concerns about missing out on fees.
"The Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing continues to meet regularly with the Ministry of Infrastructure and Infrastructure Ontario on the development of an attainable housing program, including meeting with partners across government (such as staff and executive level representatives from other ministries and agencies) as part of program development," spokesperson Bianca Meta said.
Consultations have found that stakeholders generally support the concept, but have concerns about how well it could "close the gap between market and attainable prices," the binder reads.
They also want the definition to be region-specific, based on local incomes and home prices, instead of provincewide.
A group representing mayors of big cities in Ontario said they'd been consulted on the definition as part of the government's "broad outreach." Part of it will be based on the income of a region — but not the average income, Burlington Mayor Marianne Meed Ward said. Calandra's office didn't confirm or deny that that would be the case.
If it were only based on the average income, then the definition for Burlington, which has a higher concentration of wealthy people, would be "very unattainable for people like my kids, who are young adults," Meed Ward said.
A PC MPP first used the term "attainable housing" in the legislature in July 2020, when Andrea Khanjin said the government's first budget "helped people in terms of affordable and attainable housing in this province."
It didn't fully catch on until 2022, though, when several ministers and MPPs started dropping the term. Then-housing minister Steve Clark used it 15 times in the house that year, and Premier Doug Ford promised to say "yes to attainable housing" in his 2022 election night victory speech.
Then-associate housing minister Matthew Rae came closest to defining the term in April, hinting that it would indeed be region-specific.
"People often say, 'Define ‘attainable’' — well, we can do like we did with 'affordable,' and we will define it based on community. What 'attainable' means in northern Ontario versus, say, Kenora, versus London, versus Hamilton, versus Toronto, versus Brockville, versus Renfrew — it’s different everywhere," he said during a debate in the legislature.
"But I see it simply as, 'attainable' means you do not qualify for affordable housing because you make too much money, but you don’t qualify for a mortgage because either you don’t have enough of a downstroke or down payment to qualify, or you can’t cash-flow the mortgage rates."
