Housing over environment: good policy?
Ontario’s not building houses fast enough and needs to get rid of more environmental protections to solve the shortage, a high-powered group of provincial officials is telling the government.
We need less stringent approvals for projects near sensitive land and potentially endangered species, “concierge” helpers who’ll take builders by the hand and walk them through everything they need and more aggressive rezonings around highways and transit lines, says the Development Approval Roundtable, in a set of recommendations the province released Monday morning.
The group is headed by Steve Orsini, Ontario’s top public servant, so we’re talking about a serious crew. Deputy ministers, top cityplanning bosses from municipal governments, developers and realestate agents. Premier Kathleen Wynne gathered them last April and asked them to tell her what to do about the stunning cost of housing.
“Ensuring residents can access housing that meets their needs is necessary to the sustained strength of the region. Housing is more than just where people live; it is social infrastructure that forms the building blocks of our communities and our economy,” Orsini’s cover letter on the report says.
The shortage is acute in Toronto but it matters everywhere. We’re all in trouble if Ontario’s biggest city keeps choking on its own growth, and the rules and spending they’re dealing with apply across the province.
Also, Toronto-area voters currently freaked out about prices, sprawl and traffic will have a great big say in who runs the provincial government after next June’s election.
Unsurprisingly, if the question is “How do we get more housing built faster?” some of the answers will be worrying.
For instance, the Ministry of the Environment promises to streamline approvals for environmentally delicate activities by, er, not really requiring approvals for them.
It’s called “permitting by rule,” as distinct from “permitting by permit.” You satisfy general conditions instead of requirements tailored to the specific thing you’re planning to do in the place you’re planning to do it. Dredging certain waterways, for instance, or moving rocks to control erosion.
The province’s independent environment commissioner Dianne Saxe devoted most of a chapter in her annual report, not even a month ago, to what a disaster this practice has already been for endangered species in Ontario: it amounts to letting builders assess the risks of whatever they want to do, assert that they’re following the rules for doing it with minimal harm, and then the government doesn’t check.
It could check. It’s legally allowed to check. But it doesn’t check, because, as Saxe reported, checking is literally not anybody’s job.
The government “relies on blind faith and on public complaints instead of an effective compliance and enforcement strategy,” Saxe said. And now we’ll do more of it. Replacing a cumbersome and ineffective system with a simple and ineffective one is not an improvement.
The Ministry of Natural Resources “will support proponentled assessments of species at risk requirements” — again, having the people notionally being regulated make their own judgments about what regulations are relevant.
The idea of using “a risk-based approach” comes up in a couple of places, having the intensity of government oversight of construction plans scale up with the potential damage they could do. This makes superficial sense.
Not every riverbed is the Galápagos Islands, or inhabited by interesting lichens.
But in practice, especially if the people who want to do the constructing are the people assessing the risk, it leads to assuming a lot of things will probably be fine until you find out too late they aren’t.
The recommendations also do not include talk about increasing housing density, or anything about emphasizing transit over highways as a way of making more heavily populated neighbourhoods more successful.
Of course, there’s some sensible stuff among the 14 recommendations, things we should do no matter what.
A perennial complaint from builders is that they often don’t even know what approvals they need. Where this can be made clearer and less redundant — sometimes two levels of municipal government, the province and a conservation authority might have to sign off on basically the same material — it should be.
The government will try to make this extra-easy, using a method Ottawa’s urban-planning department has pioneered: the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing is to “lead a ‘concierge’ model of service delivery, (aimed at) removing barriers to housing projects that meet the needs of local communities.”
The province will experiment with letting developers apply for approvals electronically; for a rezoning in Ottawa, you have to lug in as many as 20 paper copies of some documents, printed on sheets of a specific size and folded in a specific way.
There are historical reasons for making engineers stamp and personally sign their work, and if you’re planning a multimilliondollar subdivision or condo you can surely get some copies run off, but it’s still archaic and wasteful.
The province will also lean on municipalities to zone for development around infrastructure like new highways and GO lines. The Ministry of Transportation builds these things but it’s up to cities and towns to put them to use.
The group’s work is presented as a series of recommendations but Municipal Affairs Minister Bill Mauro and Housing Minister Peter Milczyn welcomed it as an “action plan,” so expect them to run with it.