Toronto's housing plan good step but more measures needed on affordability: experts

A person walks by a row of houses in Toronto on Tuesday July 12, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Cole Burston

Toronto's recently approved housing plan is a good step forward but more efforts are needed to address the city's affordability crisis, urban planners and experts say.

Toronto city councillors voted on Wednesday in favour of Mayor John Tory's proposals to allow multiplexes to be built in neighbourhoods currently restricted to single-family homes and to legalize rooming houses across the city.

The approval comes as the average monthly cost to rent a home in the city continues to increase.

The National Rental Report published Tuesday by Rentals.ca saidToronto was the second most expensive place to rent in Canada in November, with the average price for a one-bedroom apartment at $2,532 and $3,347 for a two-bedroom.

Tim Smith, a planner with Urban Strategies in Toronto, said many existing buildings in the city can be transformed to rooming houses for students and other individuals living alone, which would reduce demand for apartments.

But he said it could take "a decade or so" to see improvement in affordability as a result of increasing supply in the housing market by allowing multiplexes to be built in single-family neighbourhoods and legalizing rooming houses across the city.

"It's definitely not gonna be an overnight change," he said. "We are not gonna wake up anytime in the near future and say, 'Oh, we've addressed, we've solved the affordable housing issue."'

"We're kind of at a crisis point now. I think it's just gotten worse and worse. I do see it getting better. But it will take time."

Nemoy Lewis, an assistant professor at the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Toronto Metropolitan University, said increasing the housing supply alone isn't enough and new residential units that are built should be made affordable to most of the city's residents.

"It has to be housing that a vast amount of Canadians or a vast amount of Torontonians can afford," he said.

"We need to have better efforts in terms of investment towards ensuring that the housing that is being built is affordable to a vast amount of folks."

Lewis also said the city should ask the Ontario government to change some of the policies within the Residential Tenancies Act, such as the vacancy decontrol rule, which allows landlords to increase the rental price of a unit as much as they want to once a tenant leaves.

"You might have a landlord that is incentivized to push you out, so that they can get someone else into that unit that can pay them $1,000 more than what you're paying," he said.

"A landlord (might be) doing that same thing for 10 units or 12 units for every one (affordable) unit that you're building."

Toronto's plan aims to exceed or meet the target it was recently given by the province to build 285,000 homes over the next 10 years.

The city manager has until March to submit a report to the executive committee outlining how the homes will be built.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 16, 2022.