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Toronto City Council has formally adopted the Open Door Affordable Housing program, an initiative that frees up publicly held land and provides financial incentives for private developers who commit to building affordable housing. Applying the City's Gold Star planning process to residential projects, the Open Door strategy will expedite the construction of new housing stock by accelerating the approval process and delivering incentives—such as waived or reduced development fees—to developers.
Mayor John Tory and Council's Housing Advocate Ana Bailão first announced the Open Door program last month, with Block 36 North in the Railway Lands earmarked as the first site for development. As of yesterday, Council has already voted to move forward with finding a private sector or non-profit partner to develop the site as the first Open Door project.
Alongside Block 36 North, four additional City-owned sites have been identified as developemnt locations for the program's accelerated approvals process (listed below). Taken together, the Open Door program's first five projects would add a total of 389 affordable homes to the market.
An inventory of 17 additional Open Door sites held by the City—through Build Toronto, Waterfront Toronto, and the Parking Authority—and the Province, has also been released. Each of these sites have been identified as having potential for affordable development, potentially bringing thousands more affordable units to the city. Furthermore, the City plans to lobby the federal and provincial governments in order to free up what Tory has referred to as the "vast quantities of land they own in Toronto."
More broadly, the creation of affordable housing units has been identified as an increased priority for Section 37 contributions, with the City targeting more affordable units to be included in Toronto's high-rise condominium projects. The City's plan is also designed to meet a target of 200 "assisted ownership homes annually developed by non-profit corporations or developers building on public lands," with opportunities for affordable ownership presented to some residents.
The Open Door policy has in part been enacted as an attempt to remedy the embarrassing shortfall in meeting the goals set out six years ago in the City's Housing Opportunities Toronto - Affordable Housing Action Plan 2010-2020 (HOT). The plan outlined annual targets of adding 1,000 affordable rental homes and 200 affordable ownership homes to the market each year until 2020.
Meeting HOT goals would require the City adding 5,000 affordable rental units by the end of 2015, but, as Tory noted last month, "we're massively behind, with some 2,800 rental units [and 700 ownership units] brought to the market so far. This needs to change."
While the Open Door Program will play a key role in helping the City approach the HOT targets set out six years ago, housing continues to become an increasingly critical issue for the city's wellbeing, with both rents and economic inequality increasing almost in lockstep. Yet, if adding 1,200 affordable homes a year is a laudable initiative, then surely Toronto's growing 165,000-person waitlist for affordable housing remains a far more distressing problem.
