🔭 PLATFORM VIEW: Mitzie Hunter’s Toronto Affordable Housing Corporation

🔗 LINK:

🔧 DOABLE? Yes.

💰 COSTED? TBD.

✨ OVERALL: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4 out of five)

Well, this got my attention.

Mitzie Hunter’s campaign has mostly hovered beneath my radar so far. But her poll numbers have been stronger than I expected — she’s beating both Ana Bailao and Brad Bradford in the last update of my poll tracker — and now she’s gone and released a 24-page detailed housing policy proposal.

Seriously: a 24! Page! Detailed! Housing! Policy! Proposal!

This is strong stuff. Strong enough that I hope, regardless of the June 26 outcome, this plan outlives the campaign period.

The nuts and bolts are similar to the Olivia Chow plan I reviewed earlier this week. It’s a proposal to use city-owned land to build housing that would maintain public ownership of the development, in contrast to the current Housing Now plan that leases the land to private operators for 99 years.

Hunter’s plan would create a Toronto Affordable Housing Corporation, or TAHC, that will be tasked with building 22,700 units across 108 new developments, with 68% of the units deemed affordable — a higher share than other candidates are offering.

There are some intriguing details attached to the plan, like designing the new buildings to accommodate space for other city services, like child care centres and new libraries. And a plan to designate some units as “shared equity” units available for purchase, not just rent.

Hunter provides a pretty detailed costing of the plan. Like Chow, it relies on a CMHC financing program that would likely need to be modified to work for these purposes. Phase one of the plan also calls for a $1 billion investment, sourced half from “City reserve funds including parkland acquisition reserves, section 37 reserves” and half from a $100 million annual contribution from the operating budget over a five-year span.

The reserve fund sourcing gives me pause. A lot of those reserves are already dedicated to future projects in the Capital Plan. Section 37 funds were intended to fund local infrastructure to support local growth. There will be consequences to repurposing these funds. I don’t think any of this amounts to an impossible obstacle, but there are hurdles down this path.

The operating budget contribution just leaves me with an obvious big question: where are you going to find $100 million a year? Hunter’s policy doesn’t have an answer, but there is a promise of one to come:

“I will soon release a Fully Costed multi-year platform that addresses this and the more than $1 billion hole in our budget that does not go away,” Hunter says. I can’t wait to see it.

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.