A new $45-million provincial fund designed to fast-track housing application approvals is only part of the solution, says Barrie Mayor Jeff Lehman.
“It is going to take a lot more than process improvements to actually bring down the price of housing… runs of half a million dollars in the price of the average house in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area), 50 per cent price increases,” he said. “You’re not going to fix that with process improvements alone.
“I think the federal and provincial governments need to be looking at bolder steps.”
Lehman was speaking after Wednesday’s provincial-municipal housing summit for Ontario’s Big City Mayors and regional leaders.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford echoed the same sentiments.
“There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, there’s no silver bullet to fixing a problem that has been in the making for decades,” said Ford, speaking after the summit. “We need to ensure the unnecessary delays and red tape that have kept housing from being built are a thing of the past.
“To make sure every Ontarian has a place to call home, we need to be increasing housing supply all over the province," the premier added.
The Streamline Development Approval Fund is to help Ontario’s 39 largest municipalities modernize, streamline and accelerate processes for managing and approving housing applications. Municipalities can use the funding, for example, to implement online systems that make it easier for applicants to navigate the development approvals process, manage their applications and receive timely status updates.
Lehman said Barrie can use this funding for some of the city’s IT systems, which are very expensive when the city is dealing with huge files of drawings and permit details, for example. He said Barrie has already made a major investment by digitized its system about two years ago, going to a fully digital process.
But what Lehman, who is Ontario’s Big City Mayors chairman, would like the two upper levels of government to do is use their economic levers, their taxing and spending powers, to help create more affordable housing.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean you tax more and spend more. It can be tax breaks and targeted spending, for example, or subsidies, to reduce the cost, for example of rental construction,” he said. “The reason why almost all rental apartment buildings in Barrie are 50 years old or older is because in Ontario, in the early 1980s, the provincial government of the day changed the tax rules. Which made it much more expensive to build rental apartment buildings, and when they did that, everybody stopped building rental apartment buildings.
“No surprise, they started building condos, and also condos had sort of arrived on the market,” Lehman added. “So you look around Barrie and that’s what’s been built the last 40 years. Almost all the apartment buildings built in Barrie have been condos.
“If the provincial and federal government gave different tax treatment to the companies who were building rental apartments, tax breaks or incentives, then we would see the cost of rental buildings come down and the supply of them go up,” he said. “And that’s exactly what we need.”
Lehman noted this isn’t the only solution, far from it, that housing is very complicated and that no one level of government can tackle it alone. Municipalities need federal and provincial regulatory power and spending.
“We municipalities don’t have the dollars to start subsidizing home prices or rent to make things cheaper for people, but what we can do on our end is be more progressive in getting more housing built by combating NIMBY (not in my back yard) and taking a more progressive approaches to planning policies,” he said, mentioning Barrie housing affordability task force, which had its recommended actions approved in principle by city council Monday.
“We in Barrie have approved more new development on arterial roads, in intensification corridors, in the last two years than in the last five years combined.”
Lehman said housing is an issue that’s going away any time soon, because its problems exist on such a basic level.
“What can’t get pushed in any way off the front burner is the fact that the people that are most impacted by the housing crisis are the people with the least income and the least ability to deal with higher rent prices,” he said. “The high rent in Barrie is pushing more people to precarious housing and homelessness. We know those numbers are up during the pandemic as well.
“One thing that’s really important…yes there’s an issue about the price of housing and we need to focus on supply or housing to try and bring those prices down, but you can’t for a moment not address supportive and social housing for the most vulnerable because they are the ones trying to live day by day and struggling day by day because of how expensive housing has gotten in our community and around the province.”
The province also announced Wednesday more than $8 million through the Audit and Accountability Fund to help large urban municipalities identify potential savings and efficiencies through third-party reviews to further accelerate the creation of new housing and modernize municipal services.
And as an additional measure to help build more homes faster, the province will work with the municipalities to develop a data standard for planning and development applications to help accelerate approval timelines. Built with local governments, data standardization will help improve the quality of data, create consistency across systems, make it easier to measure results, reduce costs for business and governments and support municipalities’ transition to digital service delivery and digital approvals.
