Boost density near transit, realtors encourage province
‘It will be the grandchildren of millennials who will be the ones benefiting from the housing’
The Ontario Real Estate Association (OREA) wants Queen’s Park to force new zoning rules on municipalities to encourage more housing development around transit stations with an emphasis on midrise “missing middle” heights of six storeys or less.
As-of-right zoning would streamline approvals by permitting taller buildings and more uses within a 10- to 15-minute walk (500 to 800 metres) of transit hubs, says OREA.
“If you wait for municipalities to take action and the forces of NIMBYism set in, it will be the grandchildren of millennials who will be the ones benefiting from the housing, not those who are desperate today,” said OREA CEO Tim Hudak.
“The previous government tried a more gentle approach allowing municipalities to do this but the take-up has been minimal,” he said.
OREA and the Ontario Home Builders’ Association released a report on Thursday by the Ryerson University Centre for Urban Research and Land Development (CUR).
If the 200 transit stations in the study were developed to their potential they could make room for four million new homes, including 20,000 affordable units, according to the report.
But that would never happen and isn’t needed, said Hudak.
“We estimate you would need 20,000 homes per year. You don’t need anywhere near four million. That would flood the market and is just not practically possible,” he said.
Using census information, CUR found
more than 30 per cent of the space around 200 Ontario transit hubs was dominated by single-family detached houses.
Of the1,500 square kilometres around those stations, only 154 square kilometres have been rezoned by municipalities, said the study. Rezoned areas have seen twice as much development as those that weren’t rezoned and CUR found that the expected Finch Ave. West and Eglinton Crosstown LRTs have attracted relatively little construction.
The most development potential exists along Toronto’s newest subway extension to the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre. But some older stations, includ- ing Kipling, Islington and York Mills, are surrounded by only a third of the supportable homes and a tenth of the density that has popped up around some downtown subway stops such as Wellesley and College, according to the report called “Transit Nodes in Ontario Have Untapped Development Potential.”
Hudak said the density of development would be specific to the location.
“Yonge and Lawrence could go up a bit but it’s certainly not going to look like King and Yonge,” he said.
“We love these ideas of building on top of stations. We live in Canada. It’s been a terrible winter and many would kill to leave their parka and boots at home and hop on transit,” he said.
The province is expected to release its plans this spring for boosting housing supply. But Housing Minister Steve Clark has said he is reluctant to impose the Progressive Conserva- tive government’s wishes on municipalities — that he would prefer to work in partnership.