Can a zoning ‘revolution’ save Canada from a housing crisis?
On Oct. 20, Mississauga Mayor Bonnie Crombie came back from her temporary leave to overrule a previous rejection by city council and allow the building of four-unit housing on low-rise residential lots.
The move not only kept Mississauga in the running for a federal housing grant, but it also added the city to the growing list of municipalities around Canada pushing through massive zoning changes to address Canada’s housing crisis.
Since the federal government’s $4-billion Housing Accelerator Fund was launched in May of this year, cities have been rushing to claim the incentives that are tied to zoning changes. In the last few months, the Ontario cities of Brampton, London, Vaughan and Hamilton, as well as Halifax and Kelowna, have all signed agreements with the federal government. Others, like the Ontario cities of Mississauga, Kitchener and Burlington, as well as Calgary, were making significant gains in zoning changes.
This has led some experts to argue that Canada was witnessing nothing short of a zoning “revolution.” In much of the country, zoning restrictions mean developers are allowed to build only single-family homes or condo towers in residential areas. There is a huge chunk of housing options, often referred to as “missing middle housing,” that does not get built.
“It’s been really fascinating to watch how quickly that’s happened after almost 50 years of that (single-family) zoning being locked in place,” Carolyn Whitzman, a housing policy expert and expert advisor to the Housing Assessment Resource Tools Project, told Global News this week.
Whitzman said cities around Canada are beginning to realize that single-family zoning is not only serving them poorly but is exacerbating the housing crisis.
“Zoning came in in the 1920s, so it has a century of use in Canada,” she said. “They were made much stricter in terms of suburban redevelopment from about the 1960s and 1970s onward. So now, you’re talking about one or two generations that really can’t imagine any other (kind of) development happening.”
James McKellar, professor emeritus of real estate and infrastructure at York University’s Schulich School of Business, said Canadian cities need to adapt zoning rules to allow for housing that better meets the needs of Canada’s population.
“We just can’t afford this kind of single-family housing. But more importantly, it doesn’t satisfy a growing part of the market as people age,” he recently told Global News, adding that for an aging population looking to downsize, the current housing market is not well suited.
“The choice is (between) a 2,000-square-feet house or a 650-square-feet condo.”
What's spurring zoning changes now
Part of the reason many cities are accelerating the pace of change is the federal government’s Housing Accelerator Fund. The federal government is pushing municipalities to make rapid zoning changes. This includes pushing municipalities to build more fourplex and mixed housing units.
“A lot of people don’t realize, one of the reasons that certain communities in this country don’t have enough homes is because it’s literally illegal to build the kinds of homes that people could live in,” housing minister Sean Fraser said in Brampton last week.
While Whitzman agrees that the federal government’s housing fund is contributing to these rapid changes, she said in some cities the conversation has been going on for much longer.
“The latest win for people who want more well-located affordable housing is in Edmonton,” she said.
On Monday, Edmonton City Council passed a new sweeping bylaw that would allow density in the city to boom. The changes will now allow residents of Edmonton to build up to three storeys in residential buildings in all neighbourhoods across the city.
Yash Bhandari, a housing advocate with the group Grow Together Edmonton, said: “We were working for months on this, reaching out to a ton of groups that normally aren’t really franchised with our current approach to municipal governance, reaching out to immigrant groups, reaching out to student groups, reaching out to folks for whom it was hard to go to city council on a weekday at 9:30 a.m.”
In the end, city council heard from hundreds of people. The new laws are expected to shape Edmonton for the decades to come, as many are concerned that suburban spawl is causing harm to the city. A 2014 report that looked at the Edmonton suburb of Decoteau as a case study showed that at no point in the next 50 years will the projected revenues from the suburb match projected city costs if the sprawl of single-family homes continues.
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