Housing in Toronto is at an actual crisis point. The average home costs more than
100% of the average family’s monthly income in mortgage payments alone. Rents are soaring
too — 22% year-over-year. Subsidized housing has decades-long wait lists. Families are leaving the
city in droves. Toronto is #1 in the country for young adults living with their parents.
The scale of this disaster should justify an all-hands-on-deck emergency where we pull all
the stops to get more housing built, especially below-market or subsidized housing that provides
an affordable home for people on moderate incomes. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the reality so
far. In this video we’re going to show how efforts to repurpose surplus government land to build
mixed-income communities with affordable housing get sabotaged and scaled down by misaligned
priorities, political meddling, and opposition from “not in my backyard” neighbourhood activists.
This site, 80 Dale Avenue near Guildwood Train Station in Scarborough, was surplus city land
sold to a developer in 2017 by Build Toronto, the city corporation tasked with the city’s surplus
real estate assets. At that time, the developer of 80 Dale was accepted into Toronto’s Open Door
Affordable Housing Program, designed to fast-track much needed affordable housing in the city. This
land, originally intended for a highway that was never built, has been considered for affordable
housing going at least as far back as 1999 under the city’s Housing First Policy, which decided
that the number one priority for surplus city land should be maximizing affordable housing.
After acquiring the land almost 20 years later, the developer proposed a high-rise
and stacked townhouse project with a total of 386 rental units, with 116 affordable
units targeted at lower-income families. But the final design accepted by council
in 2021 was very different, shrunk down to two shorter mid-rise buildings with
fewer total units and affordable units falling substantially to a target of 47. What’s more,
all of the four bedroom, family-sized units initially planned were lost in this revision.
What happened? Opposition from neighbours and city councillors, who fought to cancel, shrink,
or delay the project, compounding with the loss of a provincial program to refund development charges
on rental housing. Starting with the neighbours, homeowner groups have been fighting new housing on
this site for more than 20 years. A 2002 city report found strong opposition to medium- or
high-density residential, with residents expressing particular concern about “the
impacts of affordable housing on the community” — a direct quote from the city’s own report.
Fast forward to 2020 and the opposition to housing here was still going strong.
The developers’ proposal was shrunk from high-rise in 2018 to the accepted mid-rise plan
in 2021 because of a litany of concerns: traffic congestion; parking; height and density; shadows;
loss of privacy and views; and the “proposed tenure/use of the development”. That really
sounds like the neighbouring homeowners just don’t like renters or affordable housing near them!
The public consultation report also makes it clear that neighbours were asking for
guarantees that the market-rate units will be “luxury” and not harm their property values.
Local city councillors amplified homeowners’ concerns, describing the initial 27-storey
proposal as “unacceptable” and “too high” for the neighbourhood.
To be clear, the context is a 17-storey building next door with more high-rises across the street
and taller ones likely in the future at the train station. The site is next to Kingston Road,
a bus priority corridor and proposed route for the Eglinton East Light Rail line.
This site is a 14 minute walk from Guildwood Train Station — it could be even faster with
a dedicated pedestrian pathway — from where you can get trains to downtown
Toronto every 30 minutes, which in a few years will be every 15 minutes or better.
The station also has intercity trains on Canada’s busiest train corridor.
Not all trains stop here, but we can take VIA Rail from Montreal, a different city five hours away,
directly to this station if we wanted. This corner of suburban Toronto has markedly more
transit infrastructure and service than 99% of people in North America have access to.
It makes you wonder, if we can’t build high-rises here, where can we build them?
What’s worse, there was still substantial neighbour opposition to the scaled-down
mid-rise plan! “The close proximity of these multi-unit buildings would encroach
on residents’ privacy in a manner that would certainly induce all kinds of stress and safety
concerns. We appeal to the city to reconsider this project that will disrupt the community.” There
was an appeal against the scaled-down project brought to the Ontario Land Tribunal from
Metropolitan Toronto Condominium Corporation No. 978. As it turns out, this ominous-sounding
corporation is none other than 90 Dale Avenue, the neighbouring condo building.
You heard that right, people from the neighboring 17-storey building continued to fight against the
scaled-down 12-storey proposal, citing, among other things… the lack of affordable housing in
the project. Which is in large part because they and other neighbours and the local councillors
opposed the height and density of the project. Their appeal was withdrawn six months later,
but this additional six month delay on the development was a NIMBY bargain,
costing them only $1,100 — or about $200 a month. Delays might be cheap for NIMBYs but they’re not
cheap for the people trying to build the housing, especially in an era of rising interest rates and
construction costs. Delays add to costs and make projects less viable and able to happen at all.
What also impeded the project and contributed to the major loss of affordable units was the
province’s cancellation of a development charge rebate program for rental housing. Development
charges (or “impact fees”) are an upfront tax on new housing construction intended to cover the
cost of new services and infrastructure. They’re politically popular with existing residents who
like to keep property taxes low, and you can see the logic behind them, but it’s hard to get around
the fact that the city adding $55,000 to the cost of building a two-bedroom apartment makes new
projects less viable, especially with affordable or low-income units. Losing the provincial rebate
in 2018 added costs to the project and lowered the number of affordable units.
There’s actually hope on the horizon here though. Despite strong objections from cities,
Ontario’s recent province-wide reforms are set to reduce development charges on rental
housing and eliminate them for affordable housing. The government shot itself in
the foot with the PR disaster of opening up parts of the Greenbelt for urban expansion,
but some of the other reforms are actually pretty exciting. And to be clear, not all cities rely on
development charges this much. Montreal charges far less than Toronto or Vancouver, for example.
People moving into new homes in Greater Montreal still pay for their infrastructure,
just with property taxes over the course of living there, more than big upfront fees.
If there’s anything we want to stress in this video, it’s that affordable housing doesn’t come
from nowhere. It’s not something we wish into existence, it’s something we have to actively
support and make feasible to build. Depending on the project, that can mean low-interest loans
from the federal government. It can mean land contributions. It can mean rebates or exemptions
on development charges. It can mean other grants and subsidies. It can mean permission to build
additional height and density, because one of the main ways that below-market or subsidized
housing is practical in private developments is through cross-subsidy from market-rate units.
Some of the profits from regular market-rate units are used to subsidize the affordable
or below-market-rate units, which means that allowing more market-rate units helps support
more affordable units. This project experienced a double hit, with neighbours and councillors
fighting to cancel, shrink, or delay it, and then it also lost the provincial development charge
rebate. Together, this resulted in a very concrete loss of affordable units, from the initial 116
to finally a target of 47. That’s a loss of affordable housing for at least 69 families.
For at least the past two decades, Toronto’s stated priority for surplus city lands has been
maximizing affordable housing. In practice, the number of affordable units gets scaled down as
negotiations uncover much different priorities on the part of homeowners and councillors. As you’ll
quickly learn from reading public comments, lots of residents actively oppose affordable housing
and want guarantees of luxury housing. The tension is stark when councillors are forced to reconcile
their theoretical support for affordable housing with their practical opposition to it. Here’s the
local councillor opposing the initial plan in 2018 with 116 affordable units: “Affordable housing is
essential, and the objectives to meet the much needed demand have my full support. [...] While
increasing density and affordable housing is vital and addressed in the Official Plan,
the unique character of neighbourhoods is also supported in the Official Plan. I request your
support in not allocating Affordable Housing funding for 80 Dale Avenue and to look at more
appropriate Affordable Housing development in a suitable location.” This is, frankly,
absurd and disappointing. We’re not talking about demolishing medieval churches in historic Paris,
we’re talking about building housing on a vacant lot of surplus government land on the edge of a
regular suburban neighbourhood in Canada’s largest city. Let’s be honest: there’s no serious argument
for a “unique character” here that’s threatened by tall buildings or affordable housing.
We’re making this video in 2023, almost two years since the mid-rise version of
this project was approved by council and almost one year since the friendly
neighbours at 90 Dale dropped their appeal. In theory the development should be able to
proceed with the scaled-down mid-rise design and smaller amount of affordable housing,
but if you go there today you won’t even see that under construction. You’ll see a vacant
lot with the same faded sign that was put up almost five years ago for the original proposal.
After all of this, is any housing going to be built here, or did the neighbours get their
wish? We emailed the developer for comment, and they confirmed that they are still pursuing this
project, but they highlighted what we mentioned earlier: interest rates and construction costs
are major pressures that they’re dealing with in making this project (and others) financially
viable to build. And these problems, we’d like to stress, are made much worse by delays.
In the five years since the first proposal on this site, interest rates have almost doubled.
Construction costs (materials, labour, and equipment) have increased by a whopping 70%.
Municipalities and planners often highlight the amount of housing that’s been approved but
not built, downplaying the extent to which their processes are a major obstruction to new housing,
but we hope this video makes clear that the devil is in the details.
Ok, so a project has been approved. But how long did it take? How much of the
building was sacrificed? What other delays were added on after the approval process?
And what happened to interest rates and construction costs during the delay?
Did the delay affect eligibility for other funding sources? Bill 23 is a step in the right direction
from the province (at least as far as development charges are concerned) but it’s hard to walk away
from examples like this and not think that our approach to housing is fundamentally broken.
We’d like to give a special thanks to HousingNowTO,
a group of volunteers working to hold the city accountable on its affordable housing targets.
They gave us a tour of some affordable housing sites in the city and provided
some of the background information and resources we used to make this video.
If you’d like to hear more on affordable housing and housing reform in Toronto, follow them on
Twitter or check out their website that tracks the status of affordable housing sites in the city.
And don’t forget that Toronto has a mayoral election coming up on June 26th. If anything
in this video resonated with you, we’d urge you to make housing a priority and demand real reforms.