🔭 PLATFORM VIEW: Olivia Chow’s Housing Plan

🔗 LINK: oliviachow.ca/olivia_ch…

🔧 DOABLE? Yes, with CMHC cooperation

💰 COSTED? Yes, with CMHC cooperation

✨ OVERALL: ⭐️⭐️⭐️½ (3.5 out of five)

John Tory’s “Housing Now” strategy has taken quite a beating during this election campaign. It’s an easy target, as it’s a housing plan that has yet to deliver any, you know, housing. The name also creates some good opportunities for fun quips, e.g. “Housing NOW? More like Housing NEVER, am I right? [Hold for applause, laughter.]”

Still, some candidates have basically proposed tweaks to the Housing Now formula. Others, like Olivia Chow, are offering a distinct alternative — pivoting from a strategy that tries to incentivize the market to build affordable housing toward strategies that will see the city take on a developer role itself, building public housing.

The conservative objection to this is pretty visceral — it’s an expansion of government, and big government agencies aren’t always the most efficient actors. The word “boondoggle” might get tossed around. It’s a fun word to say, admittedly.

But public housing is something that some other cities have done well, especially outside of North America. (In Singapore, for example, 80% of people live in public housing.) And the history of public housing in Toronto, first as Ontario Housing and later as TCHC — while certainly rife with lessons that have to be learned — is the story of a system that created thousands of homes for people in a relatively short amount of time. That’s something that, so far, the private-market approach to affordable housing has not done.

But let’s set ideology aside and talk about costedness and doableness.

Chow’s plan is to build “25,000 rent-controlled homes over 8 years” on surplus City-owned land. The housing will be funded via CMHC loan financing under the “CMHC’s Rental Construction Financing Initiative.” The design of that CMHC program has been criticized for having vague criteria and unpredictable outcomes on loan applications. Council’s recent report on Housing Now called for a variety of changes to the program to make it more useful.

So, as mayor, Chow would need to negotiate some concessions to make things work out — something her campaign acknowledges in the policy backgrounder.

The second piece of her funding plan comes via “Revenue from increasing the existing City Building Fund by 0.33%” which will generate “approximately $404 million.”

This math checks out, and might actually be an underestimate. It appears to be based on 2022 figures that suggest every 1% increase to residential property taxes for the City Building Fund generates about $34 million in revenue. But projections for 2023 and subsequent years are higher — as the overall revenue pool from property taxes gets bigger, so too does the amount you get from a 0.33% increase — such that I’d peg the cumulative revenue from a Chow’s proposed increase over eight years at closer to $500 million.

So doable and costed, probably, but what holds this plan back from getting more stars is a seeming lack of ambition. Chow’s plan calls for an average of just 3,125 rent-controlled homes per year. Of those, only 938 per year will be designed as “affordable” and only 312 of those will be rent-geared-to-income.

Without significant additional efforts to build affordable housing, this would see the city fail to meet its HousingTO targets of delivering 40,000 affordable rental homes by 2030, and not really begin to make a dent in the housing waitlist. Both the general approach and the funding strategy seem to offer the potential for more, and we know the need is there.

PLATFORM VIEW is a new daily(ish) feature by City Hall Watcher on Substack Notes. Got a request for a candidate policy proposal I should review? Let me know. (This edition of PLATFORM VIEW was requested by Jack Hauen.)