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The news cycle of the last few weeks has left Toronto with very little by way of good news on the topic of housing, culminating on Wednesday with a report from Rentals.ca indicating that rent prices are at an all time high across the country. With house and condo prices and rental fees that are higher than ever, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to ignore that Toronto is standing on uncertain ground, and what the city needs more than anything are housing solutions that are viable and sustainable.
As we steer deeper into the eye of this housing storm, Mayor John Tory stepped up to the plate, putting forward a new housing plan that was approved by City Council on Wednesday. Passed handily by the Councillors without requiring Tory to exercise his newly minted ‘strong mayor’ powers, it means to make changes to City policies across the housing spectrum. Here is everything you need to know about the 2023 Housing Action Plan.
In its entirety, the goal of the Plan is simple. Over the course of the current term of Council from 2022 to 2026, the plan hopes to update the City’s planning policy and regulations with the necessary changes in order to be able to meet the goal of creating 285,000 new homes — or more — over the next 10 years.
“The 2023 Housing Action Plan takes bold, aggressive action to address the affordability and housing crises facing our city,” said Mayor Tory. “With Council’s support this week, we've taken a major step forward to ensuring that every Toronto resident has a place to call home.” The specific changes that this bold, aggressive action will facilitate are designed to target the biggest issues first, beginning with affordability and homelessness, but beyond investing further in affordable housing programs, a more thorough re-evaluation of the City’s zoning policies is planned that is intended to have long term effects.
Often referred to in the media as ‘red tape’, extensive frameworks like the City’s Official Plan and zoning by-laws exist to establish principles for the effective and sustainable development of the city. A big issue that impacts cities like Toronto, however, is the challenge of increasing density within the limitations of exclusionary zoning policies, which virtually prohibit intensification in areas that are zoned for single family housing. One of the key aspects of Tory’s Plan is to amend the City’s zoning by-laws in the interest of being “more permissive from a housing opportunities perspective.”
Some of the most notable areas for revision to zoning policies are in relation to the restrictions surrounding major streets, heritage, and urban forestry, and areas designated as neighbourhoods in the Official Plan. These changes would shorten the approval process for development in commercial areas, while in residential areas, homeowners would be permitted to redevelop single family homes into multiplexes, creating a significant opportunity to boost density within a low-rise typology.
Finally, the Plan also puts forward a strategy to increase transparency, with an effort to give agency to the public to hold their government accountable to the goals they have outlined. A publicly accessible database is proposed as a way of documenting the approval, construction, and completion of affordable rentals. For more information, you can read the full press release by visiting this link.
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